You say Pou and think of the two Basque mountaineering brothers, Iker and Eneko, one of the best climbing, mountaineering and adventure teams in the world. Reading about them and talking to them you never understand where one ends and the other begins, where thought begins and action ends. In fact though I have been at the top of world mountaineering for 30 yearsin a partnership in which family ties, personal ambitions and reflections as a team are intertwined.
Iker and Eneko Pou: mountaineering is an aesthetic question
We met them on their way back from the Karakoram in Pakistan, where they opened one with Fay Manners new alpine-style route up Trango II (6237m)on the occasion of the Cortina Outdoor Summer Camp organized by The North Face, of which I am part of the team of athletes,
And this was the occasion for one chat about the essence of mountaineering, the spirit of adventure, the aesthetics of the mountain.
Let’s start where does your story of mountain discovery begin?
It started with our parents, they climbed a lot of mountains with them, our father had done classic routes, he had also climbed, as did our mother, even though she had never climbed. Since we were little, from 2 to 3 years old, all holidays have always been in the mountains. And so our father, while we were growing up, put us to the test, we made ridges, simple climbs in the Pyrenees, and slowly we started climbing.
We started playing, then climbing in the strict sense we started around the age of 15 – 17, but by that age we had already climbed dozens of 3000m mountains in the Pyrenees.
Also keep in mind that at that time there were no gyms, there were no books and there was nothing to train. We only went to the mountains on weekends, and it wasn’t until we were over 20 that the first climbing wall came to town.
When did you realize that this was exactly what you wanted to do with your life?
I think there wasn’t a specific moment, but it’s the motivation that has grown over time. I mean, we were 20, and when our friends went to parties and had fun, we wanted to go to the mountains. And so, without realizing it, a moment arrived when we began to live in the mountains, to become professionals, even if it wasn’t what we were looking for.
We simply spent all day climbing, we went out running in the mountains to train from an early age, we dreamed of the Basque mountaineers who went to the Himalayas, who climbed the great mountains of 8000 meters, who went to the Torre sin Nombre in the macizo de los Urrieles, who went to the Karakorum, in the Andes. And we just wanted to be like them.
How did you go from climbing to mountaineering?
Our specialty from an early age has been rock, but in reality we’ve always done mountaineering because we’ve always looked to people like Messner or Bonatti who started out with rock and then wrote memorable pages of mountaineering. And so we too wanted to make the whole transition and retrace those steps.
In this regard: how important was the inspiration given by the mountaineers who preceded you?
The history of the mountain is a continuous stratification, generation after generation. And it is only thanks to previous generations that today we can do what we do, and perhaps do it better. Think of the very important mountaineering tradition of the Dolomites, think of the incredible things that mountaineers were already doing in the thirties, forties and fifties, think of names like Riccardo Cassin, Achille Compagnoni, Messner and Bonatti themselves, think of Casimiro Ferrari and the Ragni di Lecco …
And it’s not just a matter of technical learning, it’s also a matter of inspiration that these alpinists of the past can still give us today. I mean, we are talking about climbing the great peak of the Tre Cime di Lavaredo, as Emilio Comici did in 1933, of the first ascents of Riccardo Cassi, of Bonatti on the Matterhorn, of something incredible that is a source of inspiration for us to try to doing things well, ethically well.
Do you think that there are technical and physical differences compared to the greats of the past?
Surely many things have changed, and certainly the biggest difference is in the equipment, in the equipment we have available today. And also the knowledge of the mountains that we can have today compared to that time. But then I don’t think there’s a difference between people, between those who climb today and those who climbed then.
Of course, when the 14 peaks of the eight-thousanders were climbed for the first time, they were national expeditions with a military mentality and which brought together the best mountaineers of the time from each country. Today on those mountains there aren’t necessarily the best mountaineers of our time, today it’s easier to find them engaged in very specific activities on the great mountains of 6000, 7000 meters doing technically very difficult feats.
If we know much more about the mountains today than the great mountaineers of the past did, where does the adventure begin?
Here we can talk about 2 types of adventure. One is personal adventure: a via ferrata, an excursion, a climb can always be an adventure, the first time you do it and within your limits. And this is the beauty of the mountains, that you can always have an adventurous experience, at any age, whether you’re more or less experienced.
Then you have to understand what a great adventure really is for a human being. Today there are thousands of tourists who go to the top of eight-thousand-metre mountains by the Via Normale, with full support, but this is not the real great adventure and it has no importance from a mountaineering point of view. On the other hand, climbing mountains of 6000 or 7000 meters, technically difficult, on new routes and above all independently, has it. That is, being good enough to be able to get on and off alive in complete autonomy. And then this is real adventure.
So the last question is: how do you decide which mountains to climb and which adventures to face?
We could answer you as George Mallory answered with “Because they are there”. In reality it is a mix of things, from technical difficulty to historical and cultural heritage but also, or above all, for an aesthetic question. Take the last project we closed, 4 Elements (the project started in 2017 with the opening of “Aupa 40” in Patagonia, then “Yakumama” in the Amazon, then “Leve Leve” on the Cao Grande volcano, in Africa, and finally “Waa Shakir” at Trango II in Karakorum, Ed): some climbs were technically simple, others complicated, but what we were looking for was aesthetics, a project that we liked to imagine and elements that we liked to climb. A mountaineer, a climber, is like a child: he wants to climb something beautiful. The aesthetic component is the most important of all, and is the reason for the fascination of the Dolomites or the Matterhorn. And that’s what we will do in the future too, climbing mountains that make us say “wow, it’s beautiful, let’s climb it”.
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