Gary Hemming

Gary Hemming is a trained climber in Yosemite Valley. He moved to France in the early sixties and studied at the University of Grenoble, while climbing with John Harlin. He participated in the opening of climbing routes in the Mont-Blanc massif, among others with John Harlin, Tom Frost, Stuart Fulton and Royal Robbins. Gary Hemming cut off a son with Claude Guerre-Genton in 1963 named Lauren. 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 which trains 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. Which provokes a lively controversy, Desmaison will be exclusive of the Compagnie des Guides de Chamonix and Hemming transformed into a hero. On this occasion, the French press nicknamed him "The beatnik of the peaks" because of his long hair and his cool vagabond attitude. In September 1966, only a few weeks after the rescue of the Drus which made him a hero, Gary Hemming was again talked about. The newspaper Le Monde devotes two articles to his new exploit, of a different kind. Caught climbing the gate of a villa in Fontenay-aux-Roses, Gary Hemming is in custody at the Sceaux police station. No burglary in the case, but rather a story of a spurned lover. The villa belongs to the family of Hemming's girlfriend, who has just broken up with him. He was released on bail four days later, thanks to the intervention of his friend and climbing companion Pierre Mazeaud. Hemming was dismissed. He left France some time later to return to the United States. On Wednesday August 6, 1969, aged 34, he was found dead with a bullet in the head at the edge of Lake Jenny, in the Grand Teton National Park, in northwestern Wyoming (United States). The inquest concludes a suicide. Even today, Comet Hemming appears as a climbing legend, a character as romantic as it is elusive. He seems to have commanded the admiration of all those who lived through him, including his friend Pierre Mazeaud, with whom he lived for a time. For the climbers who succeeded him, like Patrick Edlinger, he embodied a pure approach to the mountains, to climbing, and a libertarian vision of existence, freed from social diktats.