Acting

Gil Bodin

Gil Bodin, born January 1, 1939, in Parçay-Meslay (Indre-et-Loire) and died October 7, 2019, in Bron, in the Lyon metropolitan area, was a French mountaineer and mountain guide. He was one of those mountain figures whose eloquence took us back to the epics of the 1960s. Originally from Indre-et-Loire, it was during his teenage years in Paris that Gil Bodin discovered the joys of vertical climbing, awakening on the boulders of Fontainebleau. A classic adventurer's journey that would lead him and his brother, Patrice, to the Chamonix Valley, where he earned his mountain guide diploma and pursued his passion at the foot of Mont Blanc. In 1966, Gil Bodin was one of the sniper gang who, ahead of the Chamonix guides, the soldiers from the EMHM (French Mountains Management Agency), and the instructors from the National Ski and Mountaineering School, succeeded in freeing the two Germans trapped on their narrow ledge by the Drus. Along with Gary Hemming, François Guillot, Lothar Mauch, René Desmaison, and others, Bodin had ignored the institutions to bring the two shipwrecked men back alive. The happy ending, set against a backdrop of controversy, would contribute to the evolution of rescue work in the Mont Blanc massif. "At the time," says Jean Blanchard, a high mountain guide, "there weren't many people of that level, even in the Compagnie des Guides. They roped together out of friendship, climbed the west route, and brought them back safe and sound. (...) You could say that mountain rescue was born from the rescue of the Drus. It was after this rescue that the State established the PGHM system."