Meikle Alan Hill

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Biografie:
Alan Hill Meikle 1920-1984
I never did any climbing with my great friend Alan Hill Meikle, though we did once make a descent together after meeting by chance, on 5 October 1969, at the summit of the Matterhorn. On that day he was completing his traverse of the Matterhorn from Switzerland to Italy, accompanied by the man who had always been his alpine guide, his dearly loved Marcello Carrel. On that day Marcello Carrel, with Alan's agreement, was initiating his son Rinaldo into the Matterhorn. Crouching beneath the Italian peak of the Matterhorn, we spent a number of intense, important and unforgettable minutes together on a still warm and vividly colourful autumn day. The depth of our view seemed immense and this sense of breadth, this mysterious fascination, stayed with our guides, Alan and myself until our return to Breuil, in the evening.
Alan Meikle had begun climbing in the Alps, in the Valtournanche, with some fellow officers, in August 1945. He was introduced to the high mountains by a well known guide of Valtournanche, Marcello Carrel. From then on he came back to the Valle d'Aosta almost every year, continuing to climb with Marcello Carrel until his death in 1981, and with his son Rinaldo Carrel up till 1983, usually in September; mostly in the Matterhorn, Monte Rosa and Gran Paradiso groups.
In the Valtournanche he repeatedly climbed the Matterhorn by the Italian ridge and by the Zmutt ridge; he also climbed the Petits Murailles and, at various intervals, traversed the Grandes Murailles. Punta Cian, the Dragone-Fontanella traverse, Becca d'Aran, the Devil's Ridge traverse, Becca di Luseney, Becca di Guin, Les Jumeaux and Lioy were ascents made with his very faithful friend Carrel, in the course of various seasons. In the Monte Rosa group, it was the Dufourspitze, Signalkuppe, Zumsteinspitze, the Lyskamm traverse, Castor and Pollux, the Roccia Nera and the traverse of the two Breithorns that captured Alan's and Marcello's main interest. All these ascents, again made over a period of many seasons, brought profound satisfaction and left deep memories. But where Alan found, with his affectionate friend and alpine guide Marcello, the widest and most rewarding spaces of his mountaineering career, was in the Gran Paradiso group: in the crossing from Bonney-Becca of Colle di Montandaine; the Vaccarone-Bivacco peak to the Piccolo Paradiso gap; Punta Farrar; Punta Frassy; Colle Piccolo Paradiso; Gran Paradiso (including an ascent from the Tribulation Glacier to the Colle dell' Ape); and the Grivola from all sides (except the NW ridge); the complete crossing of the 'Apostles'; the Torre di Gran S. Pietro; Sant'Andrea; Sant'Orso; and Roccia Viva by the North face.
On Mont Blanc, Alan reached the Aiguille du Goliter. This however, although it included the largest alpine massif, he regarded simply as an excursion. He and Marcello also traversed the Grand Combin from the Panossiere Hut to the Col Valsorey. His great dream, Alan's great love, was in fact the Gran Paradiso group, where he would have liked always to return and where right up till the last years, by then in limited health, he still planned, with the loyal Marcello Carrel, to make other ascents.
But all these names, which spell coveted and difficult goals for any mountaineer, do not say enough about Alan's career, about the personality of Alan Meikle. To understand what all these ventures meant to Alan one would have to have known him personally - a good fortune which I had for over thirty years. Alan arrived in Italy at the end of the Second World War, and hence at a particularly complex time. In addition to his wide reading on the subject of mountaineering, he brought with him a great emotive force, an extreme refinement of spirit and an outstanding measure of human sensibility. Above all he brought with him the memory and the example of the romantic British alpine mountaineers who, in the nineteenth century, had transferred to the Valle d'Aosta their great culture and passion for exploring, their eagerness to recapture natural and essential values: in that natural environment, the values of great mountains - in an almost impossible dream - and those of the 10fal people, as a subject of historico-ethnological research in a still fairly unknown region.
Flowers, plants, colours, dawns, sunsets, streams and rivers, mountaindwellers' houses, churches ancient and small, paths and hamlets, odours and animals grazing, all aroused sharp new impressions and emotions within him. Alan Meikle's alpinism was that of the true mountaineer. He moved among mountains and valleys and people and nature to see for himself what he had previously heard or read about and to gain a living confirmation of these natural and human entities.
What always used to astonish the inhabitants of these valleys (and foreigners too) was his delightfully civilized behaviour, his warmth of feeling and openheartedness, which he transfused into his encounters and which earned him the friendship even of people who could not understand his language. In order to get to know places and people and situations more closely, he made it his business (and succeeded perfectly) to learn Italian and in part, the Valle d'Aosta patois.
Inevitably, a man of such rare humanity, such an eclectic figure, could not be understood by many. However, this cost Alan no outward suffering, for his chief desire was to give, to explain and to teach, without expecting anything in return. He bore his great solitude quietly, discreetly hiding his hypersensitivity, but he was an unfailingly polite and considerate person. His complex way of feeling, seeing and doing had been happily complemented by the original meeting with the alpine guide, Marcello Carrel, with whom he was able to build up a truly comfortable association. Here were two different cultures, two different lives; yet these two men were deeply united by the poetry expressed by their surroundings, by their faith in a common endeavour, in a total and reciprocal balance of feelings.
Alan's mountaineering in Valle d'Aosta, particularly in the Valtournanche, was a literary and philosophical expression; it was an artistic manifestation, not a passion unto itself. It was a great and pure act oT love, the love ofa pure aesthete. I shall never forget these great values of Alan Meik]e, and I am certain too that they will remain for ever in the places where he so often climbed.
At the end, I was present at his funeral, in splendid Northumberland, where his ashes remain, in his deeply loved home country. But I could not help feeling that Alan's spirit had stayed among his distant mountains and had peacefully joined his rope-companion, his alpine guide, who had preceded him by a short while into the sky's great space.
On those mountains and in those valleys the memory of a man remains, unknown perhaps to most, who filled with his quiet and unassuming personality a corner of this world; who enriched and tacitly quickened the heroic and romantic heritage of the most classic British mountaineering.
Guido Monzino
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 90, 1985, Seite 282-284


Geboren am:
1920
Gestorben am:
1984