If the weather falls kindly this week then Sir Ranulph Fiennes will begin an ascent of the notorious north face of the Eiger. The climb will raise £1.5m for charity and he’s been preparing for the past year. But as he packs his rucksack, the explorer and adventurer will be finally forced to confront the scale of the task ahead.
He is 62 years old, he takes pills for a heart condition, and thanks to frostbite he no longer has a full complement of fingertips. But more important, the training of the past year has failed to conquer his fear of heights.
“It could be a huge problem on the climb,” he admits. “If the fear comes upon me, I just go totally weak, totally dizzy. It is the one area where I could use the word ‘terror’ without overdramatising.”
He hasn’t even managed to look at the route that he and two more experienced colleagues — instructor Kenton Cool and specialist photographer Ian Parnell — will be taking. Last year he walked up the west face of the Swiss peak to see the lower reaches of the north face 2,300ft down.
“An experienced climber described it as the most exposed single drop he had ever seen,” Fiennes recalls. “I decided it would be a very stupid mistake to look down. Had I done so, I might have wimped out of the whole project.”
He has always suffered from a fear of heights, even on parachute training as a young SAS officer. “I got into trouble in the army when the sergeant-major noticed that my eyes were clenched tightly shut as I jumped,” he recalls. It is rather important, as the sergeant-major no doubt gently reminded him, to keep your eyes open when leaping from an aircraft. That way you don’t bump into other paratroopers on the way down.
It was partly to confront this fear that Fiennes first took up climbing. He believes in aversion therapy, having cured an earlier fear of spiders by sleeping in the Arabian desert. But when he began serious climbing instruction just a year ago, two problems immediately became clear. The first was his heart.
Four years ago he had just boarded a flight at Bristol airport when he suffered a heart attack of such severity that he was in a coma for three days. He had a triple bypass operation and five months later felt fit enough to run seven marathons in seven days on seven continents. But doctors have advised him to keep his heart rate under 130 beats per minute. “This means I can’t move fast on the big approaches with a heavy rucksack uphill through deep snow,” he says. “The way I can do that is to trudge slowly, not to try to go too fast.”
The second potential problem was his left hand. Would it have enough grip to use an ice axe? In 2000 Fiennes attempted to walk solo and unsupported to the North Pole, but in temperatures of –49C he was crossing a bridge of ice when his sled slipped into the water. He managed to save it, but his wet hand suffered severe frostbite when exposed to the cold air. Back home at his farm on Exmoor, he went out to his toolshed and removed his dead fingertips with a small saw. He lost the end knuckles of the thumb and all four fingers.
Luckily, he can still use a particular thin-shafted ice axe with his left hand. For the past year he has been training in Chamonix in the French Alps, gradually building up the strength in that hand. “I can now wield two ice axes just like any other climber,” he says. “The left hand might not be as strong as the right, but it’s not lethally incapable.” He has also been doing press-ups to build his upper body strength — very helpful in a climber — and he runs every other day across the moor.
The north face of the Eiger has a fearsome reputation among climbers. The mountain itself — in German its name means ogre — was first scaled in 1858. But it was not until 1938 that anybody successfully climbed the north face. Of those who tried, many never returned. More than 50 people have died on the north face since 1935. Some climbers know it as the Murder Wall, and just to emphasise the point, Fiennes and his colleagues will be passing through an area known as Death Bivouac, where two climbers froze to death.
The biggest danger is rockfall. The attempt is being made in March because — although the worst of the winter weather will be over — there will still be enough ice to hold the big rocks in place. With a slower climber on the team, they need five days of good weather. If the forecast is against them, they won’t climb. If March is a washout but the forecast is good for April 1, that will be too late. They won’t climb, and they’ll make another attempt in September.
Fiennes has already put in some impressive practice. He’s tackled several climbs in the Alps, and done altitude training in Ecuador. He has edged his way up the Old Man of Hoy, in the Orkneys, where he was attacked by a fulmar, a smaller version of the petrel that spits at intruders. And last year he thought he might have a go at Mount Everest.
