Sadly, a couple of friends have been caught out by this very problem and some brilliant lives came to an abrupt end. It was what they chose to do and willingly, in the full knowledge of the possible consequences, so I never felt that they had wasted their lives; rather that we were the ones who had lost something brilliant and precious. It was after all what had defined them, made their lives distinct and rich.
Having said that, I have always admired those who can do such feats. It seems to me to be the ultimate challenge of climbing, the most aesthetic expression of climbing that can be made – one person’s skill, nerve and self-control against the rock or ice or mountain. It strips the climber of any connection with the world and he moves into a dimension that few of us would dare enter. It demands respect, even if one privately feels it is an act of madness. I have always made a point of carefully standing to one side when watching a solo climber at work.
On 28 August 1961 Adi Mayr made the first attempt to climb the north face of the Eiger alone. At first he climbed smoothly, confidently and without hesitation. The watchers gathered around the telescopes on the hotel balconies began to feel reassured that here was an expert climber truly in his element. When he reached the Ice Hose he chose to avoid it altogether by climbing a variant line up the brittle and awkwardly stratified rock on its left side. Like many climbers from the eastern Alps, Adi felt more comfortable on rock than ice and when he reached the Second Ice Field his speed dropped and he was forced to cut steps in places where the ice was steep and hard. Nevertheless, he had reached Death Bivouac by two-thirty in the afternoon where he chose to rest until the following day.
Although a sensible and logical decision, it may have been his undoing. He no doubt reasoned that with the sun on the upper part of the face the traverse of the Third Ice Field to reach the Ramp would be too dangerous, bordering on suicidal. Rocks melted free by the heat of the sun were funnelled into the Spider and then spewed directly down the Third Ice Field.
Adi was providing good business for the telescope owners as the queues of paying spectators waited patiently for their turn to gawp at him. I wonder how many half hoped to see him fall. The weather was fine and the proximity of the sheltered rocks of the Ramp a couple of rope lengths away must have been a great temptation to Adi. With at least six hours of daylight remaining and the Ramp in sunshine he could reasonably have hoped to reach the Traverse of the Gods – even the Exit Cracks – before nightfall. With luck the rock in the Ramp would have been dried by the sun, except where spray from the melting ice in the Waterfall Chimney pitch had leeched down, dampening the adjacent rock walls.
Climbing wet rock would not have been a problem for a man of Adi’s skill. The Waterfall Chimney pitch, sometimes sodden with water and sometimes glazed with ice, is frequently the hardest section of climbing in the Ramp. In winter it can be completely jammed with a plug of ice near its top where the walls rear outwards and arm-thick icicles can block progress as effectively as a portcullis. He chose instead the fifteen-hour bivouac at Death Bivouac’s sheltered cave, a long time to sit alone and think of what you have committed to. The freedom of intense concentration and precise climbing technique were no longer there to keep his fears at bay.
In the morning Adi was observed traversing the Third Ice Field slowly and with great care, cutting steps as he went. It was icy cold and his choice to bivouac and avoid the rock-fall seemed a wise one until he reached the first few rock pitches of the Ramp. Here the rock is sound and by no means technically difficult, yet Adi was observed to be climbing in a cramped, hesitant manner. Had the long anxious night eroded his spirit, eaten away at his confidence and élan?
As they watched him climb into the shadowed, icy maw of the Ramp they noticed that he had still not chosen to get out his rope and use a self-belaying system. If the difficulty had been troubling him then this is the first thing that he would have done: perhaps he was moving slowly because he wasn’t fully warmed up after the long bivouac and the previously wet rock was now heavily iced with a treacherous patina of verglas.
As he approached the Waterfall Chimney pitch his progress slowed dramatically. He had to make a delicate traverse just beneath the chimney. It is at this point that a feature called the Silver Trench becomes apparent when the sun strikes deeply into the Ramp in the late afternoon.
Like many names on the mountain the Silver Trench is a pleasant name for an otherwise intimidating section of climbing. I had often wondered how these evocative and sometimes lyrical names had come into being. Perhaps the Traverse of the Gods was so called not because of its magnificent and exposed position on the edge of a 5000-foot chasm but because climbers edging across it had the unnerving feeling that they would be joining the Gods rather more quickly than they had planned.
