Escaping the Trap

This story has been published in the 2024 Pathfinder Issue of Hidden Compass. While every story has a single byline, storyteller proceeds from patronage campaigns in this issue will go collectively to Team Beyond the False Summit on top of their article pay.

In a Hidden Compass first, we’re running a three-part series of articles by a single author: expedition leader Lance Garland. This is the second in the series. The expedition begins with Part One, “Climbing the Unforeseen,” and continues in Part Three, “Connecting Beyond the False Summit.”

The crew gathers outside the Montenvers train at 9 a.m. Our photographer, Ben Tibbetts, and his rope-gun girlfriend, Valentine Fabre, board the bright red boxcars first. My rope-mate Jordan Cannon and I climb aboard after them. The cars are full of climbers with packs thrown in wherever we can stow them. We roll up the mountain, through dense trees filtering morning light, into the Mer de Glace valley, a breathtaking entrance into a gorge surrounded by towering, snow-capped mountains. 

At the train stop, we begin our hike up to Envers hut, perched on a ridge above the valley like an eagle’s nest. It will be our home for the night and base camp for our new objective, which we hope to summit tomorrow: the Aiguille du Grépon, roughly translated from French as a needle of steep rock made of slabs. It’s a literal description of what we hope to climb — and is a massive shift in difficulty from our original objective of the Matterhorn.

The hike should take about three hours, and as we walk up a surprisingly dirty glacier that bears little signs of ice, I start to feel nauseated. This morning at our rented loft, my husband, Oliver, lay sick in bed, unable to get up to hug me goodbye.

“Are you going to be ok?” I asked, concerned.

“I’ll be fine,” he reassured me. “It’s probably just jet lag or a cold I caught from the flight. Have fun up there, baby.”

We had only been in the country for just over 24 hours, so I figured it was probably the time difference. I kissed his forehead and hugged him through the blankets before I left. But it was an ominous sign.

My nausea lingers throughout the hike, but for me, discomfort is no stranger. As a firefighter, I regularly deal with sleep deprivation from 24-hour shifts, missed meals from emergency calls, and the familiar feeling of being tired. My time in the military trained me to overcome physical ailments like these. At nineteen, I trained with Navy SEALs, who taught me what my body is capable of, how to step outside my limits and how to push my boundaries sustainably. As an endurance athlete, I regularly use these lessons to accomplish objectives that seem daunting, like the Grépon. I’m well trained, but this is going to be a hard mountain to climb.

~~

Yesterday, in the early hours of July 21, we arrived in Chamonix. Before our team met for the first time that evening, Oliver and I revisited a place that has deep significance to our lives. Up steep dirt roads, we drove through the forest, parked near a restaurant for hikers, and walked down a trail and over a wooden bridge. Then, we started looking for a specific clearing in the forest.

Nearly six years earlier, in 2018, after a frigid December day snowboarding with friends here for his 40th birthday celebration, Oliver guided us off-piste and into the woods. We had settled in at a fondue cabin where he made reservations, but before the melted cheese arrived, Oliver told me he wanted to show me a special spot.

He led me on foot outside, through the snowy woods, over a bridge, and into a woodland sanctuary where we found carved snow benches, bistro lights, and lighted letters spelling This Is It. There in the warmly lit enclave, he got on one knee and asked, “Will you live a great story with me?” 

I joined him on one knee and replied with an emphatic “yes!”

Later, I’d learn that he’d orchestrated the whole scene with the help of some local friends. In July, the landscape looked different than it had in the depth of winter. The forest was grown over with understory bushes and plants, making it difficult to get deeper into the woods.

I turned around to see the Aiguille Verte to our east and smiled at the thought that more than a century ago, George Mallory and Geoffrey Winthrop Young also spent time on that mountain together. Oliver and I have a personal connection to this place, as well as a historical one, and it filled my body with a deep sense of home. I reached out and held Oliver’s hand.

~~

In much of society, a gay man is considered a weaker man.

As we traverse the glacier, Jordan and Ben talk about our project and discuss why we’re here. “It’s hard to find proof of gay men in climbing history,” I explain, “but I’ve found a lot of information hidden away.”

“That’s because sodomy was illegal,” Ben states as a matter of fact.

Jordan retorts, “I hate that word.”

