First women's expedition to the Himalayas Cho Oyu (8,201m).
"During the expedition, every day, I wrote as much as the hiking, my activities or fatigue would allow. These somewhat battered pages upon my return had remained as a rough manuscript. From them I drew the following text. I have changed nothing of what I wrote throughout those three months: the fatigue, the heat, the discouragement, the happy hours, the death."
Micheline Rambaud, filmmaker of the first women's expedition to the Himalayas, Cho Oyu (8,201 m), in 1959, reveals to us, through text and image, her travel journal. An expedition organised by Claude Kogan, the finest French female mountaineer of the era, who, in forming her team, had chosen the elite.
English women, a Belgian, French women and above all the famous Swiss climber Loulou Boulaz. But the adventure would end tragically near the summit: four deaths, including Claude Kogan, buried beneath an avalanche.
This gripping, moving and humour-filled account is an immersion into the daily life of the expedition members, the Sherpas, and above all the women encountered throughout this journey.
Main features
- BIOGRAPHY
- Micheline Rambaud was born on January 20, 1929 in Grenoble. Holding a degree in art history, she practiced photography with her father in the family business in Grenoble. Micheline devoted part of her leisure time to mountaineering in the surrounding Alps, which led her to become known in the "mountain world". It was thus that in the late 1950s, when mountaineer Claude Kogan was preparing the first international women's expedition to the Himalayas and was looking for a mountaineer and filmmaker, Félix Germain recommended Micheline Rambaud to Claude Kogan. Faced with the scope of the project and not considering herself a high-level mountaineer, she hesitated to accept the proposal. She would nonetheless go on to film the expedition's documentary, "Voyage sans retour". After the Cho Oyu expedition, Micheline Rambaud would make two more films in 1961: a film for the Société dauphinoise de secours en montagne, Hauts vols, and another about the rescue of a small plane at the Col du Lautaret.
- INTRODUCTION
- Jean-Michel Asselin, writer, journalist and passionate mountaineer and Himalaya enthusiast
- AWARDS
- Grand prize of the Festival du livre of L'Argentière-La-Bessée 2022
- Grand prize of the Salon international du livre of Passy 2022
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