Jim Klobuchar was a columnist with the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE for 30 years and today writes periodically for the CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, which in 2003 nominated him for a Pulitzer Prize. He was voted the nation’s outstanding columnist in 1984 by the National Society of Newspaper Columnists and in 1986 was a finalist in NASA’s Journalist in Space project, a program later canceled because of the Challenger accident. He is the author of 20 books, the latest being "Sixty Minutes with God," and "The Miracles of Barefoot Capitalism," which he co-authored with his wife, Susan Wilkes. He also operates an adventure travel club, Jim Klobuchar's Adventures.

Jim Klobuchar returns to an arena that will be familiar to his readers when he was a columnist for the MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE. You’ll find here a periodic mix of commentary and personal reflections drawn from a lifetime in daily journalism. They might season your day.

                   48 Years After a First

                Climb on The Matterhorn

            A Guide and His Client Reunite

              In the approaching gloaming of Christmas Eve in the Swiss Alpine village of Zermatt, Gottlieb Perren strode into the lounge of a small hotel from where--if you stationed yourself at one of the favored windows--you could see The Matterhorn filling the sky through the tossing snowflakes. You could feel its electric force.

              He had climbed the mountain more than 400 times, five of those with me, the first time 48 years ago.

              "Gruss Gott," I said.

               He smiled, pretending to be impressed by the quality of my clumsy German. He wore a vividly patterned blue and white ski sweater over shoulders that looked square and sturdy after all the years. He was 80 years old but still athletic despite the slight limp from a skiing accident on a glacier early in his mountaineering life. His appearance surprised me.  He might just as well have carried a coiled nylon rope into the hotel. His face had lost almost none of the taut virility of the postered Swiss mountain guide. He was a Bergfuhrer still, although no longer climbing.

              Our reunion had been arranged by Elizabeth Perren, his sister-in-law  who co-managed the Hotel Aristella with her husband..The Aristella is one of those enticing Swiss mountain inns with a tiny two-passenger elevator serving four flours and an immaculate dining room where you have to tear yourself away from the fresh hard rolls and croissants. From there it’s a two-minute walk to the steepled old Catholic Church which anoints each day with the tolling of chimes, whose sound fills the valley and floats up the mountain slopes and mingles with their Arolla pines. Thousands of feet above, you have to stop. This is the angelus of the Alps. It moves you to give thanks: for the innocence of the day, the nourishment and beauty of it, the music of the bells, and for the mountain of mountains in this white cosmos of the Pennine Alps, The Matterhorn. 

     I had some misgivings about Frau Perren's intercessions. Although all of those climbs with Gottlieb had been significant in my life, and we'd developed a passable relationship, my knowledge of Swiss mountain folk told me that a climbing guide values the peace and quiet of his retirement years too dearly to welcome the intrusion of sentimental old clients who were  part of the landscape of retirement.

    Gottlieb surprised me again.

    He remembered one of the first climbs, well before the hordes took possession of the mountain, and we climbed virtually alone, moving quickly with our headlamps spearing the dark flakes of the Matterhorn cliffs. We whisked up the Mosely slabs and ate sausage and drank tea in the Solvay emergency hut. From there we eased out onto the North Face for a few hundred feet and then cramponed up the snow pack of the summit ridge, past the fixed ropes, to stand on top at 14,400 feet at almost the exact moment the rays of an enormous sun erupted above the crest of the Rimpfischhorn to the east and struck us full in the face.

    For me it was unearthly, out of body stuff, to be sucking the alpine wind, staring into the rising sun,  wanting not to leave.

    And for Gottlieb?  Decades later now, he was talkative. "You know, I never got tired of it," he said. "I remember especially that day we climbed the  Zmutt (west) Ridge on the Matterhorn, which not many people do. That was my favorite place on the Matterhorn. It was away from the crowds. It was long and you had to take time and you needed some technique. I felt free. I almost felt alone on the mountain even though the mountain was there every day of my life in Zermatt. You could climb within yourself. Do you know what I mean?"

    I did, and I could confide in 2006--when he was 80 and I wasn't far from there--things that would have seemed gratuitous during our climbs. I told him that I had climbed enough elsewhere through the years, in the Andes, Himalayas, the Tetons, to understand that among some of the leathered aficionados of climbing, The Matterhorn was something of a paper tiger. It wasn't technically demanding on the traditional Hornli Ridge above Zermatt, and climbers came by the hundreds now, and it had become a mountaineering cliche.

    "But I saw it first when I was in my 20s," I said, "and for me it was the Rosetta Stone of the mountains. It defined the high country. Seeing it from Zermatt, the mountain just engulfed you. It was huge and isolated,  stark, miles away from the other summits, and it was the mountain children imagine mountains to be. It has always been that for me. And I remember leaving my name for you at one of the hotels when I asked for a guide in 1958.. There were only seven people on the mountain that day. We climbed in thick cloud from start to finish. All I could see of you was the blade of your ice axe until we got to the summit."

    Gottlieb’s face turned elfin. "You know, sometimes you were a little crazy," he said. "We came down that long ridge on the Obergabelhorn, the Arbengrat, and when we got down from the rock to the snow you made this long jump. And I couldn't believe it.That was the bergschrund, where the snow and ice pull away from the mountain. I thought you were gone."  I told him I still remembered the Bergfuhrer's scream of disapproval.

    And then I told him: "You took thousands of people to the summits. I don't know if you realized that you were opening a new world of discovery and commitment for so many of them. It changed their lives. It created for the rest of their lives a bond with a part of the world where their spirits could run with the wind. This is what you have done for me, and it was a gift."

    He got up to leave, not quite the Teutonic Bergfuhrer I remembered; old and warmer and accessible, celebrating with his former client a quieter and different time of recognition. We embraced. In the old world manner, he touched my cheek with his, then the other. I gave him a bottle of wine as a holiday gift. I said I already had received his.

By Jim Klobuchar

cJim Klobuchar

© 2005 Jim Klobuchar

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