In a few hours, with constant encouragement from Kenton and Ian, I had blundered my way up 1,000 feet or more of the initial rubble slopes. I felt much comforted by the thought that, if my nerve failed as the drop below grew far greater than any climb I had done before, there was a nearby escape hatch, the Eiger tunnel’s gallery window or porthole which allows tourists to look out and gasp at the airy void immediately below them.
We must have climbed some 2,000 feet up the mountain when we reached the next recognisable feature, the aptly named Shattered Pillar. I was feeling tired and my neck muscles were aching from the tug of my rucksack harness. But the weather was, as prophesied by the met offices of Berne and Exeter, holding good and clear. Every few hours I tore open a new hand-warmer bag with my teeth and inserted the two tiny pouches into my mitts. They worked well and whenever the sensitive stumps of my amputated fingers began to feel numb with cold, I positioned the hand-warmer pouch over their ends for a while.
I had never climbed on similar rock before, smooth like slate with almost nowhere to provide even the tiniest holding point for the tips of my ice-axes and crampon spikes. At times I had to remove one or other of my mitts with my teeth and use my bare hand to clasp some rock bulge or slight surface imperfection to avoid a fall. This I hated to do, for my fingers, once cold, took for ever to re-warm, even with my heat pouches.
Every now and again I glanced below me without thinking and felt that shock of terror I knew so well which presages the first wave of vertigo. I instantly forced my mind to concentrate on something of interest above me, usually Kenton’s progress. On that first day this process worked well for me. I was, due to vanity, keen to prevent Ian and Kenton from glimpsing my fear. With Kenton I may have succeeded, but Ian was a sharp cookie and zealous in his film-making responsibilities. Philip had especially instructed him to record personal emotions and such points of human interest as discord within the group.
At some point on a steep icy slope, to my considerable alarm and dismay, one of my boots skidded off a nub of protruding rock and my left crampon swung away from my boot. Although still attached by a strap, the crampon was useless. Luckily the same crampon had come loose once before, on a frozen waterfall with Kenton a month ago. So I reined in my rising panic and, hanging from one axe and a tiny foothold, I managed, with much silent swearing, to reattach the crampon to the boot.
We came, over 2,000 feet up, to an eighty-foot-high rockface known as the Difficult Crack, which I found virtually impossible, far more technically demanding than any of my previous training ascents, and extremely testing on my puny biceps. To be more precise, my arms felt as though they were being torn from their sockets since, in the almost total absence of any reasonable footholds, I had literally to haul my body and rucksack upwards by arm-power alone. I wished I had spent more time obeying Paul Twomey’s instructions to train hard at obtaining some upper body strength. By the time I heaved myself up the last steep and glass-smooth boulder of the Crack, I was on my very last ounce of willpower and wanted only to stop for the day and sleep. Not that there was anywhere remotely suitable in sight to lie down or even sit.
Ian recorded my ascent of the Difficult Crack through the eyes of a top-flight mountaineer who knew I was facing my first big test on the North Face.
Through Ran’s two years of training for the route, he proved himself to be a competent and efficient ice and mixed climber, but steep rock tended to bring out his weaknesses. In particular, his ineffectual stumps for fingers on his left hand . . . Ran’s worst fear was that he might be forced to climb bare-handed. Luckily he had one big advantage. Whereas Kenton and I spent valuable time fretting and testing the security of the meagre hooks we’d uncovered, Ran, to put it bluntly, was clueless. His technique basically involved dragging his tools down the rock until they somehow snagged, then he would blindly pull for glory. His footwork on rock was similarly polished: a wild peddalling technique that for all its dry tooling naivety was surprisingly effective.
From the top of the Difficult Crack we could look immediately above us at an immense sheer wall, known as the Rote Fluh, smooth, red and infamous for its propensity to shower loose rock-falls on to the face below. A natural desire of all climbers at this point is to ascend as quickly as possible towards the base of this lethal feature, since proximity minimises the danger of being hit. With a bulky backpack, however, speed is not too easy. Balancing like a dainty gymnast in rock-shoes is a far cry from climbing heavily laden with the weight on your back ever threatening to pull your body away from the rock and out into space. From the Crack we still had more than 8,000 feet of climbing, including traverses, on the North Face, much of which, I knew, would be a lot harder and more exposed than had been the eighty-foot-high Crack.
