Fratelli e compagni di cordata

Sons and grandchildren of mountain guides from the historic Society of Alpine Guides of Courmayeur, the oldest in the world after that of Chamonix, the brothers Alessio and Attilio Ollier shared a love for the mountains, for Mont Blanc where they were born and raised, and for the profession of their ancestors. And in the 1960s and 1970s they became one of the strongest teams ever, capable of competing with the most famous names of the moment. In 1965 they perhaps achieved their mountaineering masterpiece: the first winter climb of Poire on the Italian side of the Bianco, coveted by many champions of the time including Walter Bonatti. Having descended from the French side, they were celebrated for their great feat and were escorted from Chamonix to Courmayeur through the Mont Blanc tunnel not yet open to the public. Furthermore, contacts with Bonatti were frequent in the Courmayeur guide community and four years earlier the Olliers had taken part in the rescue efforts during the tragedy of the Frêney Central Pillar, just as, risking their own lives, they took part in hundreds of rescue operations, saving mountaineers who attempted feats bordering on the impossible, such as René Desmaison who in 1971 was trapped along the Punta Walker route on the Grandes Jorasses. Very close together in a team, as only two brothers can be, like Reinhold and Günther Messner, they have climbed perhaps like no other all the peaks of the Western Alps and have also participated individually in important non-European expeditions. Between November 1968 and March 1969, exactly fifty years ago, the two brothers actually found themselves at antipodes: Alessio with Carlo Mauri in Antarctica in the first Italian mountaineering-scientific expedition financed by the CAI and the CNR, and Attilio in Greenland with the explorer Guido Monzino in the first Italian expedition to the North Pole.