If George Finch as a youth had indeed ever been unwilling to challenge authority, then he would certainly make up for it as a young man, forever testing boundaries and those who put them in his way.
George had quickly stamped his authority on the membership of the Academic Alpine Club after becoming president, particularly with his insistence that new members earn their stripes. He wanted eager participants, with or without experience, but they had to have the capacity to climb and not just the enthusiasm. The stone climbing wall at the back of the club hut at Windgällen, which Aldo Bonacossa had scaled back in 1909 when the clubhouse was opened, had become an increasingly difficult testing ground not only for prospective members but experienced climbers. Whenever someone succeeded, George would rearrange the structure to remove a critical hand- or foot-hold to make the climb harder. He, of course, always found a way to the top – the king of his domain.
It was in January of 1911 that a prospective member, a young American named John Crowther Case, arrived in Zürich. His father was an oil company executive who had moved the family to London a few years earlier and the nineteen-year-old now wanted to study civil engineering at ETH. He had joined another university club – the Anglo-American Club – where he had made some friends, some of whom encouraged him to attend an open day at the AACZ clubhouse during the Easter break.
Case had never been climbing but fondly recalled a childhood holiday in Switzerland during which he had been taken on a hike across the top of a small mountain, the Rigi, outside Lucerne. The AACZ clubhouse was situated higher than the Rigi itself, two-thirds of the way up the Gross Windgällen, one of the southern-most mountains in the Glarus Range and about an hour by train south of the city.
There was no shortage of newcomers to the open day, all of whom were eventually led out to the back of the clubhouse where they were encouraged to make an attempt at the wall. Some refused to even try and those who did attempt failed, as George Finch had hoped; after all, this was a test to discover aptitude but also to teach a sense of respect for the terrain.
John Case was the exception on the day, making the top and earning the respect of the president who took him on a testing climb the following day with another student climber, Marcel Kurz. The young man’s ability confirmed, George invited Case to join him and Max for part of their summer climbing trip which would include, among a host of others, three of the most dangerous peaks in the Alps: the east wall of Monte Rosa, the Zmutt Ridge of the Matterhorn and the southern flank of Europe’s tallest peak, Mont Blanc.
The memories of that summer with the Finch brothers were still fresh more than sixty years later when Case was invited to write for the Alpine Journal, the magazine of London’s Alpine Club:
On a mountain George gave the impression of being always master of his surroundings. His route-finding and eye for ground were excellent, results of his study of mountain form. On rock, his strength was more apparent than grace of movement. He climbed very fast, going straight from stance to stance, using holds far apart, without pause, rarely hesitating and almost never retracing a step. He seemed able to test each hold without loss of motion for I never saw a weighted one come away under hand or foot. On ice he was superb, cutting steps far apart very fast with a minimum of powerful strokes. On steep ice he liked to cut straight up with his backer-up only a step behind and moving with him. His lead on the Marinelli route on Monte Rosa in the very dry year of 1911 with step-cutting from the Imseng rocks to the ridge of the Grenzgipfel was a perfect example of this technique.
Of the Finch brothers he wrote:
Realising the necessity of acquiring knowledge and skill before they could tackle large peaks on their own, the boys worked long and hard to attain competence in the art of mountaineering and all connected with it: knowledge of weather and its effects on snow and ice, the qualities of different kinds of rocks, the use of the Siegfried map, and the reaction of the climber to cold and altitude. This intellectual attitude struck me forcibly when I first climbed with George and Max as a learner. They formed a perfect team, George the more brilliant and with more nervous energy; Max as a fine mountaineer, remarkable for his steadiness and even temper under all conditions.
It was one of the best insights into the character and ability of George Finch, provided by a man who, as a youth, had put his life into the hands of a near stranger not much older than himself, seemingly without question and based on the premise that George’s ‘individualism was characteristic and to become president was a mark of the confidence and liking of his peers’.
