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Henry or Henri Duhamel (born 9 December 1853 in Paris, died 7 February 1917 in Gières (Isère)) [1] [2] was a French mountaineer, author and skiing pioneer. He introduced the practice of skiing to his circle of friends at Grenoble, leading to the creation of the first ski club in France.
Henry Duhamel was born in Paris in 1853 and moved in 1873 to Gières, near Grenoble, due to health problems. [1] [2] There, the young Parisian bourgeois developed a taste for the mountains, the practice of hiking, climbing, running and combined driving and strove to become an accomplished athlete.
In 1874, Duhamel founded the Isère or Grenoble section of the Club alpin français (French Alpine Club) and began to explore the peaks of Dauphiné. [1] [2] In 1875, in the company of Baron Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau and the guide Alexandre Tournier, Duhamel tried to climb the western peak of the Meije without reaching the summit. A second attempt the following year by the south side led to the foot of a wall deemed impassable. [3] [4] Finally in 1877 Boileau de Castelnau and his guide Pierre Gaspard reached the top, taking the first path traced by Henry Duhamel. Henry Duhamel turned to other peaks, both in France and Kabylie, and established twenty-three new routes, including first ascents of eight virgin peaks. [1] [2] He climbed the Pic Gaspard (3883 m) in 1878 and the south face of the Barre des Écrins (the south arête of the Pic Lory, 4088 m) in 1880 with Pierre Gaspard and his son. [1]
When French mountain climber Henri Cordier was killed in an accident on the slopes of Le Plaret in June 1877, Duhamel took charge of returning Cordier's body to La Bérarde, where he photographed it. [5]
Henry Duhamel moved in all seasons in the mountains of Dauphiné, but the winter remained a problematic season. Horses and sleighs pulled by use of a coupling were limited when the snow reached dizzying heights. The athlete could not find a way to stay in shape with outdoor exercises. He considered snowshoes, but they were not suitable for hiking and he failed to find shoes manufactured with satisfactorily wide flanges.
In 1878, looking for Canadian snowshoes, he visited the Exposition Universelle in Paris, [1] where a Norwegian representative showed him the long, narrow boards that his fellow Scandinavians used in winter. He bought the stand display of the unified kingdom of Norway and Sweden. They were snow skis, traditional wooden planks for sliding on snow. Duhamel purchased the skis without instructions on how to use them. Back in Gières, he researched skis in his extensive library, finding a reference to their use by Arctic explorers in a 1539 Swedish encyclopedia. [6] Duhamel realized that the simple lace binding was complex. Due to his lack of mastery of the link with an adapted shoe, he was awkward and took several years to master skiing technique. [7] In 1889, with the best bindings cobbled together by a craftsman, he managed one successful trial to Chamrousse, [7] which ended with a final somersault. He then undertook a trip to Finland in 1890 and met members of the Sami people (or "Lapps") already familiar with the terrain and the use of skis. The tests were successful; skiing became an enjoyable exercise and a tourist pleasure in the fresh air. Duhamel imported fourteen pairs of skis, equipped with good bindings produced in Norway, and proceeded to distribute them to his friends over the years. In November 1895, some of his athlete friends, skiers sufficiently distinguished, decided to gather in a ski club in imitation of the British. The association saw its constitution officially recognized on 1 February 1896. Recreational skiing for the urban bourgeois was born in France.
The first president of the Alpine Ski Club was the founder of the Rock Club, Ernest Thorant. Henry Duhamel declined the presidency because he did not reside in Grenoble. On 1 March 1896 the first joint meeting and celebration under the eye of Alpine journalists was held in the presence of a monitor officer of the Swedish army from Lans-en-Vercors to Autrans, with return by Croix-Perrin. The Moniteur Dauphinois published an extensive account on 7 March 1896. The Alpine press described the technique and the equipment at length.
Historians[ who? ] have questioned Duhamel's remarks about his ski trials in 1878 because he only claimed to have conducted them in late 1908, when skiing reached its first peak of popularity. The first winter ascent of the Croix de Belledonne in snowshoes cannot be attributed to Henry Duhamel.[ citation needed ] Photographic evidence exists that the first such ascent was conducted by Maurice Allotte of la Fuye on 23 February 1890. [8]
As a supporter of the mountain sports world, Duhamel sought to share his passion with others by publishing numerous articles for the CAF, a Guide du Haut-Dauphiné in 1887 (in collaboration with W. A. B. Coolidge and Félix Perrin) which included a topography in color of the Mont Pelvoux massif, and a tribute to the Alpine troops, Au Pays des Alpins, in 1899. [1] [2]
In 1914, Henry Duhamel was assigned to the 28th Bataillon Alpin de Chasseurs à Pieds as a territorial captain. He was responsible for organizing the training of ski companies going to the Vosges front. [1] As a volunteer instructor officer, he performed his last military mission at the age of sixty-three. Duhamel died on 7 February 1917 as the result of a fall on a patch of ice two months earlier in the courtyard of the barracks of Bonne, Haute-Savoie. [1] [9]
Duhamel's library was dispersed at two sales in Lyon in 1921 and 1922. [2] In honor of Duhamel, a street in Grenoble bears his name, as does the gap separating the Croix de Belledonne from the central peak of the Belledonne range, and one of the side peaks in the Massif des Écrins (the Pyramide Duhamel). Duhamel appears as a character in the novel Le roman de Gaspard de la Meije by Isabelle Scheibli. [1]
Hautes-Alpes is a department in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur region of Southeastern France. It is located in the heart of the French Alps, after which it is named. Hautes-Alpes had a population of 141,220 as of 2019, which makes it the third least populated French department. Its prefecture is Gap; its sole subprefecture is Briançon. Its INSEE and postal code is 05.