“Me too,” I say, thinking of all the places around the world that still uphold such hateful laws. There are 64 countries currently criminalizing homosexuality — including Pakistan, where Jordan was climbing recently.

Jordan breaks my oppressive reverie, “That reminds me of that Blink-182 song.”

We look at each other, laugh, and sing at the same time, “The state looks down on sodomy!” 

“You know, France was the first to decriminalize it, all the way back at the end of the 1700s, after the French Revolution,” Ben says with a clear sense of pride for his adopted country.

~~

When I began this project, I heard that one of the most famous mountaineers in history was gay: George Mallory, a man at the center of the biggest mystery in mountaineering history. In 1924, Mallory and his climbing partner, Andrew “Sandy” Irvine, famously disappeared on Mt. Everest. They were last seen 800 feet below the summit before being engulfed by menacing clouds. Mallory has since been the subject of extensive debate: Was he the first man to reach the fabled summit of Mount Everest, or did he die trying? The answer, it seems, we will never know. But unlike the question of whether he was the first person to stand on the summit of Everest, the question of whether Mallory was gay has far more evidence to sift through.

Even though there was horrific punishment for homosexuality in Britain during his time — one could be sent to prison and chemically castrated — Mallory was shockingly playful and seemingly unconcerned about his connection to queer life. In a private letter from 1914 to his friend, the artist Lytton Strachey (who was openly gay with close friends), Mallory wrote of his engagement to Ruth Turner. “It can hardly be a shock to you that I desert the ranks of the fashionable homosexualists (and yet I am still in part of that persuasion) unless you think I have turned monogamist. But you may be assured that this last catastrophe has not happened.”

To me, these sentiments sound like an admission of intended ongoing homosexual behavior. And although the Independent’s profile piece, “Mallory, The Everest Enigma,” highlights that “Mallory’s muscular beauty attracted both men and women,” it also describes the conventional opinion of Mallory as “sexually ambiguous.”  The piece goes on to say that “the extent of Mallory’s homosexuality is much discussed, but it seems likely that an awkward encounter with James Strachey was the limit of his experimentation.”

I would add a word here: It was the limit of his documented experimentation, which I suspect was by his own design. Still, I wanted to know more about this “encounter” with James Strachey.

~~

After ascending multiple hundred-foot ladders and traversing cliffside trails abloom with summer’s wildflowers, we make it to Envers hut, a stone structure clinging to the edge of a cliff that drops precipitously to the glacier below.

Before our summit bid early tomorrow morning, we decided our crew needed to get some practice climbing this terrain: It will be our first time climbing together. My teammates say we’ll do a pitch or two and ask me if an intermediate route works. They’re all expert-level climbers. I climb at the intermediate range at the rock-climbing gyms, so I say yes but explain, “That’s where my skill set ends.” I’m comforted by the fact that I can just be belayed back down to the ground if I can’t pass a crux. Or so I think.

Valentine starts climbing first. While we only just met for the first time last night at our rented loft — when Oliver and Heather created a charcuterie board feast of French cheeses and cured meats for us to eat while we discussed climbing logistics — I already appreciate Valentine’s confident persona. As a member of an under-represented group in climbing, it resonates within me that a member of a different under-represented group is leading us up the mountain. There is power in a coalition. Valentine exudes a quiet power and a no-nonsense approach to getting the job done. She also represents so much of the story we’re trying to unravel here: How do people lacking representation piece together a history? And if they can’t, how do they find the role models they need to do it on their own?

For me, discomfort is no stranger.

Jordan leads me up the first pitch — a vertical crack in the granite the width of my hand — and when I follow him up, I quickly realize that this climb isn’t a good idea. I was prepared for something entirely different. Our original route up the Matterhorn is basically a scramble — a method somewhere between hiking and climbing where a person uses their hands for balance — something I have a lot of experience doing. The hardest parts of the Matterhorn have lots of fixed protection. But this is different.

Looking up at this intermediate route, I realize I’m already well outside my comfort zone. Digging deep, I welcome the opportunity to grow as a climber, but I’m inescapably aware of the fact that this is going to be a long couple of days.