It had been less than ten years since the teenage George Finch had stood atop Mount Canobolas and wondered at the possibilities of climbing snow-capped mountains across the world. Now, at the age of just twenty-two, he was considered among the best in Europe and a mature, if controversial, leader of others.
8.
THE TYRO COMPANION
It would be in early August 1911, a few days after George’s twenty-third birthday, that he and Max organised the challenge of the east face of Monte Rosa, the so-called ‘Himalayan face of the Alps’: an 8000-foot wall, gleaming white and deadly dangerous – just the sort of challenge that inspired the Finch brothers. George was targeting the Marinelli Couloir, a near-vertical passage named after an Italian climber who thirty years before had been killed in an avalanche with two guides attempting the climb George now proposed with Max, John Case and Franzl Obexer, who had accompanied Max on the gruelling Tödi expedition.
George sat chatting over lunch in the Italian village of Macugnaga with a guide named Alessandro Corsi, the only member of the Marinelli climbing party who survived the avalanche of 1881. There was a buzz around the village, the climb attracting attention because it was by far the hardest route to the summit: long, steep and treacherous, its difficulty compounded for the Finch party by the almost constant sound of avalanches across the 10,000-foot-wide wall of rock, ice and snow, fed by recent unseasonal snowfalls that had left an overload warming in the late summer sunshine.
There seemed no escape from the danger of unstable snow, and finding a route around the gaping crevasses created by moving glacial ice seemed impossible, but George was determined to find a way. John Case watched him closely as he talked to Corsi, all the while making rough sketches and notes to plot a pathway through the vertical minefield. George’s aim was to minimise their time cutting ice steps up the couloir, which acted like a collecting point and funnel for the avalanches.
Eventually, George decided to climb almost 800 feet straight up to a point above an outcrop of rocks known as the Imseng Rücken, where the most precarious of the giant seracs, or snow columns, could be seen almost swaying, ready to topple. From there, they would cut steps across the wall to the left, away from the immediate danger of avalanches but into the path of ice cliffs and bergschrunds (crevasses formed by glacial ice), which they would have to negotiate to reach the Grenzgipfel, the highest summit on the Italian side of the border and from where they could access Dufourspitze on the Swiss side, at 15,203 feet the highest of the ten summits that make up the massif known as the Pink Mountain.
The only relatively easy part of the equation was the starting point, a hut positioned about halfway up the mountain at the base of the ice wall. The four climbers, watched by half the village as they left the next afternoon, made the climb to the hut by early evening. As the others settled for the night, George spent the last hours of sunlight standing on a ledge inspecting the route he had sketched from the village below, while trying to ignore the steady stream of wet snow that hissed past, accompanied by the occasional boulder and an ice pinnacle that speared down to shatter like glass into a million pieces: ‘The whole wall was literally alive with movement,’ he would later write.
When darkness fell he retired to the hut, retrieved the thin, evil-smelling communal blankets that had been aired by the others so they might sleep, and ate a meal over the light of a small spirit stove while scouring a scarcely used visitors book that only confirmed t
he dangers ahead on a climb that balanced attempts with a ‘mortality percentage’.
That night George insisted they check the equipment before leaving, laying out the ropes that would connect them in pairs. He would lead the way to cut steps with his pickaxe while tied to John Case. Max would follow linked to Franzl Obexer whose climbing irons, on inspection, were not only missing teeth but did not fit his boots properly. It meant the steps would have to be cut deeper into the ice wall; this would slow them down, increasing their exposure to avalanches. But the alternative, a likely fall by Obexer, would almost certainly be tragic.
They began in the early hours of the following morning under the light of a bright moon when the lower temperatures were more likely to hold together the unstable snow. Just after 1am they stepped onto the couloir to begin a vertical sprint to clear the danger zone before the ‘mad rush’ of avalanches that would begin as the morning sun toasted the upper reaches.
