Gobbi Toni

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Biografie:
Toni Gobbi 1914-1970
Toni Gobbi of Courmayeur, who met with a fatal accident while leading a ski-ing party in the Dolomites on 18 March 1970, was one of the most distinguished Alpine guides of his time and, appropriately one of the first to be elected to membership of the Alpine Club after the rule was altered to admit professionals. He was a man of commanding personality and talents, which could, one felt, have brought him success in many fields.
Toni was not a native of the mountains. His early climbing, starting in the Dolomites in 1932 when he was eighteen, was as an amateur. “Un alpiniste devenu guide” was the title of the lecture he gave during a visit to England in 1962. Born in Pavia in 1914 he attended the university, obtaining his doctorate in law, and subsequently studying up to the last year for a further doctorate of letters, and began acareer as a lawyer. In 1940, now an officer in the Italian army, he was posted as an instructor to the military school at Aosta, which brought him for the first time to the western Alps. For a time he was in charge of the detachment manning the frontier above Courmayeur (“l was in command of Mont Blanc”) and had under him a number of men who were, or subsequently became, guides. This brought him some lasting friendships among members of the profession, to which he turned for a permanent career when he registered as a porter in 1943; he graduated to guide in 1946. Meanwhile, in 1943 he had married Romilda Bertholier, daughter of a Courmayeur guide, and made his permanent home there.
It cannot have been easy for a newcomer to establish himself as a guide at that time and earn a living for himself and a family. Toni had determination and energy, and a superb physique. Tall, handsome, with enormous eyes at once attractive and formidable, he was so well proportioned that he did not look a big man, until you saw him alongside someone known to be big and compared the breadth of Toni's shoulders. The impression he gave was of strength, both physical and of character. To strength he added drive and readiness to work. More than once I heard him speak of the hard work of those early years. He did not rate himself specially gifted as a climber. 'Je suis alpiniste moyen', he would insist. But by hard work, intelligence and fitness he made himself an acknowledged master of his profession, not least in the variety of his experience, which extended more widely to other parts of the Alps away from his home area than is common among modern guides. Frequent ascents gave him the reputation of specialist in routes like the South ridge of the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey, the Hirondelles ridge of the Grandes Jorasses, and on Mont Blanc the Route Major and the Innominata. On the Hirondelles ridge and on the final buttress of Route Major he was the author of important variants. He made a number of first ascents in the Dolomites and around Mont Blanc, of which the most important, in partnership with Waiter Bonatti, was the first ascent in 1957 of the Grand Pilier d'Angle, the famous and challenging problem on the flank of the Peuterey ridge, above the Brenva glacier. An early exponent of more advanced standards of winter climbing, he made the first winter ascents of the Hirondelles ridge (1948), the South ridge of the Noire (1949) and the Route Major (1953). In 1957-8 he was a member of a pioneering Italian expedition to the Paine region of Patagonia. In 1958 his position among Italian guides was recognised when he was appointed deputy leader of the Italian National Expedition to Gasherbrum IV; he played a key role in organising operations on the mountain, and went twice to Camp 6 at 7600 m.
As a second line of business he established a shop in Courmayeur, in which he was aided by his charming and distinguished wife, and latterly by his son and daughter. In the early days the shop was divided between mountain equipment and books, a combination of interests evident in my own first contact with him when in the autumn of 1952 his reply to a letter about some karabiners for the next year's Everest expedition and certain difficulties with the Customs was enlivened by a learned allusion to Whymper's ladders. Later, a second shop was acquired a few yards further along the street and the range of trade broadened. The business was so successful that suggestions were heard that he should establish branches in other places, but Toni resisted this, recognising how much was due to his own personality and that of his wife in the shop.
He was active too in ski-mountaineering. From 1951 onwards, each spring he organised and led a programme of ski-mountaineering 'weeks'. These became famous and have been widely copied. The typical week was an Alpine tour, like the High Level Route, or in the Bernese Oberland or the Dolomites, but more recently he had widened the scope, and included trips to Greenland, and in 1966 to the Caucasus, where he took pride in having been the first Western
guide to lead a party of clients on ski to the summit of Elbruz.
The success of these weeks demonstrated his gifts and enterprise as an organiser and manager as well as a mountaineer. Inevitably there fell to him the duties of administrative office and leadership in his profession. He was first an instructor, then for many years director of training and testing courses for young guides of his region. He was President of the Aosta Guides' Association from 1957 until 1965, when he became National President of all the guides of Italy. He served on the expeditions committee of the C.A.I. He was one of the instigators, and the inaugural Vice-President, of the International Union of Guides' Associations formed in 1965. In these offices he strove especially to foster the professional status of guides and to pass on to new entrants to the profession his own high sense of its traditions and responsibility. This was one of the themes of his training courses, as I saw for myself when in 1965 he invited me, as then Secretary of the Alpine Club, to attend one of them as an observer. This invitation, which he had planned for several years, evidenced too his desire to promote international friendships among mountaineers and between guides and amateurs, whether or not the amateurs might be potential clients. Toni regretted the absence in modern conditions of the lifelong climbing partnerships between guides and amateurs which contributed so much to earlier Alpine history, and he sought to develop comparable links in other ways.
One such way was his unfailing helpfulness to guideless climbers. In recent years he spent less time climbing, at least in summer, and was to be found more often in the shop: as he put it, 'So many alpinists seem to need me there.' They did indeed, not only to buy equipment, but for advice about the mountains. His shop was the natural rendezvous of climbers visiting Courmayeur, and the help which he gave them Toni saw as one more manifestation of the prime duty of his profession, to help people to enjoy the mountains. Countless climbers of many nationalities had cause to be grateful to him.
On 18 March 1970, at Sasso Pialto in the Val Gardena, he was leading a roped party of four clients and a porter on ski across an easy slope above a low cliff of about 70 ft. A small windslab avalanche from above caught and carried them quite gently, it is said, down to the edge of the cliff, and over. The porter and the client at the rear, jerked by the rope into a wider arc, landed on snow and were not seriously hurt. Toni and three clients fell onto boulders at the foot of the little cliff, and were killed.
He leaves a widow, a son and a daughter. Notice of his son's forthcoming wedding had been sent to friends a few days before his death. The family are continuing the business of the shop, and Toni's friends the world over will wish them success, while sharing in some sort their irreparable loss.
Anthony Rawlinson
Quelle: Alpine Journal Volume 76, 1971, Seite 326-329


Geboren am:
1914
Gestorben am:
18.03.1970