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For many years the New York author James Salter has been writing screenplays for Hollywood – particularly for Robert Redford. His mountaineering novel “Solo Faces” with Redford as the protagonist was to be filmed in Chamonix. Yet James Salter turned the screenplay into a literary novel: “Solo Faces” is one of the most riveting books ever written about alpine heroes. Because of his topics and his lucid style the over 80-year-old Salter is often compared to Albert Camus and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. For his lonely hero, however, the former pilot James Salter chose not the desert or the blue skies – but Mont Blanc. Once the author himself had learnt the art of mountaineering in Chamonix, always with a small notebook and pencil stub in his back pack, he felt strong enough to describe the extreme conditions and the special laws of the “roof of Europe”. For Birgitta Ashoff’s documentary the American James Salter returns to Haute-Savoie and meets here, 25 years later, his legendary mountaineering friend Claude, who taught him to climb and introduced him to the mountain world. Two grand old men, each one an original in his own way, meet again, still bound by a dangerous love – the passion for the mountains. They talk about friendship, danger, courage and challenge – and whether the magic of the mountains can ever be truly captured in literature.