The sky was clear, the snow crunching satisfactorily beneath their boots. The slope was 46 degrees as they began, the axe only needed occasionally as they raced to reach the Imseng Rücken where the two ropes were joined to link the pairs. George glanced at his watch – 2.35am – just as the moon disappeared behind the ridges high above their heads, forcing them to resort to candle lanterns. They had climbed almost 1600 feet in a heart-pounding ninety minutes, but from that point the slope steepened sharply, the surface rutted ice and scarred from avalanches.
George began cutting as they climbed: three precise, single-handed swings were required to create each hole deep enough to anchor the front pad of their boots. His way was lit by Case who clung close to his ankles and used the handle of his own axe to hang a lantern. Below them, Max was also cutting to deepen his brother’s efforts and accommodate Obexer’s faulty climbing irons.
The only sound was the chink of the two axes as they worked steadily, the slope steepening to a point where they had to use hand-holds to steady themselves while cutting steps for their toes. It was precarious work in the dark, suddenly made more serious by the rumbling of an avalanche above, thundering its way down the couloir and across the Imseng Rücken where they had been standing only an hour before.
Many years later Case would describe the climb to a friend, detailing how George led the whole way with him standing close below, his hands placed firmly on George’s heels to keep them in each ice step as he cut the next. Max and Obexer did likewise immediately below, the foursome moving together like a linked chain.
The friend remarked:
When I expressed my amazement at this method of protection, John smiled and closed his eyes, squinting so as to see more clearly in the past, and said: ‘Well, I think we’d have had a pretty good chance of holding if anyone had slipped.’ He then opened his eyes again, and in the clear light of the present he laughed at the craziness of it.
Dawn was breaking as they reached the field of crevasses and seracs. It was still too dark to extinguish the lanterns and although the gradient had eased, the way was treacherous as they climbed around, over and under the obstacles that appeared to have been placed specifically to deter them as they traversed the wall. Their progress had been slowed by the step-cutting that was now renewed as they cleared the last serac and began climbing upwards once more, aware of the fast-approaching light that would turn the slopes into a tumbling mess of snow, ice and rocks.
The Grenzgipfel was ahead, but the slope between them and safety had once again steepened to a point where George clung to an icy hand-hold while chipping the next step for his boot. It also meant skirting the edge of the Marinelli Couloir once more and then crossing a ridge beneath the Grenzsattel, a snowy pass connecting the Grenzgipfel and their target, the Dufourspitze. After crossing the path they again resorted to step-cutting their way upwards while groups of onlookers, who were descending from the peak after taking the easier route, stood on the Grenzsattel to watch their progress, like sports fans cheering from the grandstand.
At 6.50am they reached a ledge on the lower reaches of the Grenzgipfel, clear of any danger of avalanches for the first time in almost six hours of climbing. It would take another two hours to reach the peak, the snow and ice giving way to jagged rock, icepicks and crampons replaced by the physical strength needed to haul themselves up a series of six-foot-high ridges and overhangs. Max and Obexer had fallen behind, fatigued by the speed and danger of the ice climb, as George, rejuvenated by the relief of having succeeded, increased the pace. At 9.15am, just over eight hours after leaving the hut, he and John Case collapsed in triumph on the warm rocks of the Dufourspitze. They had completed the ascent several hours faster than any climbers before them.
The record didn’t last long, although beating it was a hollow achievement. The next day another group bettered their time by a few minutes – but they hadn’t cut a single step, instead using the dozens chipped out the previous day by George Finch.
George Finch’s relations with other climbers were not always harmonious and he was sometimes regarded as being overbearing and a difficult climbing companion. He was apt to be critical of the leadership of others but with few exceptions his relations with really first-class climbers were excellent. When in 1911 Val Fynn and Ernesto Martini invited us to join forces with them on the Zmuttgrat it was interesting to see how George admired and deferred to these more experienced climbers and to see their respect for his ability.
This was a prophetic observation by John Case because even though he wrote it many years after the event, he would not have been aware of the importance to George Finch’s career of this meeting and climb in mid August of 1911, a few days after George, Max, Case and Obexer had descended from Monte Rosa and sought the comfort of a hotel room in Zermatt, a village on the Swiss side of Monte Rosa and in the shadows of another of the most famous Alpine peaks, the Matterhorn.
