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little Carrel” in honor of his famous predecessor, and by Giacomo Chiara eighteen years later, in 1942.) Our modesty in not killing ourselves in an impossible—given the equipment and techniques of 1924—attempt on the Furggen Ridge overhang reminded me at the time of how I had first met the 37-year-old Englishman Richard Davis Deacon and the 25-year-old Frenchman Jean-Claude Clairoux at the base of the unclimbed north face of the Eiger—the deadly Eigerwand. But that is a tale for another time.
    The essence is that both Deacon—known as “the Deacon” to many of his friends and climbing partners—and Jean-Claude, just become a fully accredited Chamonix Guide, perhaps the most exclusive climbing fraternity in the world, had agreed to take me along for months of their winter, spring, and early summer climbing in the Alps. It was a greater gift than I had ever dreamed of. I’d enjoyed going to Harvard, but my education with the Deacon and Jean-Claude—whom I eventually came to call “J.C.” since he did not seem to mind the nickname—for those months was by far the most demanding and exhilarating educational experience of my life.
    At least until the nightmare of Mount Everest. But I get far ahead of my tale.
    On our last two days on the Matterhorn we made a partial ascent of the mountain by its treacherous west face, then rappelled down to work out routes and strategies on the truly treacherous north face, one of the Alps’ final and most formidable unsolved problems. (Franz and Toni Schmid will climb it seven years later, after bivouacking one night on the face itself. They will ride their bicycles all the way from Munich to the mountain and, after their surprise ascent via the north face, will ride them home again.) For the three of us, it was a reconnaissance only.
    This final day we had teased out routes on the seemingly unassailable “Zmutt Nose” overhanging the right part of the north face, then retreated, traversed to the Italian Ridge, and—when the Deacon nodded his permission to climb the final 100 feet—finally found ourselves here on the narrow summit on a perfect day in late June.
    During our week on the Matterhorn we endured and climbed through downpours, sudden snowstorms, sleet, ice that turned rock to verglas, and high winds. On this final day, the weather on the summit is clear, calm, warm, and quiet. The winds are so docile that the Deacon is able to light his pipe after striking only a single match.
    The top of the Matterhorn is a narrow ridge about a hundred yards long, if you wish to walk the distance between its lower, slightly broader “Italian summit” and its higher and narrowest point at the “Swiss summit.” In the past nine months or so, the Deacon and Jean-Claude have taught me that all good mountains give you clear choices. The summit of the Matterhorn offers very clear choices: a misstep to the left and you die in Italy; a wrong step to the right and you die in Switzerland.
    The Italian side is a sheer rock face falling 4,000 feet to rocks and ridges that would stop a fall about halfway down the face, and the Swiss side falls away to a steep snow slope and rocky ridges hundreds of feet lower than the halfway mark, boulders and ridges that might or might not stop a body’s fall. There is enough snow here on the ridgeline itself for us to leave clear prints of our hobnailed boots.
    The Matterhorn’s summit ridge is not quite what excited journalists like to call “a knife-edge ridge.” Our boot prints in the snow along the actual ridge prove this. Had it been a knife-edge ridge, with snow, our boot prints would have been on both sides, since the smart way to traverse a true knife edge is to hobble slowly along like a ruptured duck, one leg on the west side of the narrow summit ridge, one on the east. A slip then will lead to bruised testicles but not—God and fate willing—a 4,000-foot fall.
    A slightly wider “knife-edge ridge” of snow, a vertical snow cornice, as