Jean-Christophe Lafaille

Lafaille's last climb was one of his boldest. In December 2005 he began a solo attempt to climb Makalu (8462m), the only 8000-metre peak in Nepal not to have seen a winter ascent. It was a goal which would have been considered suicidal a few years previously, but for Lafaille the danger was an important part of the experience. He commented

In December 2004 he made a solo ascent of Shishapangma. It was intended to be the first winter ascent of the mountain, but he reached the summit on 11 December which was seen as too early to be classed as a true winter ascent. By this point he had completed eleven of the fourteen peaks, and needed Everest, Kanchenjunga and Makalu to complete his goal.

By 2003 Lafaille had decided to try to climb all fourteen 8000-metre peaks; but unlike many of the mountaineers who take on this goal, he had no desire simply to climb them by well established routes, in large expeditions and with bottled oxygen. He preferred to continue trying to achieve new routes or solo ascents, or to climb in the more demanding winter season. In 2003 he climbed Nanga Parbat, Dhaulagiri (solo) and Broad Peak in a two-month period. The last of these nearly killed him when he fell into a crevasse and then developed high altitude pulmonary edema. He was rescued by Ed Viesturs and Denis Urubko.

10. No Short Cuts to the Top, by Ed Viesturs with David Roberts (Broadway Books, 2006), p. 223-248. Description of Annapurna Expedition led by Ed Viesturs, April - May 2002. Viesturs abandoned the climb on the long east ridge, while J.C. continued and summited on May 16, 2002. An exploit labeled by himself as "the hardest thing he'd ever done in life", and by Viesturs "one of the most remarkable ascents of modern times."

Annapurna remained an obsession for Lafaille, and he would later call his autobiography Prisoner of Annapurna. He returned to the mountain three times. The first time he made a solo attempt on the British line on the South Face, which failed due to poor snow conditions. In 1998 he returned to the same route with a larger team, but the expedition was abandoned when a team member was killed in an avalanche. He finally reached the summit in 2002 with Alberto Iñurrategi via the long, committing east ridge.

A year after his accident on Annapurna, he climbed Cho Oyu, and then in 1994 he climbed a new route, solo, on the north face of Shishapangma. It was the first of many solo ascents of 8000 meter peaks, including consecutive ascents of Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II in four days in 1996, and Manaslu in 2001.

On the strength of his climbs in the Alps, Lafaille was invited on an expedition to Annapurna by Pierre Béghin, one of the leading French climbers of the day. The pair attempted the mountain's vast South Face following the monsoon season in October 1992 in Alpine style, with no Sherpa support, pre-stocked campsites or fixed ropes on the upper mountain. They had reached a height of 7,400 metres when bad weather forced them to descend. The pair made a series of abseils down the face, but due to their lightweight approach they had little protective equipment and were often forced to abseil from a single anchor to conserve equipment. On the fourth or fifth abseil, Béghin fell to his death when the single cam he was using as an anchor became dislodged from the rock. Béghin had been carrying most of the pair's technical equipment, including all the ropes, and Lafaille was left alone on the face, a vertical mile above safety.

In the early 1990s, Lafaille qualified as a mountain guide and began mountaineering in the Alps. He made a number of difficult ascents on the Mont Blanc massif, including the first solo climb of Divine Providence on the Grand Pilier d'Angle, one of the hardest routes on the massif.

Born in Gap, Hautes-Alpes, Lafaille's background was in sport climbing, and as a teenager he climbed extensively at Céüse and played a part in turning it into one of the world's best known climbing venues. In 1989 he became the first Frenchman to solo a climb graded 7c+, and one of the first to climb 8c graded routes.

Jean-Christophe Lafaille (31 March 1965 – 27 January 2006 [presumed]) was a French mountaineer noted for a number of difficult ascents in the Alps and Himalaya, and for what has been described as "perhaps the finest self-rescue ever performed in the Himalaya", when he was forced to descend the mile-high south face of Annapurna alone with a broken arm, after his climbing partner had been killed in a fall. He climbed eleven of the fourteen eight-thousand-metre peaks, many of them alone or by previously unclimbed routes, but disappeared during a solo attempt to make the first winter ascent of Makalu, the world's fifth highest mountain.