Kenton had planned for us to bivouac the first night at a ledge known as the Swallows Nest. Between the Difficult Crack and this refuge was the infamous Hinterstoisser Traverse, the key passage, unlocking access to the centre of the wall. It was a passage won at considerable cost by its pioneers, two German guides, Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz, and two Austrian guides, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer.
Their story forms a part of the forbidding history of this section of the face. In 1935 a couple of Germans, Sedlmayer and Mehringer, had climbed a record distance up the mountain, but at 3,300 metres they had frozen to death on a ledge. A year later Hinterstoisser and his companions, hoping to set a new record, if not to reach the summit, had reached the ledge of the frozen bodies which with climbers’ macabre humour they named Death Bivouac, only to be themselves turned back by the weather and falling rocks. But fatally they had left no rope in place across their key traverse, and their desperate attempts to reverse their route over this slippery, vertical cliffside all failed. So they tried to rope down to reach the railway’s porthole in the rock but disaster overtook them. One fell and dropped free to the valley below, one was strangled by the rope, and a third froze to death. The youngest German, Toni Kurz, dangled from the rope-end a mere 100 metres above the porthole, just out of reach of and conversing with his would-be rescuers. His was a slow, unenviable death.
When we reached their traverse, a relatively new-looking rope, clipped to the rock, disappeared round a bulge at the top of the great slab. My mouth felt dry and my hands weak. This was a moment of truth, and the only way I knew how to face it was by attacking the obstacle in a rush, desperate to keep my mind busy with no tiny chink into which sheer terror could claw, then spread incubus-like and render me a gibbering fool, an embarrassment to myself and to the others. This was my nightmare as I tried to find successive nicks in the glistening rock to place the steel points on my crampons. I gripped the black rope where I had watched Kenton hold it, and edged down around the bulge – and into space. Suddenly, and with a visual impact that took my breath away, there was a panoramic view of the world below. For 2,500 feet under my boots, only the wind touched the plunging rock. My crampons skidded out of their tenuous holds. I gripped the black rope dangling from the rock as my feet scrabbled desperately to find a hold. Into my brain, unbidden, came the picture of my heavy body tearing Kenton off the cliff, and then the deadweight of us both pulling Ian away, and the rush of air as we cartwheeled through space. Will I scream, was my main worry, strangely enough.
The first team to climb the North Face had used this same route, and the author of their story, Heinrich Harrer, wrote, ‘The rocks across which we now had to traverse were almost vertical, plunging away beneath into thin air. We were full of admiration for Hinterstoisser’s brave achievement.’
My own memory of that traverse is thankfully confused. I know that I swore to myself again and again that this was my last climb. I also recall, at some point during that fearful move, focusing on a sudden whiteness in the black rope, the rope upon which I was, in my mind, utterly dependent each time my crampons slipped away from the face. Somehow the rope had become frayed at this point to a single fragile strand.
When I eventually came to the far side of t
he traverse, Ian recorded:
Ran emerged near the end looking by his standards pretty nervous – not one to shout his complaints, his eyes which were wide open and out on stalks betrayed what he was really thinking. I kept the ropes tight but couldn’t pull him up the final few feet. So, when he started slipping down, his cramponned feet pedalling for purchase on blank rocks, sparks flying, I think he felt desperate measures were needed. The nearest thing at hand to assist him was his ice-axe, so he took an almighty lunge up at the ropes and pulled himself to safety. The only problem was that his ‘safety’ was reliant on the one centimetre thick cord of nylon he had snagged with his razor sharp axe blade and which secured me to the belay.