~~

In his book, Into the Silence, Wade Davis investigates Mallory’s homosexual experimentation and illustrates the male-on-male sexual atmosphere of Cambridge in the early 1900s, where gay sex was rampant and accepted within the confines of all-male schools — “a culture that allowed a certain kind of love between men to exist.” But that culture only existed within the walls of Britain’s elite male schools and among the wealthy men who existed at the top of that society. For young men like Mallory, this atmosphere would only exist while a student there. The trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde the decade beforehand had reinforced the penalty of sodomy in the minds of the people. Yet, still, this hidden culture existed.

Mallory was a sought-after young man to the gay artists of the famed Bloomsbury Set, like Lytton Strachey, Duncan Grant, and John Maynard Keynes. The group — a coterie of artists, writers, and intellectuals — formed in the home of Virginia Woolf and her sister Vanessa Bell in the Bloomsbury neighborhood of London and garnered profound influence from their embrace of sexual equality, liberal politics, and bohemian freedom.

Lytton was clearly smitten with Mallory, writing, “My hand trembles, my heart palpitates … he’s six foot high, with the body of an athlete.”

While Lytton swooned, it became clear that Mallory had a crush on Lytton’s brother, James. Maynard Keynes said that, “James and George Mallory fell into one another’s arms.” This crush lasted for months. Observers said, “James and George now stroke each other’s faces in public.” 

At one point, George made it clear to James that he wanted to have sex. James played coy but then invited him to Paris. George had already committed to a climbing trip. They wrote to each other while they were separated.

Meanwhile, George had another budding connection with a gay man. In an essay, psychotherapist Gerald Grey writes, “There were a few well-known gay climbers, those whose class rank or money allowed them to be less discreet. One of them was a handsome, first rate climber named Geoffrey Young, ten years older than Mallory, who invited the young man for vacation in Italy, to be followed by a summer of climbing in the Alps in 1909 (Young had a practice, probably for safety, of affairs outside of Britain). When Mallory said he would like to accept but could not afford it, Young paid his expenses — and so Mallory spent the summer with him … If we heard of such an offer from an older male and accepted by a younger woman, both of whom dated heterosexuals, we could be forgiven if we concluded there was an affair.”

Davis further highlights their relationship in Into the Silence with Young’s first impression of Mallory: “six feet of deer-like power concordant with the perfect oval face, the classic profile, and long, oval violet eyes … a gravely beautiful tenor voice.”

Maynard Keynes wrote, “I tried to get up an affair between him and George Mallory with the greatest possible success.” It worked. Young said they became “fast friends at once.”

Davis states, “there is no suggestion that he (Young) and Mallory became lovers.” I’m not sure what he means by suggestion. Indeed, there is no evidence, and despite Grey’s speculation, the length of Mallory and Young’s relationship and the intimacy I would later discover between them embodies a same-sex relationship that was outside of the strictures of their time.

How do people lacking representation piece together a history?

After leaving Young in the Alps, Mallory returned home, seemingly empowered to make his move, and insisted on meeting with James. Despite those early days of falling into each other’s arms and stroking each other’s faces, James remained disinterested but eventually gave in. James wrote to his friend Rupert Brooke about this encounter with Mallory, “Poor George has returned, he tells me, from the Alps. By the way, I never had the courage to tell you that he insisted, before we parted, on copulating. No, I didn’t in the least lead him on. In fact I was very chilling. But as he seemed so very anxious, and I couldn’t pretend to have all that virgin horror, I submitted. So we went through with it… I didn’t enjoy it much — I was rather bored. Nor, oddly, did he. He, I think, was shocked.”

Mallory continued to reach out to James, but from that moment on, James refused to connect. On December 20, 1909, Mallory wrote an emotional outburst to Strachey, “What do you think of me? That I’m proud? That I’m injured? That I’m angry? It is six weeks since yesterday since I said goodbye to you at Hampstead and I haven’t sent you a word. I who love you! Probably you know the reason for my silence as well as I do. There has never been anything to say since the day I told you I loved you. Am I to repeat continually the wearisome news that I want to kiss you? It is about all I am capable of…You had better forget that I was ever your lover. If you could treat me as an ordinary friend I might manage to behave like one. How pleasant it was! For you I believe as well as for me, wasn’t it.” 

Strachey made no response. Therein lies the end of Mallory’s documented homosexuality.

