Jacques Richon, Doctor of altitude

A surgeon, an upper mountain guide and a rescuer at the Maison du Sauvetage François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB), Jacques Richon is a rather atypical character. With an eye heavenward it is in the mountains here and elsewhere that he reveals his talent for managing emergency situations.

TEXT & PHOTOS : Vincent Tornay

The throbbing of the helicopter, the emergency, the danger… all ingredients that appeal to Jacques Richon, a veritable doctor of the summits. The greenish atmosphere of the operation theatre is too cramped to appease his love of vastness. He has a thirst for large expanses and revels in the sense of freedom which the mountain imposes. “I have always found the job of surgeon to be a fabulous job. Its only flaw is that it's performed indoors" he says. To make up for this, Jacques Richon opted for a landscape of immense snow-capped cathedrals in which to practise his medicine.
In 1976, he performed his first rescue in the mountains. Twenty years later, he became a mountain guide. Clearly it’s up high in this exhilarating setting that the practitioner really takes pleasure. Hanging vertically from a wall, his rich medical experience takes on its full meaning.

From escapism to experience

From childhood, he followed in the footsteps of his father across the heights of the Val d’Hérens. The Aiguille de la Tsa, the Dent Blanche, summits which he climbed on multiple occasions and which transmitted to him this quest for elsewhere, the unpredictable, the unknown. Later, his need to escape was to extend towards the fulfilment of the Great North, towards the exhilaration of the Himalayan altitude, or even the wild volcanoes of Bolivia.

However Jacques Richon cannot be complacent in the sweet solitude of his roving adventures. With the benefit of a wisdom synonymous with vast experience, he testifies to the need to convey, share, and disclose his knowledge of heights, his taste for urgency, and his philosophy about risk. For this he organizes numerous conferences, seminars and outings into the mountains, which revolve around mountain rescue, avalanches, frostbite, resuscitation ... Like a prophet of risk awareness in the mountains, he has this desire to inculcate a "mountain culture" among young people.

Risk as a barometer of renunciation

Read the rest of the article in the Mountain Report magazine - Where to find ?