The Boys of Everest

by Clint Willis

  His thoughts at times returned to his encounter with the aging explorer. Eric Shipton had sacrificed the greatest opportunity of his generation—the chance to lead the first successful assault on Everest. He had maintained his integrity and his appreciation for the joys of exploration. Chris increasingly felt his own wish to be happy. This wish allowed him to enjoy his connection to his intelligent and gifted young wife, to climbing and climbers, to his stories and the memories that sustained them, to the mountain landscapes near his Lake District home. He awoke some mornings in bed with Wendy as if in a fog-shrouded meadow, unsure of where or who he was and blissful in his ignorance. And then, as thoughts formed, he would feel a sense of exposure, of all there was to lose.

  6

  BONINGTON DIDN’T KNOW it yet, but he wasn’t through with the Eiger and its notorious North Face—although this time, he would encounter it on very different terms. The ascent of Patagonia’s Central Tower of Paine had marked a step in climbing’s accelerating evolution toward smaller teams on harder routes. That movement had taken on another dimension in recent years. The best young climbers in Europe looked to climb the hardest alpine walls by the most direct routes possible: they spoke of climbing the line followed by a drop of water falling from the summit. This uncompromising stance stood as a rebuke to anyone who merely meandered up a wall’s weak spots, as Chris and Ian had done on the Eiger.

  As it happened, the Eiger’s North Face was an obvious candidate for a more direct ascent. The existing route snaked its way up and across the face from the right side to the left, detouring around a series of difficulties and hazards. Climbers now began to search in earnest for a line that would run directly from base to summit. This new challenge became the latest in a series of Last Great Problems for mountaineers in the Alps.

  Two Polish climbers made the first attempt on the Eiger Direct during the winter of 1963, only months after Chris and Ian had made their ascent of the North Face. The Poles chose to climb in winter, when the cliff’s features were frozen, to reduce the risk of rockfall. The Poles turned back in bad weather. Other mountaineers continued to ponder the potential for a Direct Route—the Direttissima—on the Eiger. The most determined of those climbers was a handsome young American by the name of John Harlin.

  HARLIN HAD MADE the first American ascent of the Eiger’s North Face in 1962, barely a week before Chris finally climbed the route. Like Bonington, the American was ambitious and insecure, a gifted, moody, self-involved young man—but there were differences. Harlin had a more urgent need to be admired; he inhabited a more ramshackle myth of himself. Harlin’s moods went deeper; his bouts of manic enthusiasm were more intense, more likely to get him into trouble.

  His qualities were appealing to some men and women; they also could be dangerous to John and the people who relied upon him. The myth he created was a romantic one; he saw himself as someone in pursuit of experience and truth. He wanted to think of himself as an extraordinary man connected to other extraordinary men. He wrote in his journals of wanting a certain oneness, a penetration of one life into another. These visions distracted him, made him careless at times.

  Harlin—like Bonington—had a touch of boyishness, but no one took Harlin for frail. Other climbers called him the Blond God. He could be imperious and demanding, and he looked like someone’s notion of a Nordic deity—yellow hair and piercing eyes, square jaw and sturdy bearing. It often seemed that he wished to become a god of sorts: an irreproachable version of himself.

  He was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1935, and spent his first seven years there. He was—again like Bonington—an only child, and a woman raised him. He was named for his father, an airline pilot who bought him a shotgun and took him on hunting and fishing trips. But the boy spent most of his time with his mother, Sue Harlin. She was a tall, strong-willed woman with artistic tendencies—she was a talented amateur painter.

  The family lived in Paris for several years after the war. They moved back to the United States when John was a young teenager. He finished high school in Redwood City, California. He was good at sports, and he was proud of his body and his looks. He wore shorts and tight T-shirts; he tried to get his cowlick to stay flat. He took his two dogs for long walks in the hills near home. He wasn’t popular, but people noticed and remembered him. He had lovely manners. He surprised his mother’s friends by talking to them about interior decoration and women’s fashions—he’d learned about clothes on shopping trips with his mother in Paris.

