Gary Hemming

Gary Hemming is a trained climber in Yosemite Valley. He moved to France in the early sixties and took university courses in Grenoble, while climbing with John Harlin. Gary Hemming had a son with Claude Guerre-Genton in 1963. He participated in the opening of committed climbing routes in the Mont-Blanc massif, among others with John Harlin, Tom Frost, Stuart Fulton and Royal Robbins. On August 18, 1966, in Entrèves in the Alps, the American Gary Hemming and his climbing partner, the German Lothar Mauch, sipped coffee while ruminating because bad weather conditions spoiled their project on the south face of Mont Blanc. The copy of the Dauphiné Libéré lying on the table announces two Germans in perdition on the west face of the Drus and a difficult rescue for the soldiers of the EHM. Hemming's blood boils: "We have to go, Lothar!". With René Desmaison and other excellent climbers, they took the Berardini-Magnone route, ahead of the official rescue team, and descended with the two injured climbers via the "La Directe Américaine" route that Hemming had opened with R. Robbins in 1962. What provokes a lively controversy, Desmaison will be excluded from the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix and Hemming erected as a hero. On this occasion, the French press nicknamed him "The beatnik of the peaks" because of his long hair and his wandering appearance.