Today’s Depeche du
Midi had a story which caught our eye mainly because it concerned a figure
from the days of great explorers and climbers: Henry Russell. An eminent
Victorian we thought, but no – Henry Patrick Marie, Count Russell-Killough was
born in Toulouse and died in Biarritz. Although his father was Irish from an
old Catholic family, it was in the Pyrenees that Henry made his name. In fact
the highest peak on the French side of the range is called Pic Russell.
Not content with just conquering the Pyrenean heights,
he developed the idea of “base camps” from where the next stage could be
attacked. But no flimsy tents clinging to the mountainside: Russell hacked out
caves where he and his companions could bivouac. Especially taken with the Vignemal, which he first
climbed in 1861, he hacked three caves between 1881 and 1896 (he rented the
mountainside for 1 franc per annum). But these caves were eventually covered by
a glacier and he had others made lower down. Lined with Persian carpets these were
ideal for lavish entertaining but lacked the splendour of the higher sites.
Eventually he dynamited a cave just 18 metres from the summit, “without
permission” as a modern expert comments ruefully.
The story is relevant today because the shrinking glacier
had revealed the three original excavations for the first time in many years.
Henry Russell celebrated what he called his “silver wedding” in the highest
cave: a “man who married a mountain” as his biography is called
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