  John finished high school in 1953. He spent the summer at a military school designed to prepare him for the Naval Academy—his father’s idea. John didn’t like the drilling or the uniforms, so he came home and enrolled at Stanford. He was taking shape as a character. His behavior became flamboyant and even erratic. He joined a fraternity and played on the Stanford football team; meanwhile, he posed for nude photographs that ended up in a magazine, causing a minor scandal. He learned to climb with the Stanford Alpine Club, doing some routes in Yosemite. The Club suspended him for using unsafe climbing techniques, and he brushed aside the rebuke. They were merely playing at climbing; John told people that he meant to be a real mountaineer.

  His father’s airline job provided the family with free plane tickets. John flew to Europe in the summer of 1954 with the idea of climbing the Eiger’s notorious North Face. He arrived in Switzerland and made his way to Kleine Scheidegg, where he pondered the face through the hotel telescope. He came home without doing the route, but he had managed to rope up with the newly famous Sherpa Tenzing Norgay—touring Europe after his Everest ascent—to inspect the lower reaches of the Eiger’s North Face.

  He went back to school and met a girl, a Stanford junior named Marilyn Miler. He courted her with flowers and stories of his Eiger visit. He confided that a thug with a knife had tried to rob him that summer, and told Marilyn that he’d responded by killing the would-be thief—put a wrestling hold on him and broke his neck. He returned to the Alps in the summer of 1955, roping up with an American law student for a failed attempt on the Matterhorn’s North Face. John wrote Marilyn a postcard claiming that he’d climbed the route; he would later include this fictional ascent on his application to the American Alpine Club.

  John meanwhile had decided to study fashion design. He stopped in Paris on his way home from Europe and managed to meet the designer Pierre Balmain, who invited the young man up to his country house for the weekend. One afternoon, young Harlin surprised Balmain and two other guests—the three were playing cards at a table outside—by entering the garden dressed only in a pair of tight red shorts. John would later claim that he’d worked as a designer for both Balmain and Christian Dior.

  He was very young—still twenty years old—but his story was picking up speed. He returned to Stanford in the fall of 1955 and married Marilyn. He changed his major to fine arts—with a concentration in dress and costume design—and joined the Air Force ROTC. He took to sleeping with a gun under his pillow.

  He finished school in 1957, and spent the next two years in pilot training. The Air Force in 1959 approved his request for assignment to Germany’s Rhineland, within easy driving distance of the Alps. The Harlins by now had two small children, John III and Andrea.

  Harlin would spend another four years in the military, flying out of Hahn Air Force Base. He made a certain reputation as a climber, making repeated attempts on many of the Alps’ most serious routes. He got up a handful of impressive climbs with his Stanford friend Gary Hemming and one or two others. The Eiger’s North Face remained his great ambition. He was successful on his fifth attempt, reaching the summit on August 22, 1962.

  John’s success on the Eiger, the first ascent by an American, made him a figure in climbing circles. He left the Air Force in 1963 to take a teaching position at the American School in Leysin, Switzerland—a short drive from Kleine Scheidegg and the Eiger. Harlin by now had his eyes on the Eiger Direct. He made three reconnaissance trips to the face: one in the summer of 1963, two more the f
ollowing winter. Those forays confirmed that the route should be climbed during the winter to reduce the risk from rockfall—and that it would require a team of very strong climbers.

  JOHN HARLIN FOUND one of those climbers during the summer of 1964, when he came across a Scottish climber named Dougal Haston. Haston, twenty-four, had made a series of hard winter climbs in Scotland and the Alps. His Eiger credientials were good; he’d made the first Scottish ascent of the North Face. He was a formidable character, another talented misfit with outsized ambitions and an erratic temperament. Unlike John Harlin, Dougal didn’t court or seduce people. Still, certain types were drawn to him, saw in him something they recognized or lacked. He was lanky, oddly attractive: people noticed his long, gaunt face with its deep-set eyes, all of it framed by an unruly mop of hair. He cultivated a kind of coldness. He was prone to long silences and occasional outbursts of drunken violence. He dressed like a beatnik’s idea of a Romance poet. He kept a journal filled with accounts of his climbs and with philosophical ramblings; he quoted Nietzsche and at moments imagined himself a philosopher Ubermensch.