If he was hoping to pit his fear of heights against the challenge of the world’s highest mountain, his mission was a failure. These days proper climbers don’t rate Everest. “To get to the top you don’t ever climb,” he says. “You trudge. There’s a fixed rope the whole way and if your body is susceptible to altitude you won’t make it. But if you body is okay and the weather is okay then you make it.”
He spent 72 days in the attempt, waiting for foul weather to clear. When it did he got to within 1,000ft of the summit ridge when his heart decided enough was enough. “It was like an elephant sitting on my chest,” he recalls. “The wires used to tie up my ribs after my operation felt like they were being wrenched apart. I thought I was about to have a massive heart attack while sitting on an ice cliff 300 metres from the ridge of Everest.”
He reached for one of his heart pills, thought better of it, and downed the entire packet instead. Then somehow he made his way down. “I did the fastest-ever descent of Everest and managed to get to Harley Street within two days.”
That trip raised money for a heart unit at Great Ormond Street children’s hospital; his latest climb is for the Marie Curie Cancer Care charity. In recent years he has lost his mother, two sisters and his first wife, Ginny, to cancer. “When Ginny was in hospital I talked to lots of old people who had no friends or relatives to come and visit them,” he says. “They all said they wished they could be in their own homes. I hope that the money we raise will allow more terminal cancer patients to be treated where they want to be.”
He remarried last year after meeting his second wife, Louise, at a lecture he was giving. She had a son, Alexander, and they now have a daughter, Eliza-beth. Louise is apparently far from thrilled at her husband’s latest adventure. When the couple decided to have a child, he agreed — she says — to spend more time at home. “Then I heard from someone else that he had announced he was going to try the Eiger,” she complained. “He’s away almost continuously.”
That was last year. Now she’s keeping quiet. “She doesn’t want to talk to the media because she would be pretty rude about the climb,” says Fiennes. “She thinks I’m not helping anybody, that the charities would make their money without me, and that I should be a family man now.”
Does she really want more help changing nappies, or does she fear for his safety? “I don’t know,” he says. “I find it better not to inquire and open the subject matter. If she brings up the subject, I make myself scarce. I do know that more people are killed driving on motorways than ever fall off mountains.”
That’s true enough, but the trouble with rock faces is that they can behave so unpredictably. His closest shave so far was not on Everest, the Andes or the Alps but on a climb that does not usually strike fear into a mountaineer’s heart — Cheddar Gorge in Somerset. “I got hold of an underhang that my instructor had just used above me, and the whole of it came away. It knocked me on the rope away from the cliff and landed way below, not very far from where my wife was parked.”
Fiennes inherited his baronet’s title at birth from his father, who was killed in action during the second world war at Monte Cassino. Young Ranulph joined his father’s old regiment, the Royal Scots Greys, and was later seconded into the SAS. He spent the last years of his military career seconded to the army of Oman, but eventually he realised that he would never command his own battalion.
Looking around for a way to use his army training he began his career as an explorer by leading an expedition up the White Nile in a hovercraft. More than 30 years later he is regarded as the world’s greatest living explorer. Between 1979 and 1982 he travelled the globe on its polar axis by land, covering 52,000 miles in the process. He attempted to cross Antarc-tica unaided with Mike Stroud, a nutrition expert, in 1992 and then in 2000 set out on his ill-fated walk to the North Pole. And now the Eiger. So what is it that drives him?
“I don’t know,” he says, not altogether helpfully. “I’m not an introspective, philosophical sort of a person. I don’t like delving into my psyche. I’m just sort of me.”
It says much about Fiennes’s approach to life that he has not even considered the possibility that something untoward might happen to this 62-year-old heart patient as he inches his way up the Murder Wall and past Death Bivouac.
Asked how the others would get him down in the event of a medical emergency, it was clear that the possibility had not even been discussed. “I don’t know,” he said after a short pause. “You’ll have to ask the others. Shall I get you their phone number?”
Follow progress on the Eiger expedition, part sponsored by The Sunday Times, on Fiennes’s website: www.ranulph fiennes.co.uk
