Marcel Rémy

Swiss alpinist Marcel Rémy celebrated his ninety-ninth birthday in February 2022 at his local rock gym in Villeneuve, on the eastern shore of Lake Geneva, climbing to the fifty-foot rafters before descending for cake with his sons, the underground climbing legends Yves and Claude Rémy, and a handful of well-wishers. Barring the cake, it was a typical day for Rémy, who began climbing at twenty and kept at it, passionately and mostly anonymously, until he was featured in a documentary about his ascent of the Miroir d’Argentine at the age of ninety-four.

Rémy had a long history with the fifteen-hundred-foot limestone face, having climbed it more than two hundred times over a span of seventy-one years. As a younger man, the mirror-smooth slab in the Swiss Vaud Alps was a favorite playground. As he grew older it became a testing ground, and finally a place of affirmation.

At eighty, he scaled the face three times, leading every pitch of La Normale