~~

Just to our right, a female climber is having a hard time on a different pitch, reaching for holds but slipping off of them. “Don’t be a gumby,” my crew states in a variety of ways.

It’s clear that “gumby” is derogatory, presumably meaning someone who is having a hard time and is clearly lacking the style needed to complete the objective. I guess it shows what kind of climber I am when I ask my teammates what a gumby is. To really set myself up after that question, within five minutes, I’ve become one.  

There is no way to hide it. My shoes aren’t sufficient for this type of climbing. I’m slipping. But the crew continues upward. We do four pitches on a route called La Piège: The Trap. I was prepared for the Grépon but not for this kind of climbing — thin cracks and roofs where I must climb under, out, and around. This isn’t what I usually climb, but I’m here nonetheless, and I’ll be judged for it for the rest of this trip. It seems fitting, this fact that I’m outside my element, being measured against something I don’t claim to be. I’m not a great rock climber. Just as I’m not a straight man. But the world judges based on the dominant perspective. In much of society, a gay man is considered a weaker man. On this mountain that I did not plan to climb, I’m considered a gumby. 

But I climb anyway, throwing myself at the mountain with everything I’ve got, a goofy green gumby covered in blood. La Piège. A trap indeed. It reminds me of the trap society set for Mallory.

~~

We make it to the top of the route and immediately start to abseil, the European word for rappel. There is a frantic energy in the crew now: We’re running behind schedule, and that might cost us our dinner. Meals are served promptly at the hut, and Ben scares us with talk that the French won’t serve us if we’re late.

We roll up the mountain, through dense trees filtering morning light, into the Mer de Glace valley, a breathtaking entrance into a gorge surrounded by towering snow-capped mountains.

The sun has moved to the other side of the mountain, and I’m getting cold. We started in the warm sunlight and left our packs at the base of the cliff. I didn’t bring my coat or any layers, so I’m stuck with this sweaty t-shirt. My fingernails are covered with blood from cuts to my cuticles while shoving my hands into thin cracks in the walls. I try to wipe them on my pants, but they’ve mostly dried. I’m proud of myself for climbing the hardest multi-pitch route of my life, but I get the impression from Ben that I’ve held them back.

“Don’t worry,” Jordan says, his warm eyes constant with mine, “Tomorrow will be way easier.”

We’re late to dinner, and the handful of other climbing teams in the dining room look at us with judgment. The cooks are a husband-and-wife duo with a baby, a surprising reality at this elevation. We sit beside them as they serve us soup and spoon-feed their child. Ben says, “You better eat up; this is all we’re getting.”

I drink three bowls of thin lentil soup, thinking that’s all we’ll get. Then, the father brings out bowls of meat stew over barley. I’m a little confused as Ben makes another comment about being late. 

“I can’t tell when you’re joking, Ben,” I say, clearly missing the humor. 

Ben and Jordan get up, leaving me and Valentine at the table. She is a stranger to me, so I make attempts to get to know her. We bond over our emergency medical work, and she tells me, with thick, French-accented English, stories of being deployed in Afghanistan, where she worked in a field hospital and triaged soldiers wounded in battle. 

Behind her efficient athletic exterior, there’s a deep refinement that seems at ease, like the unadorned way her brown hair falls in a loose ponytail. Her eyes — earthy hues rising over freckled cheeks — come alive whenever she reveals her elusive smile. I’m enthralled, but our conversation is cut short when a French team recognizes her and begins a conversation in a language I don’t understand.

Up a creaky set of stairs are a few bunk rooms. Each room has bunk beds, three high and three people wide on each side of the rooms. Ben and Valentine take the lower bunk on the right side. I take the top left, and Jordan takes the top bunk above Ben and Valentine.

I don’t sleep well, a shame because we’re getting up at 3:00 a.m. for our summit push. Something is wrong with me: My stomach still churns, but I know that it doesn’t matter. I’ve overcome far worse obstacles in my life than an unsettled stomach, sleep deprivation, or being the weakest person on the team. I’m fortified by the knowledge that this climb and this research matter profoundly, not only to me but to my queer community. I’m part of something bigger than myself, and that gives me the confidence to attempt the biggest climb of my life.

We leave in just a few hours.

The expedition continues with Part Three: “Connecting Beyond the False Summit.”