I clambered past Ian’s body and savoured the blessed relief of a solid six-inch ledge under one crampon. I rested on it and felt a wave of exhaustion pass through me. So had I conquered my fear of heights? Had I vanquished my sixty-two-year-old bogeyman of vertigo? I had crossed the Hinterstoisser Traverse on the great North Face of the Eiger, so surely I must have become a ‘proper climber’. And proper climbers surely don’t fear heights. Yet I suspected that nothing had really changed. There had been no actual confrontation within myself. No fearful struggle I had bravely and finally won. My only victory thus far had been to prevent the creeping angst getting a grip on me. Day one on the Eiger was almost over without a disaster. Three or four more days, ever higher, lay ahead.
From the end of the traverse, we inched up a seventy-foot vertical crack to an eighteen-inch-wide ledge beneath an overhang, the Swallows Nest. A scab of frozen snow was stuck to the ledge and we used our axes to flatten this out, giving us some four feet of width and almost standing up space. Ian clipped my waist harness to a rock bolt, and Kenton melted snow over a tiny gas stove. Our bivouac was comfortable but, for me, ruined by the knowledge that, as I lay with my nose up against the rock wall and my knees curled up for warmth in the lightweight sleeping bag, my backside protruded over the edge of our ledge and over the void below.
The world-famous climber, Walter Bonatti, pioneer of some of the hardest cliffs in the Alps, wrote of his own Swallows Nest visit in the 1960s:
I was not the first man to tackle the Eigerwand alone. Two others had tried in recent years, but both had died in the attempt. The aura of fatality and blood that hangs over this killer mountain seemed painfully distinct to the eyes of a solo climber, restoring it to the atmosphere of the early years.
I appeared on the first snowfield simultaneously with the first thundering salvo of boulders, and I just had time to dodge smartly back into the Swallows Nest before they came shooting by. The incident did not surprise me; it is natural on a face like this that as soon as the upper snow slopes are touched by the sun they should start to unload their wares, and it was by chance that with the whole wide face available they had fallen exactly where I happened to be.
When Joe Simpson and Ray Delaney had bivouacked here seven years before us, two other climbers (Matthew Hayes from Hampshire and Phillip O’Sullivan from New Zealand) had fallen off, roped together, from an icy slope higher up and dropped past this ledge. Simpson had written: ‘I thought of their endless, frictionless fall, numbed in their last moments of consciousness by the full enormity of what was happening . . . I stared down thinking of them lying there tangled in their ropes, side by side . . . We didn’t hear them go. They didn’t scream.’
That could have been their epitaph, I thought. ‘They didn’t scream.’
During the night a breeze blew ice-dust down the neck of my jacket, and small stones clattered by. I resisted the temptation of rolling over to sleep facing outwards. The clear night sky was crammed with stars, mirrored by the pinprick lights of Grindelwald in the dark valley below. Kenton woke us before dawn. He passed me an empty cloth bag which I filled with snow blocks that I cut, reluctantly, from the end of my sleeping platform. Ian asked me for some item and, unthinkingly, I threw it along the ledge to him, forgetting for an instant where we were. This deserved and got a mouthful of abuse from the others. ‘Never,’ they cried in unison, ‘throw anything. Pass it over with care.’ Ian went on to warn me about my boots and crampons. ‘Put them on carefully. It’s all too easy with cold hands trying to force a cold foot into a rigid boot to lose your grip and then, before you know it, a boot is gone – a long way. Then you are in serious trouble.’
Answering the call of nature during the first day’s climb was something I had successfully postponed, but the moment of truth arrived on the narrow ledge. There was a sharp breeze and I felt cold. Squatting between the rock face and the void, I was thankful for the small mercy that I was up one end of the ledge and not, like Ian, in the middle. Luckily I had an empty polythene bag to hand as a receptacle. Nonetheless, I did begin to wonder how climbers cope on big mountain faces having to drink water from the soiled snow floors of oft-used ledges. But then I remembered that the London sewage system provides Londoners with oft-recycled drinking water without even the safeguard of its being boiled on Kenton’s gas stove.
