For Sir Ranulph Fiennes, the man who has been called the world’s greatest living explorer, the north face of the Eiger is just an extreme form of aversion therapy.
He has crossed deserts and oceans, dragged sledges twice across Antarctica, travelled to the North Pole and competed in the world’s most gruelling super-marathons; but at the age of 62 he remains terrified of heights.
Next March he hopes finally to banish the demons by climbing the biggest — and arguably most dangerous — mountain wall in Europe. Last week I accompanied him on the first step of the journey, climbing part of the way up the Eiger’s west ridge to get his first close look at the wall.
We took the first train up through the meadows and woods to Kleine Scheidegg, the cluster of hotels where, during the 1930s, tourists thronged the telescopes to watch men climbing to their deaths. Of the 10 who attempted the wall unsuccessfully between 1935 and 1938, only six returned alive.
The editor of the Alpine Journal, incensed by the apparent fanaticism of these predominantly Italian and Teutonic Eiger candidates, declared that whoever finally succeeded on the Mordwand — the death wall — would have completed “the most imbecilic variant in the history of mountaineering”.
Attitudes change. As the current president of the Alpine Club I, like several other club members, have followed in the pioneers’ footsteps up the wall. For most serious alpinists, the north face of the Eiger is simply one of the greatest climbs in the world — a fantastically varied journey through a stupendous vertical landscape, redolent with history.
But it is still one you approach with respect. Get caught in a storm halfway up that mile-high concave shell, and you could be fighting for your life, unsure whether to try to force your way up to the summit, or to retreat down interminable tilted icefields, pounded by a barrage of falling water and rocks — or, if you are attempting the wall in winter, smothering snow.
Having climbed the wall in 1986, going back was a nostalgic trip down memory lane. But what about Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, the baronet who has over the years shed almost as many names as frostbitten fingertips, downsizing to a more modern, demotic “Ran Fiennes”? What did he make of it all?
The amputated stumps on his left hand (frozen while retrieving a submerged sledge from the Arctic Ocean at –45º C) were busy tightening bootlaces. The eyes were inscrutable, the upper lip resolutely stiff.
When he spoke it was to ask Jon Morgan, a mountain guide who accompanied us, practical questions: “How soon do we rope up? Will we need crampons? Can I do the first bit in trainers, as boots hurt that old skin graft on my right foot?”
The man accustomed to being in charge was quietly modest, acknowledging that, despite a steady regime of training over the past few months, he is still not a fully fledged mountaineer.
At Eigergletscher station the train disappears into a tunnel that winds its improbable way through the mountain. We got out, to start walking up the southwest flank.
We were still in shadow, following Jon up scree slopes and occasional little rock steps. When it got steeper he stopped to put Ran on a “short rope”, leading him on a 10ft tether up hard frozen snow, then a little rock overhang, which got us onto classic Eiger territory — downward sloping tiles of grey limestone, littered with rock debris.
Then suddenly it all changed as we emerged onto the crest of the west ridge proper, where the sloping tiles reached a knife-edge between two utterly different worlds — on one side our rambling sunny slope, and on the other an immense sombre abyss.
Jon lobbed off a rock and counted 15 seconds before hearing its distant clatter. The bottom of the north face was 2,500ft below.
Ran said nothing. Jon got him to crawl along the edge. Then he made him stand up and walk along the edge. Then he anchored the rope, paying it out slowly as he told Ran to lean right out over the abyss.
Like the well-trained former soldier that he is, Ran obeyed orders, brown eyes still inscrutable beneath bushy eyebrows. Then he admitted: “That is horrible!”
We dangled him there for about 10 minutes, then let him back onto the gentle side, where he and I sat in the sun, sharing a sandwich.
I asked him why he needed this challenge and he insisted that he just had to overcome his “irritating” fear of heights. “At Eton I did lots of roof-climbing, but it was always at night, so you couldn’t see the drop. Then in the army I had to do parachute jumps, but I always kept my eyes shut, hoping the sergeant-major wouldn’t notice.
“And once I got into expeditions, I always made a point of avoiding contours on the map — our journeys were flat, horizontal ones. But when I started doing expeditions with Mike Stroud in the mid-1980s, he made me abseil off London tower blocks and took the mickey because I wouldn’t look down.”
Somehow that bluff quip didn’t quite account convincingly for this non-mountaineer’s ambition to attempt the climb which one of the first ascensionists described as the mountaineer’s “supreme test of stamina, skill and courage”.
He is clearly a driven achiever. And he admitted that without a big challenge to look forward to, life would become “terribly boring”.
But perhaps this new project is also an attempt at catharsis after a series of gigantic traumas tore his life apart. In June 2003 he had just boarded a plane when he collapsed with a massive heart attack.
He emerged from his coma only after three days; yet just four months later, despite a triple bypass operation, he ran seven marathons, on seven consecutive days, on seven continents.
He returned triumphantly to his farm on Exmoor to find his wife Ginny doubled up with stomach pains. He rushed her to hospital to discover that she had cancer.
Four months later, in February 2004, his wife of nearly 35 years, the woman who had dreamt up the great Transglobe Expedition, a 52,000-mile odyssey by land and sea which had absorbed both of them for 10 years, the constant companion of his life, died.
“I was completely devastated. I had known Ginny since she was a girl of nine. I couldn’t bear to be alone at home without her, so I just buried myself in work. “I found it very, very difficult to be alone and constantly thinking of her. I can’t see how people can be in their own company and enjoy it.”
At one of his packed lectures later that summer he met Louise Millington, a horse-trainer some 20 years his junior with a 10-year-old son from a previous relationship. It was always a sadness that he had been unable to have children with Ginny. But last spring, he and Louise married and they now have a four-month-old daughter, Elizabeth.
Though proud and happy, he does have the odd qualm about coming to fatherhood so late. “I’m not sure I should be a father at 62. What am I going to be like at 72?” he said.
But that does not extend to thinking that Elizabeth might grow up without a father. Though Louise is not happy about him attempting the Eiger, he is pretty confident of his own survival: “I’m going with an outstanding guide who’s only going to let me do it if he thinks I’m up to it,” he says.
But his determination makes one suspect he will do it, and that his very resolution is a way of coping with the undercurrent of grief and loss that remains despite his new-found happiness with Louise.
It is certainly not just self-indulgent therapy. Since 1986 his expeditions have raised nearly £9m for various medical charities. If he succeeds on the Eiger he hopes to raise at least £1m for Marie Curie Cancer Care.
In recent years not only his wife but his mother and two sisters have died of cancer, so it is a cause close to his heart.
“When Ginny was in hospital, I talked to lots of old people who had no friends or relatives to come and visit them. They all said they wished they could be in their own homes. I hope that the money we raise for Marie Curie will allow more terminal cancer patients to be treated where they want to be, at home.”
The choice of the Eiger is typical of his desire to set himself the toughest challenges possible. But as we sat in the sun, on the Eiger’s western flank, absorbing the gorgeous alpine scenery that once entranced the artists Turner and Ruskin, I wondered if he actually enjoyed this game of alpinism. Did he appreciate the actual physical, tactile business of moving through a vertical landscape?
“I enjoy completing a climb,” he replied, “but not the actual climb itself: it’s not easy to enjoy something you’re frightened of.”
Despite the fear, his training regime continues until next March, when another guide, Kenton Cool, will be watching the weather forecasts for a spell of clear, cold weather to make an attempt on the north face.
In the meantime, Ran continues his training programme, honing skills and trying to come to terms with verticality. And raising money.
You can support Ranulph Fiennes by donating at www.mariecurie.org.uk/EigerChallenge