  Like Harlin, he’d noted the potential for a Direct Route on the Eiger. All those acres of rock, and only one route—it seemed wrong to him. And he liked the Eiger. Other climbers did the route and moved on, vastly relieved to have it done. They were drawn back to their lives and their homes; Dougal felt himself drawn back to the face.

  He had come to climbing from a working-class background. His father was a baker in Currie, six miles from Edinburgh. Dougal’s mother worked as a domestic servant. Currie had a tannery and a couple of paper mills. The countryside during Dougal’s childhood—he was born in 1940—was mostly farmland, with grazing for sheep and cattle. The village lay on a ridge near a river: the Water of Leithe, filthy from the tannery and the mills. Dougal made his first climbs there in the early ’50s, traversing the walls along the river’s bank—much as Don Whillans had done a decade earlier on the Irwell near Manchester. He climbed Currie’s stone church one night with two other boys—James Moriarty and Jim Stenhouse. The three of them called their wall the Currie Eiger. They made their first real rock climb together in 1954, when the Currie Youth Club ventured to Glencoe. The three friends continued to practice on railroad bridges, and passed around mountaineering books—their favorite was Nanga Parbat Pilgrimage by Herman Buhl, the great Austrian mountaineer.

  Dougal’s friends by now knew him as a daredevil and something of a loner: a long-limbed, pigeon-toed eccentric. He often strode off ahead of his companions during trips to the local hills. He began a journal of his mountain experiences when he was sixteen—he made his first entry in July 1956—and maintained it for the next twenty years.

  He outgrew his mentors in the Currie Youth Club, moving on to other teachers. A young Edinburgh shipwright named Ronnie Marshall—brother of Jimmy Marshall, a leading Scottish climber—taught him rope skills. Marshall also recruited Dougal—together with Moriarty and Stenhouse—to the Junior Mountaineering Club of Scotland, which ran trips to the country’s various ranges.

  Dougal knew already that he liked to drink. He was a mean drunk. He would start fights and let his friends step in to finish them; the hulking Moriarty, known to his mates as Big Eley, was very good at this work. Dougal’s behavior stood out even in the Scottish climbing scene, increasingly populated by informal clubs of students and workers that could seem as much street gangs as recreational clubs.

  These young Scottish climbers—like their counterparts at English clubs such as the famous Rock and Ice—brought to mountaineering a knee-jerk antiestablishment attitude. They backed up their bad attitude with a violent streak and the ambition to reinvent their lives through climbing. Dave Agnew, a member of Glasgow’s famous Creagh Dhu—a club known for boozing and brawling almost as much as for climbing—later recalled his first day in the mountains. He had looked out across to the smog over Clydebank and seen blue sky for the first time—he hadn’t known such a thing existed.

  Dougal and his friends spent many nights at a ramshackle Creagh Dhu hut near Glencoe. Dougal meanwhile found another mentor in Robin Smith. Smith, the son of a naval architect, was nineteen, two years older than Dougal. He was pursuing a philosophy degree at Edinburgh University, where his studies came easily to him; schoolwork was only a minor distraction from the climbing that had absorbed him for three years. Smith had an appetite for extremely difficult climbs undertaken in all conditions, and a reckless grace that appealed to both men and women. His boldness was different from Dougal’s, which was often clumsy, as if reflecting a wish to forget or to bludgeon. Dougal was a striking figure, with his melancholy, his hunger, his edgy vulnerability—but his version of recklessness was something to look away from; it betrayed desperation.

  He joined Robin Smith at Edinburgh University, enrolling in the philosophy program in the fall of 1959. Robin suggested the move; they could do their reading at night, leaving days free to climb. Dougal grew his hair long and cultivated an image as a hard-drinking philosopher—he took to wearing tight moleskin trousers and a scarf—but he was still a teenager, troubled and self-centered, and he didn’t fit in at Edinburgh. There were snobs who wanted to know where he’d been to school, young women who wanted to talk to him in clubs and bars, tutors and schoolwork. He stuck with his old climbing friends. Robin had friends in the philosophy department, and went to their parties. Dougal remained aloof.

