Meeting Stéphanie Bodet means crossing in the first place an unusually deep and intense gaze, as if it had the ability to sum up an extraordinary path in life. She chose to tell the story of her past two decades in a sensitive and delicate book, A la Verticale de Soi, in which she retraces her life of ’wanderer of the great outdoors.’ As French writer Sylvain Tesson wrote so rightly in the preface, ’it is the story of a girl who found on the big walls of the world an opportunity to uplift her life in the most fulfilling way.’
‘Nothing was predisposing the dreamer I am to become a top level climber.’
Climbing. The guiding principle, the absolute constant in Stéphanie’s life. Rocks have been a source of fascination since a very young age, she would spend hours contemplating them. She starts climbing at the age of eleven, her eyes sore from allergies and fear. Despite that, the art of mastering rocks becomes the cornerstone of her existence. A sheer love at first sight, an obvious fact difficult to put into words. This initiatic stage of her life corresponds in her opinion to a transitional period between two generations. ‘We were inheriting the vision of nonconformist aesthetes, those hippies of the rock searching for freedom who brought their vision of climbing to the highest spheres.’ Stéphanie refers to the philosophy of French climbing legend Patrick Edlinger and ‘his absolute way of living, his near mystical sense of asceticism.’
Years go by and after an intense period of competition, her whole being is more attracted to the wide open spaces and the urge to explore the remote corners of our planet. Together with Arnaud Petit, her life and climbing partner, she will travel during twenty years to the most extraordinary walls of the globe, ascending among other places El Capitan in Yosemite, the Tre Cime in the Dolomites or the Torres del Paine in Patagonia, Trango Towers in Pakistan… Climbing becomes a fabulous excuse for traveling. She narrates with her own poetic style those hours during which, as true celestial bums, ‘roped together, they sailed to reach the stars.’ In the midst of those high spheres, she discovers how much this sense of verticality is essential to fulfill her life. A living teaching at each pitch, in physical, psychological, geological and philosophical terms. ‘Being there takes on its full meaning.’
‘Ceüse is an absolute, an epitome of beauty and difficulty.’
More than the fact to be working a route, Stéphanie feels closer to the idea of opening something, to the feeling of moving towards the unknown. The first contact with a route somehow evokes her the beginning of a love story. The discovery phase is the one she likes the most, exploring the rock in all its intimacy, ‘in the texture of its skin and in the folds of its limestone’, matching its outline and landscape. She could narrate her adventures ascending dozens of walls in the four corners of the globe but there is a place which stands apart from all the rest, Ceüse. A delicately chiseled diadem, it reigns in the climbing unconscious as the queen of cliffs, with its divinely sculpted grey slabs, its overhanging sections studded with holes, its bluish walls on which you lose your sense of verticality. Ceüse represents to her ‘an absolute, an epitome of beauty and difficulty.’ This compact and sublime ribbon stretches its four kilometers of limestone facing a vast horizon in the Southern part of the French Alps, deeply opening up your gaze and heart. Routes such as le Cadre, l’Arcadémicien or Natilik, on which she strove to decipher their own particular language, share a special place in her vertical unconscious,.
She spent countless hours working on these routes but admits the fact that, for a long time, single-pitch sections were not the ideal terrain that thrilled her. She had difficulties understanding the huge amount of patience and perseverance required in those long-term projects. Paradoxically, she had to deal with this strange feeling to never completely achieve what she was determined to carry out, with this excessive demand she had towards herself. For it is truly this thirst for exploration and discovery which defines her personality and constitutes her driving force in life. Climbing is time consuming by essence and what she was experiencing as a fault in the first place became over the years an incredible opportunity to open up to other people and to the world surrounding her. ‘Nothing seemed more appealing to me than to wander according to the changing seasons, to experience a place more intensely and to create bounds.’
‘Tomorrow does not exist.’
Stéphanie always felt the need of a very free relationship with time. As a yound kid already, she knew she wanted to live a different life, a more conscious one in which one fully experiences everything. For after all, this is what life is all about. ‘To live intensely, to make our short passage on this Earth material to dream, to create, to forge oneself.’ This perception of time, an essential notion in her book, is fundamental in her existence. Stéphanie is twenty when her little sister Emilie dies suddenly. A bottomless heartbreak which somehow gives way to a second birth. We sometimes have to go through a tragedy to grasp the essential in our lives. As a ‘fragile Rastignac of themountains’, she will teach literature at some point until she chooses to devote herself entirely to climbing, ‘more efficient on a crack than on the blackboard.’ The whole challenge to adapt an intense and irregular way of life to a norm encouraging more linearity. And it is in this perspective that the very act of climbing matches her conception of time in this ability to be present, to only focus on the moment, here and now. Time is literally dissolving itself in climbing. ‘I am simply here and everything is perfect.’ How many times did she experience this feeling roped on those giant cliffs? Stéphanie’s existence has always been in search for this subtle balance between a time which is expanding and accelerating endlessly. Still, one thing remains certain: the necessity to have ‘vast open pages in front of her to dream and organize her wanderings.’
‘If I adhered to something in my life, it is to the cause of rocks and words.’