Shortly before sunrise, Kenton disappeared upwards from the Swallows Nest. Soon after I followed his lead on to the ice slope above our bivouac, there came an awkward leaning move over the face of a smooth rock. For a while I was flummoxed, but, stretching the axe in my good hand fully upwards, I felt its spike lodge in some unseen nook. Such moments require a blind hope that your sole hold on life will be a reliable one when you make the next move. If it isn’t and your sudden bodyweight dislodges the axe’s placement, you will plummet downwards hoping not to drag your colleagues with you.
Once over the rock I was on to a long steep icy slope known as the First Ice-Field, and here I heard the whistling thrum of solid matter falling past us, whether ice or rock, I’m not sure. The day before, a small stone had struck Kenton’s helmet, and at the base of this First Ice-Field, arrowing upwards at some 55°, a largish lump of ice caught Ian on the helmet.
With careful axe work, I crawled up two steep slopes of mixed rock and ice with extreme caution, for there was a deal of loose rubble just itching to respond to the call of Isaac Newton. After 200 feet negotiating this unstable zone, we scaled the first real icefield, which I found less difficult than anything to date. It ended all too quickly at the bottom end of a 300-foot-high near-vertical gulley of part-iced rock known as the Ice Hose. I definitely disliked this section which, as an amateur, I find difficult to describe. But I took some comfort from Harrer agreeing with me: ‘there isn’t a cranny anywhere for a reliable piton, and there aren’t any natural holds. Moreover, the rock is scoured smooth by falling stones, bread-crumbed with snow, ice and rubble. It isn’t an invitation to cheerful climbing, it offers no spur to one’s courage; it simply threatens hard work and danger.’
More stones whistled by as I inched up the Hose but, although I found myself flinching and ducking, none made contact, and the next time I reached Kenton’s belay position, he looked happy, clearly pleased we had reached the Second Ice-Field intact. This was the great white sheet easily identifiable from Grindelwald. At some point as we axed our way up it, Kenton saw an ice-axe whistle by us on its way down the face. We never did identify its owner. I shivered at the thought of trying to climb any distance at all on such a mountain with only one axe. The wind picked up on the wide open flank of the ice-field. An explosion sounding further down the face, as we learned later from Philip and his film crew, came from an avalanche of rock and ice roaring down the Ice Hose that we had earlier scaled. The ice climb seemed to go on and on and our ropes were usually slack between each other to the extent that I felt as though I was almost free climbing un-roped. On the many soft snow patches, I took special care to dig in my spikes and axes as deep as I could.
Philip had hired a helicopter to film our ascent of the ice-fields, and he needed to collect all the film Ian had taken with the hand-held videocam. The helicopter dropped a steel hawser down towards us with a black bag on its hook. But the angle of our slope was too steep, so Ian cramponned down and then out towar
ds the centre of the ice-field. Perched on a rock, with no apparent regard for the huge drop below, he attached his film container to the swinging hook. Simply watching him made my blood run cold.
The helicopter disappeared way below us, and we finally reached the upper edge of the ice slope, following it to the left. At this point a difficult rock pitch leads up on to a triangular rock buttress called the Flat Iron. In 1961 two British climbers, Brian Nally and Barry Brewster, were progressing below the buttress when Brewster was hit by a rock and injured. Chris Bonington and Don Whillans abandoned their own ascent to attempt a rescue, but the already unconscious Brewster was swept to his death by rockfall before they could reach him, so they led a seriously disoriented Nally to safety.
Kenton, seeing that I was flagging badly on a difficult section to access the Flat Iron, had pointed upwards. ‘Only two or three pitches to Death Bivouac,’ he assured me. The name of the place was hardly reassuring. Just then, however, Kenton’s promise of its proximity did make it sound a very welcome spot. Again we dug away at a snow-clogged ledge and cleared enough space for the three of us to lie head to toe. I slept well at Death Bivouac for I was tired, but some climbers have found its atmosphere oppressive. The legendary French climber, Gaston Rébuffat, wrote of his time there: ‘On this sinister, murderous face, the rusty pitons and rotten ropes dating from the early attempts, the stone wall which surrounded us as we ate, and which sheltered Sedlmayer and Mehringer before they died, all combined to remind us that the moment you cease climbing toward the summit, success and safety itself are compromised.’
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 36