The Silver Trench, however, was coined not by climbers but by the spectators at Kleine Scheidegg and Alpiglen because only they could see the sun flashing brilliantly back at them, reflected from the gleaming plate of ice covering the traverse at the foot of the Waterfall Chimney. Early that morning as Adi cautiously attempted a bridging step across the traverse the face lay in shadows and the watchers could not see the deceptive glitter of the Silver Trench.
They watched as Adi stretched a foot far out to his left. His boot slipped suddenly and he withdrew his leg to regain his balance. Poised above such an immense fall, it is hard to understand why he did not reverse his movements to a point where he could get out his rope and use a self-belay. Perhaps he did not want to waste time? Maybe because it was just one small step he knew he only had to raise his courage and then all would be well. The defiant way to regain confidence would be to force yourself to confront the impasse that has stymied you. Perhaps Adi, already unnerved by the treacherous conditions, had reached just such an impasse. Backing off and resorting to the rope would be an admission of failure. It might open the floodgates of fears that could quickly wash away whatever self-belief remained to him. He was being watched by an attentive, expectant audience. Perhaps he felt he couldn’t back down; just one long stride and he might regain his poise. It was a time to be brave: it was what he lived for.
He stretched his boot out once again, a jerky, tense movement, and again returned warily to his stance. Then he worked on the foothold with his ice axe. His movements reflected the actions of a tired and nervous man.
They saw him make another agonising attempt. Nothing was different from his previous strides but perhaps this time he managed to raise sufficient courage to transfer his weight to the glassy foothold. At twelve minutes past eight in the morning Adi risked the step. Heart pounding and adrenalin coursing through his body, he weighted the hold momentarily and then fell silently from the Silver Trench. His body flew from the Ramp and hardly struck the face during its fall of 4000 feet.
I too have paused many times at a particularly tricky move, hesitated as I tried to bolster my courage, and then stepped up or reached a tiny handhold at full stretch and breathed a sigh of relief. It is the essence of climbing. For an endless moment everything is concentrated on the outcome of one shift in body weight, one calculated decision to move, upon which the outcome of the entire climb – if not your life – is dependent. For an instant you are intensely alive. Good memories of climbs are as much about these brilliantly intense experiences, milliseconds of movement, confrontations with infinity, breath held until you have won through. I glanced up at the face thinking of Adi’s fateful step. Sometimes we lose.
The train rattled to a halt at the Kleine Scheidegg station and the air compressors hissed as the doors swung open. Most of Tokyo seemed to disembark onto the platform and rushed after a chattering tour guide holding aloft a pink umbrella as a marker point.
‘Where do they all come from?’ Ray said, as he watched the Japanese tourists perform a pincer movement around a St Bernard dog and fire off fusillades of well-aimed camera shots. The dog looked bored, lay down and began to lick his genitals. The tour guide raised her pink umbrella, barked a sharp Japanese order, and h
er entourage dutifully streamed off behind her in the direction of the hotel. I saw Simon and the camera crew take up defensive positions around the camera tripod.
‘God knows,’ I sighed and then turned to Hanspeter.
‘Do we go straight up to the Eiger Gletscher station now?’ Ray asked, like a condemned man hoping the scaffold had collapsed.
‘First I must clear it with the station master and then talk to Simon about the helicopter, but don’t worry, we shall still catch the first train up.’
‘Great, wonderful.’ He heaved his rucksack onto his shoulder.
We wandered up towards the group huddled around the camera. Everyone seemed to be in high spirits. Simon Wells grinned broadly and gave us the news that the team were already on the move heading up the Ramp. Hanspeter had a hurried conversation with Simon and then it was time to go. We shook hands all round and waved farewell as they shouted encouragement and we followed Hanspeter back towards the platform. I would rather have gone straight up onto the face without meeting anyone. I hate farewells.