Isère is a landlocked department in the southeastern French region of Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Named after the river Isère, it had a population of 1,271,166 in 2019. Its prefecture is Grenoble. It borders Rhône to the northwest, Ain to the north, Savoie to the east, Hautes-Alpes to the south, Drôme and Ardèche to the southwest and Loire to the west.
La Meije is a mountain in the Massif des Écrins range, located at the border of the Hautes-Alpes and Isère départements. It overlooks the nearby village of La Grave, a mountaineering centre and ski resort, well known for its off-piste and extreme skiing possibilities, and also dominates the view west of the Col du Lautaret. It is the second highest mountain of the Écrins after the Barre des Écrins.
The Barre des Écrins is a mountain in the French Alps with a peak elevation of 4,102 metres (13,458 ft). It is the highest peak of the Massif des Écrins and the Dauphiné Alps and the most southerly alpine peak in Europe that is higher than 4,000 metres. It is the only 4,000-metre mountain in France that lies outside the Mont Blanc Massif. Before the annexation of Savoy in 1860 it was the highest mountain in France.
Belledonne is a mountain range in the Dauphiné Alps in southeast France. The southern end of the range forms the eastern wall of the mountains that surround the city of Grenoble.
Sarah Katharine "Katy" Richardson, also referred to as Kathleen Richardson, was a British mountain climber. She made numerous first ascents in the Alps and climbed frequently with her close friend Mary Paillon.
The Ailefroide is a mountain in the Massif des Écrins in the French Alps, and is the third highest peak in the Dauphiné Alps after the Barre des Écrins and La Meije. It lies at the south-western end of the Mont Pelvoux–Pic Sans Nom–Ailefroide ridge.
The silver age of alpinism is the name given in the United Kingdom to the era in mountaineering that began after Edward Whymper and party's ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 and ended with W. W. Graham and party's ascent of the Dent du Géant in 1882.
The Lautaret Alpine Garden is an alpine botanical garden located at 2100 metres altitude in the Col du Lautaret of the Dauphiné Alps, near Villar-d'Arêne, Hautes-Alpes, Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, France. It is part of the List of Remarkable Gardens of France certified by the Ministry of Culture (France).
William Augustus Brevoort Coolidge was an American historian, theologian and mountaineer.
The Musée dauphinois, located in Grenoble (France), is dedicated to the ethnography, archaeology, history and society of the former province of the Dauphiné. Situated above the neighbourhood of Saint-Laurent in the listed historic monument of Sainte-Marie d’en-Haut, the Musée dauphinois is an accredited “Musée de France“ and takes part in the Long Night of Museums.
Pic Gaspard is a mountain in the French Alps, one of the tallest in the Massif des Écrins. It was named in honor of the celebrated L'Oisans guide Pierre Gaspard, conqueror of La Meije on 16 August 1877 in the company of Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau.
L'Oisans is a region in the French Alps, located in the départements of l'Isère and Hautes-Alpes, and corresponding to the drainage basin of the River Romanche and its tributaries. Between Livet-et-Gavet and Le Bourg-d'Oisans, the Romanche forms a deep gorge.
Henri Cordier or Henry Cordier was a French mountaineer. In his short two-year career, he became the first Frenchman to reach the level of the English members of the Alpine Club, in the silver age of alpinism in the second half of the 19th century, which was dominated by the development of mountaineering in the Alps. With some of the Alpine Club's mountain guides and mountaineers, he led significant first ascents in the Mont Blanc massif and in the Dauphiné Alps.
Henri Emmanuel Boileau, baron de Castelnau (1857-1923) was a French alpinist and sportsman who took part in the first ascent of the Meije. After his career as an alpinist he competed as an amateur cyclist.
Pierre Gaspard was a French mountain climber, one of the greatest mountain guides in the silver age of alpinism. He made the first ascent of La Meije on 16 August 1877 with his son and Emmanuel Boileau de Castelnau. Their ascent followed the south buttress Arête du Promontoire, which became the "normal route".
Croix de Belledonne, at 2,926 metres (9,600 ft), is one of the highest points in the Belledonne range in the French Alps, close to the highest summit in the range, Grand Pic de Belledonne at 2,977 metres (9,767 ft). The name derives from the cross erected on the summit.
Mary Paillon (1848–1946) was a French mountain climber and writer. She is known for her climbs with Katharine Richardson, and for her contribution to the Alpine Journal and the Ladies' Alpine Club.
Louise Drevet, née Marie-Louise Chaffanel was a French novelist. She was co-founder, editor and contributor to newspaper Le Dauphiné.
Ulrich Almer was a Swiss mountain guide, born on 8 May 1849 in Grindelwald where he died on 4 September 1940. He made many premieres in the Alps, at the beginning with his father Christian Almer, one of the great guides of the golden age of mountaineering, and was one of the first Swiss guides to visit the Caucasus.
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