Another main thread gradually takes shape throughout the book, the one of a deep relationship with senses. Suffering from asthma since her early childhood, it is as if Stéphanie had developed a fierce will to open up to the world in reaction to her bronchial tubes which close inexorably. ‘I need to live broadly and widely to be able to breathe.’ The smell of the old bread bin at her grandparents’ place, of Spanish juniper trees in the small village of Taghia in Morocco. The vision of a hummingbird announcing the end of their ascent at the top of the Salto Angel wall in Venezuela. A sheer invitation to a sensorial journey. ‘Walking without any thoughts, the nose in the wind (…) kissing a tree, greeting a stream (…) snooping around an abandoned ruin (…) and not moving any longer (…) listening to a green woodpecker, picking a bunch of nettles (…) setting off to dream on other paths and being shaped by the wind.’ These are the lines full of poetry that she feels inspired to write on paper as she wanders around the wild expanses of the world. It comes as no surprise to learn that the great travelling writer Nicolas Bouvier is her favourite author, whose books she reads at regular intervals. The fragile and melancholic style of Nicolas Bouvier, his relation with the passing of time find a deep echo within her. One of the last sentences of L’Usage du Monde, his most famous novel, sums up this wonderful relationship with her own senses she has developed over the course of her existence: ‘Like water, the world is flowing through you and lends you its colors for a while.’ For it is truly the world in all the spectrum of its possibilities and endless horizons which flows through her entire person. Devouring classics from an early age, she feels home everywhere in the company of a book. Having barely reached her teenage years, she was already writing stories she was dedicating to her younger sister. She always carried a book close to her during the long waiting phases of the numerous competitions she took part in. To her, writing and climbing share things in common for whether it is in front of a blank page or a cliff, one can write their own partition and give free rein to their creativity, give a meaning to the words they choose and to the gestures they are performing. For this is what is the most important: to do one’s best so that things become meaningful.
‘Climbing allows to experience a place more deeply and to create strong links.’
Sigoyer, a small village leaning back against the cliff of Ceüse, ‘a fierce and peaceful place.’ Building there a common life project together with Arnaud Petit could not be more meaningful and eventually obvious, at the foot of those sublime routes on which they have spent so many hours. ’Deep blue altitude skies and the perfect limestone of Ceüse’ form a peerless blend in this suspended balcony of the Southern Alps. They spend three years in the village, living in the ancient farm of a retired couple of farmers. Then one day, the sight of a rock standing on a plot for sale decided them to take the plunge. Severed from this crown and laying some six hundred meters below, it is the physical thread linking them with this cliff they love so much. Step by step, a house made of wood and sustainable materials rises from the ground and takes shape, creating a space of life in harmony with them. A feeling of perfect balance. A rooting where everything makes sense. Stéphanie evokes a ‘dreamland’ and a voluptuous sensation taking hold of her every time she drives the small winding road leading up to their home and the Guérins mountain pass.
And there is also Taghia, a Berber village nestled at two thousand meters in the High Atlas of Morocco. Following the advice of Bernard Domenech, an old alpinist friend, they set off to explore in 2002 the imposing ochre walls overlooking the village and just like in Ceüse, this is truly love at first sight. Stéphanie remembers with emotion the first time they arrived there in the heart of winter, a thin layer of snow had just covered everything. They had entered an altitude desert, the dirt road unfolding its sharp bends on mineral hillsides, to find themselves in a cozy small gîte in the company of their hosts Saïd and Fatima. They immediately felt the magnetic power of the place, of its giant cliffs among which the stunning Oujdad pyramid proudly throning over the village. Since then, they have been getting back there at least once a year, making a pilgrimage of the heart. Stéphanie tries to put into words this sense of peacefulness going through her since fifteen years when she leaves Zaouïat, their bags loaded on mules, and start trekking up the Ahansal valley. She knows ‘every curve and every landscape, (…) the river lined with willow trees which rushes into a narrow gorge, (…) the wind in the corridor and the gigantic size of the walls.’ In this village without electricity inhabited by four hundred souls, shepherds look after their flocks of sheep, men walk back home from the fields at night carrying timeless wooden ploughshares across their shoulders. Magnificent casbahs, those fortresses made of wood, mud and straw, ‘defy gravity and the passing of time.’ A magical encounter happens one day during one of their first stays, with young Sadiya, ’her determined dark pupils, her bright smile, the proud cheeky sense of humour of a child.’ A strong bond of friendship develops between the two women over the years and despite the gradually diminishing language barrier, ‘being together, without words, is enough for us.’ The everyday life of each one may be utterly different, Sadiya seeding the couscous, weaving wool and Stéphanie deciphering those big walls, yet they meet on the essential. Sadiya is now a young woman in her twenties who is about to get married in a few months and the village attracts more and more climbers from all over the world. But not only: Mohammed, who Arnaud knew as a child and initiated, is a local climber of the first generation who just opened his new route he named Titrit like his newborn baby girl.
‘The time has come to be more flexible, in every sense of the word.’
September 2010. Stéphanie attempts to repeat the first female ascent of the route opened by Arnaud Petit on the Grand Capucin in the Mont Blanc range, arguably one of the hardest high-altitude multi-pitch climbs in the world. But a breaking point happens at that very same time: all those years of extreme stringency towards herself and her own body lead to a sheer burnout and a temporary loss of faith in climbing and her life in general. It is hence the time to open up to something else, there comes the moment ‘to learn to steal some time away from climbing’, to switch from a purely athletic practice to a more contemplative one. She decides to start a four-year yoga training and the small rectangle of her yoga mat becomes her new geographical horizon after the wide open spaces which were the norm during her whole life. She initiates in a pure state of joy a transition ‘from the big walls of the globe to the depths of her own self.’ She eventually accepts her fragilities and something disentangles itself. Her asthma attacks even become less and less frequent. ’It is not the world which has changed but my way to apprehend it.’ This feeling of incompleteness which was regularly taking hold of her finally disppears and is replaced by a sense of greater calm and reconciliation. From now on, she knows what is good for her. She feels happy to be able to transmit her passion through workshops combining yoga and climbing. ‘To become in my turn a giver of enthusiasm is a privilege which brightens my future.’ And it is no coincidence if such an introspective book took shape at this stage in her life. Stéphanie just turned fourty this year, deeply grateful of ‘everything that has been given to her during this first part of the journey.’