As the train climbed up past the Eiger Gletscher station with a full complement of Japanese tourists aboard the lights in the two carriages flickered on as we drove into the guts of the mountain. I watched the morning light fade to a pin-prick dot and then disappear as the tunnel entrance receded behind the train.
I glanced at Ray, who was looking serious. I felt edgy and suppressed the urge to laugh. I aimed my video camcorder at the carriage full of faces who all began smiling back at me. Obviously I was learning their language. I panned across and filmed Ray as the train hissed to a stop and the side door opened.
‘Come on,’ Hanspeter called as he jumped down onto the tracks. ‘Come round the front of the train. You’ll see the Stollenloch door on the left.’
I switched the camcorder off and hefted my rucksack out of the door, following clumsily into the darkness of the tunnel. Walking around the front of the train I waved my thanks to the driver who smiled and held up a thumb in encouragement. A short corridor had been carved into the side of the tunnel and we clambered up a slight rocky incline towards where a weathered wooden doorway blocked further progress. On the left of the corridor I was astounded to see a fluorescent green neon advertising display that I had no time to read.
In moments we were alone and suddenly a blast of wind began hurtling up the tunnel. Hanspeter had pushed open the small trap door set within the main wooden door. The wind was strong enough to suck me off balance. I saw Ray say something but couldn’t hear the words in the rush of the wind. A grey light glimmered into the tunnel, silhouetting him against the morning sky.
‘This is bloody ridiculous!’ I heard Ray exclaim as I poked my head out of the door. He looked nervous. Hanspeter smiled.
‘What a way to start the day!’ I exclaimed turning to Hanspeter and Ray. ‘This is weird.’ I dumped my sack on the broad ledge outside the door and looked straight down 2500 feet to the meadows below us. ‘Hell, it’s not every day we get a chance to do something like this, is it?’
‘Thank God,’ he said and began to step into his harness. I quickly sorted out the rack and tightened the harness around my waist.
‘I’m glad we’ve done this, you know,’ I said as I uncoiled the green 60-metre rope. ‘I thought I would feel guilty about missing out the bottom bit, but we’ve already climbed it once and this is the scene of so much history. Just imagine all the people who have come this way.’
‘Yeah, usually trying to save their lives,’ Ray said sharply and handed me the end of the blue rope.
‘You have company,’ Hanspeter said, pointing towards a triangular rubble-topped pillar about a hundred metres away. Two men sat side by side on the rubble. One was smoking a cigarette and his companion chewed on a sandwich. Thirty-one-year-old Matthew Hayes from Hampshire and Phillip O’Sullivan, twenty-six, a New Zealander living in Britain, had started up the face early that morning. We never talked to them on the climb but heard enough shouted commands to know that they were Brits.
‘Damn,’ I swore despondently. The last thing we wanted were people in front of us.
‘They must have started at first light,’ Ray said as he clipped a sling through a shiny new bolt set into the rocky mouth of the tunnel.
‘Ah well, we’ll have to see how they’re going,’ I said. ‘There will still be room for us at Death Bivouac if that’s where they’re headed.’
I glanced at the sky, making a quick weather check. There was a line of greyish white on the western horizon. The forecast for the day was for some overcast cloud cover in the afternoon which would clear during the night to be followed by three, possibly four, days of fine weather. I checked my Casio barometric altimeter, which gave altitude readings and more importantly, air pressure changes every hour.
As I stepped around Hanspeter and onto the face proper he clapped me on the shoulder and wished us well. At the last moment I asked if I could take a quick look at the Difficult Crack through his binoculars.
The black rock sprang into focus and I twirled the dial to adjust it to my eyesight. The first thing I noticed was the sheen of water dripping down the buttress of rock that the Difficult Crack cut through.
‘It’s streaming with water.’
Suddenly a figure appeared, clinging to the rock.
‘Damn, there’s another climber,’ I said, and looked more closely. ‘He doesn’t seem to have a partner,’ I added, as I examined the first and final stances of the Difficult Crack.
‘God! He’s soloing,’ I added, feeling despondent. I didn’t want to be anywhere near a soloist on the Eiger. ‘And what’s more he’s not using a back rope and he’s wearing bloody rock shoes.’
