Jean Ravier(1933-2022)
Jean Ravier is a French climber and Pyrenees climber.
Jean Ravier and his twin brother Pierre Ravier form the emblematic rope team of twentieth-century Pyrenees climbing. Self-taught and with lightning-fast learning, they have opened more than 200 of the most famous climbing routes in the great Pyrenean massifs, from the North-East Dihedral of the Grande Aiguille d'Ansabère to the Yellow Dihedral of the North Face of the Vignemale, from the Pilier de l'Embarradère de l'Ossau to the South Face of the Tozal del Mallo in Aragon.
So many "firsts" among several hundred, scattered across all the massifs, even the most remote, of the French and Spanish Pyrenees. Total lack of training, little equipment, refusal of fashions: the genius of the Ravier brothers lies in a very personal conception of the mountain, based above all on friendship. They are not mountaineers, but rather Pyrenees, attached to the history of Pyreneism, they will always take care to document and extend their climbing routes through writing and photography.
The Ravier brothers are the main figures of the post-war revival of Pyreneism and climb with other mountaineers such as Guy Santamaria, Raymond Despiau, Claude Dufourmantelle and especially with Pierre Bouchet. They also sometimes climb abroad, in Spain, in the Caucasus or in the Hoggar in Algeria. Jean Ravier was selected to participate in 1962, in the company of Lionel Terray, Robert Paragot, René Desmaison and Guido Magnone, in the French expedition to Jannu (7,710 m) whose summit he reached on April 28, the day after the success of the first team of the expedition.
Jean Ravier and his twin brother Pierre Ravier form the emblematic rope team of twentieth-century Pyrenees climbing. Self-taught and with lightning-fast learning, they have opened more than 200 of the most famous climbing routes in the great Pyrenean massifs, from the North-East Dihedral of the Grande Aiguille d'Ansabère to the Yellow Dihedral of the North Face of the Vignemale, from the Pilier de l'Embarradère de l'Ossau to the South Face of the Tozal del Mallo in Aragon.
So many "firsts" among several hundred, scattered across all the massifs, even the most remote, of the French and Spanish Pyrenees. Total lack of training, little equipment, refusal of fashions: the genius of the Ravier brothers lies in a very personal conception of the mountain, based above all on friendship. They are not mountaineers, but rather Pyrenees, attached to the history of Pyreneism, they will always take care to document and extend their climbing routes through writing and photography.
The Ravier brothers are the main figures of the post-war revival of Pyreneism and climb with other mountaineers such as Guy Santamaria, Raymond Despiau, Claude Dufourmantelle and especially with Pierre Bouchet. They also sometimes climb abroad, in Spain, in the Caucasus or in the Hoggar in Algeria. Jean Ravier was selected to participate in 1962, in the company of Lionel Terray, Robert Paragot, René Desmaison and Guido Magnone, in the French expedition to Jannu (7,710 m) whose summit he reached on April 28, the day after the success of the first team of the expedition.