The four had barely walked into the foyer of the Monte Rosa Hotel before they were greeted by Val Fynn and Ernesto Martini, two of the older members of the AACZ, who were planning to climb the Matterhorn in a couple of days via the most difficult route, the north-west ridge known as the Zmutt.
Valère Alfred Fynn, aged in his early forties, was something of a maverick, always seeking out the toughest climbing routes rather than following the crowds, and legendary for once spending the night sitting on sling ropes as he tried to climb the north-east face of the mighty Finsteraarhorn. Russian-born and Swiss-educated, he had run a successful electrical engineering firm in London but was now taking his creative genius to the United States where he would develop car engines.
He saw something of himself in George Finch, not only in the young man’s desire to tackle the most difficult mountain challenges, but in his meticulous approach to climbing which meant that risk could be tempered by care and skill. Their meeting and the subsequent climb up the Matterhorn would be significant events in George Finch’s life, although he couldn’t know that at the time. Fynn was not only an admired alpinist but a man of considerable influence where it mattered most – among the senior members of the Alpine Club of London where he would spruik the young man’s name to great effect.
George readily agreed to the challenge proposed by Fynn. After all, the Matterhorn had always been one of the main targets of the Finch boys given their worship of Edward Whymper, whose 1865 triumph in finally defeating the great mountain (though via a different route to the one proposed by Fynn and Martini) had ended in the tragic death of four of his seven-man party on the descent. George described the mountain with some passion as he sat writing in his diary in the cosy luxury of the hotel lounge the evening before setting out on the climb:
Perhaps no other mountain in the Alps, or for that matter anywhere in the whole world, can make such an appeal to the eye as the Matterhorn. This appeal is not merely one of beauty and boldness of form, but also of position. The Matterhorn has no neighbours in close proximity to invite comparison; it stands utterly alone – a great dark rocky pyramid with sides of tremendous steepness, and tow
ering up towards the heavens from out of a girdle of glistening seracs and snowfields.
The six men camped overnight at the Schönbühl Hut, a three-hour hike from Zermatt, and were ready at 1am on August 12 for the ten-hour climb which began by traversing the Tiefenmatten Glacier that lay at the foot of the Zmutt Ridge itself. The first part of the climb was a relatively easy scramble as they made their way up broken rocks to a point where there was a deep gap, beyond which stood three giant rocky teeth that could be seen from the village below.
Fynn, the man in charge, called a halt for breakfast on virtually the same spot that the British gentleman climber Albert Mummery had sat with his guides in 1879, contemplating the task of defeating the Zmutt Ridge for the first time. And echoing Mummery’s experience, the pre-dawn cold cut through the men like a knife, fed by a wind that whistled from the north and swept across the ridge. It was time to move on, roped in two parties – Fynn, Max and Obexer on one rope and George, Martini and Case on the other – as they edged their way past the teeth.
From here the task grew more difficult. Thunderstorms a few days before had turned a thin layer of new snow into a veneer of ice, making the climb treacherous and forcing the party to traverse a gully that ran to one side of the ridge’s backbone. The climb there was steeper and lacked the rocks to anchor a belay, but was free of the ice that might cause a fatal slip.
They tried the ridge again but it was a short-lived attempt, as the slope steepened once more and it became impossible to chip hand-holds into the ice-glazed rocks. Fynn placed the Finch brothers as lead men on the two ropes, putting his faith in their skill as ice men as the two groups carefully negotiated the gully wall, so steep in places that those behind could only see the soles of the boots of the men ahead. To make matters worse, they had to remove their gloves and risk frostbite to get sufficient grip in the tiny fissure hand-holds. It was slow and painful work, but Fynn the cheerleader called out encouragement: ‘Take your time. Put your hands and feet down as if the Matterhorn belongs to us.’
The Brilliant Outsider Page 6