‘Bugger!’ Ray said pointedly.
‘I just hope he’s good,’ I said fervently, thinking of Adi Mayr. ‘And lucky.’
‘Okay, guys, I had better get going,’ Hanspeter said. ‘I have to run up to the Gallery station before the next train comes. Good luck.’
When I turned to run a rope length out horizontally across from the Stollenloch to the rubble-topped pillar I saw that the two resting climbers had hurriedly started climbing. Clearly they wanted to stay ahead of us. I imagined that they were pretty annoyed to see two climbers pop out of a window in the face and almost get ahead of them. Still, I wasn’t about to start racing them. We wanted to do the climb in our own time, in control, and not get ensnared with another party. I was happy to let them go first.
The terrain was easy but deceptively dangerous and I was very aware of the sucking gulf on my left side. Above the pillar I found a large sling clipped to an old peg and a shiny new bolt. A hurriedly discarded half-eaten sandwich and the butt of a cigarette lay near by. I watched Ray as he moved nervously across the ledge and began climbing the pillar. He moved with an exaggerated caution that betrayed his tension.
‘How are you feeling, kid?’ I asked, when he hauled himself up beside me.
‘A bit freaked out to tell the truth,’ he said. ‘I’ll need a while to get comfortable with this place.’
‘I might as well just keep leading until you settle down. What do you think?’
‘Fine by me,’ Ray said, and grinned. ‘Bloody hell, this thing’s big,’ he added, as he peered up at the immense wall of the Röte Fluh that blocked any view of the rest of the face. A flurry of powder snow rustled out into space hundreds of feet above us and over to our left.
‘That must be the solo climber,’ I said, pointing at the snow drifting away on the breeze. ‘God, I hate being on this with him above us.’
‘Forget him. It’s his choice,’ Ray said emphatically.
I glanced up, searching for the two climbers ahead of us. I saw a red rucksack and white helmet moving leftwards beneath a yellow band of rock.
‘That must be the Wet Cave bivouac,’ I said and Ray nodded. I could look down from where I stood to the top of the Shattered Pillar and several thousand feet below the distinctive rounded tumuli of the First Pillar marked where we had started u
p the face four days earlier. We climbed up a faintly defined rib, moving together, carefully keeping several pieces of protection clipped on the rope between us. Most of the gear was of dubious quality, old rusted pitons hammered into downward-sloping cracks and bent over against the rock. We moved slowly, trying to get a feel for the terrain. The hand- and footholds were disconcertingly smooth, downward-sloped, and verglas and wet snow made otherwise easy scrambling an alarming experience. I would find myself unexpectedly tip-toeing around smears of ice desperately looking for some protection with a 100-foot fall lurking beneath me.
Ray took over the lead and climbed a series of slabby white limestone rock walls, then stopped for a long time. I began to feel impatient at our slow progress. A few irritated shouts elicited a pregnant silence. A stone clattered by, making me duck for cover as the ropes began to move through my hands.
When I reached the point that had slowed Ray I felt bad about my impatience. He had been perched a long way above a frail piton runner faced with delicate balance moves made desperately hard by large weeps of verglas. I thought about putting my crampons on and then decided that it would waste too much time. As the Vibram rubber sole of my left boot was skittering across the glazed slab I regretted my impetuosity. Hooking an axe pick against an icy nubbin of rock saved me from falling in a long sweeping swing across the wall. I arrived beside Ray breathing heavily and a little shaken. I moved up to a rectangular low-roofed cave burrowed into a rock buttress.
‘Hey, Ray, this is the Wet Cave bivouac!’ I yelled down excitedly. ‘And I can see the Difficult Crack now, directly above us. Those lads are at the belay. I’ll see if I can catch them up.’
Finding these sites that I had only ever seen in books had filled me with elation. It was a confirmation that we were on the route we had dreamed about for so long. I felt a childish, irrepressible joy just at being there. I wanted to shout down to Ray that we really were on the 1938 route but I decided he had probably already worked that one out.