First on the Rope

Roger Frison-Roche was born in Paris in 1906 of Savoyard parents. Moving to Chamonix and away from the city as soon as possible, he got a job in the tourist office and began in earnest the training for a guide de haute montagne, which he passed in 1930. He founded his own rock climbing and mountaineering school, and was active and successful in mountain races. He wrote articles on these events, becoming so popular that he was made editor in chief in 1935 and sent to Algiers, working on La Dépêche d'Alger. He also began to write a serial about the life of a young Alpine guide for weekly instalments in the paper. These were put together to form Premier de Cordée – the book that took him to fame. Frison-Roche travelled widely during the war as a correspondent and joined the Resistance in the Savoyard region. He later became obsessed with the landscapes of the desert and the Arctic after many trips to the Sahara and to stay with the Inuit, which became the subject matter of many of his subsequent books, as well as his beloved mountains. After having lived around the world and in various parts of France, in 1960 he moved back to his home town of Chamonix, soon after to be elected president of the Union Internationale des Guides de Montagne. Roger Frison-Roche died on 17 December 1999 in Chamonix.