  He continued to climb. He read his Nietzsche. He drank with intensity and purpose; people noticed and remembered his drinking. He would drink in pubs with other climbers; he would continue with girls and loud music at the rooms kept by the Scottish Mountaineering Club; long after midnight, he would wander into the Club library to read mountaineering journals until he fell asleep on the floor—he wouldn’t stop drinking or go home. Some nights, the climbers would box or wrestle; Dougal might choose an opponent and try to hurt him. He was still starting fights with strangers, still leaving Eley Moriarty to finish them. Dougal would go off to drink himself to sleep, awaking baffled and ashamed.

  He was ambitious and talented. There still was the possibility that climbing would not always be necessary to him, that it was merely a bridge to the rest of the world—but two things happened to make climbing still more a matter of urgency, of need.

  The first occurred in 1962. Robin Smith joined a British-Soviet expedition to the Russian Pamirs. Dougal stayed home to work nights at a frozen food warehouse in Maidstone, earning money for the Alps. He planned to meet Robin there; they’d talked of climbing the Eiger together. Dougal finished his shift one morning and picked up a newspaper to come upon the news that Robin was dead at twenty-three.

  The details came later. Smith had been descending an easy snow slope, roped to Everest veteran and scholar-poet Wilfred Noyce. One of the climbers had slipped—the rest of the party had agreed not to say which man—and the pair had fallen some 4,000 feet.

  Dougal found that he couldn’t bring any reasonable feelings to bear on Robin’s death; what surfaced was mostly a familiar blurred shame. He made a stab at the Eiger that summer with Andrew Wightman, another Edinburgh climber and a friend of Robin’s. The climbers retreated in a storm; Wightman slipped on wet rock and broke an ankle.

  Dougal did almost no schoolwork that fall. He thought of quitting university altogether. He returned to the Eiger the following season, the summer of 1963. This time, he roped up with Rusty Baillie, a young climber from Rhodesia. They climbed iced-over rock and green icefalls to reach the top in three days. The ascent made headlines at home. Dougal finally quit school later that year, with the idea that he might somehow make a career out of climbing.

  He headed for the Alps again in 1964, and bumped into a London climber named Bev Clark at a Chamonix campsite. They climbed the West Face of the Dru, the route that had sealed the reputations of Joe Brown and Don Whillans a decade earlier. Dougal and Bev were celebrating their accomplishment in a subsidized workers’ cafeteria—they were turning over a plan to tackle t
he Walker Spur—when a big, blond American approached their table.

  Bev Clark knew John Harlin slightly, and he introduced him to Dougal. The American and the Scot eyed one another appraisingly. John didn’t waste time; he’d come to invite the two Brits to join him on the Shroud—the huge unclimbed ice field to the left of the Walker Spur. Clark had relatively little experience on ice, and he bowed out. He understood at any rate that he wasn’t in the same league as these two. John and Dougal made the attempt on the Shroud. A storm forced them to retreat, but they agreed to climb together again.

  Dougal ran out of money and went back to England. Bev Clark had family money, and he bankrolled an informal climbing school, with Dougal and Big Eley Moriarty as instructors. The teaching was sporadic. Dougal did odd jobs on the side, mostly painting rich Londoners’ apartments with Eley. When he had a little cash, he returned to the Alps. He took up residence in John Harlin’s concrete basement in Leysin, subsisting on Leysin School leftovers. He got his first taste of winter climbing in the range: extreme cold, high winds, deep snow, brutal approaches. The nature of the climbing made sense to him, made him feel briefly clean.

  John told Dougal of his plans for a Direct Route on the Eiger. Dougal agreed to join him. Dougal was now far along in the task of inventing himself. His posturing protected him from anyone who might judge him for his background or identify some weakness. His need for such protection led him into various kinds of disguise and retreat, but he wanted the mountains to be real—and the Eiger was very real to him.

  John for his part felt the Eiger’s pull partly as the lure of fame and the romance of risk and death. But he also carried an authentic desire to know what the mountain could tell him about the nature of things apart from his mixed-up and occasionally childish emotional life. The Eiger’s glamour seduced him but he saw that something deeper was at stake, and this helped to draw him on.