He had been climbing for 12 hours without a break. At 63 he was tired and
racked by thirst from the dry winter air. In two hours it would be dark, but
to reach the only bivouac ledge he first had to cross this crucial pitch.
A tangle of old ropes hung across the smooth slab tilted at 75 degrees. The
dark sheath of one rope had frayed to reveal its pale tattered core, but he
clipped in to a more robust-looking line and began to teeter across the
slab, leaning out on the rope, crampon-spiked boots scratching on the slick
limestone.
He had never done such a manoeuvre before and he was terrified of succumbing
to vertigo, so he stared resolutely sideways. He had almost reached the far
side when his feet skidded off the rock and his whole weight fell onto
outstretched arms, a rucksack full of bivouac gear wrenching his shoulders.
For one sickening moment he glanced down at his scrabbling feet. Just long
enough to glimpse the grey slab dropping to the lip of a huge overhang.
Below that nothing but air. And, much, much further down, blurred shapes at
the bottom of the face, more than 2,000ft below.
“It’s all right — I’ve got you,” reassured a friendly voice and yanked him up
to the anchor. Sir Ranulph Fiennes was safely across the Hinterstoisser
Traverse. It was the first big test on the north face of the Eiger, but
there were going to be much harder challenges over the next three days.
When Anderl Hinterstoisser and his three companions discovered that key
traverse in 1936, they pulled the rope through after them, effectively
cutting off their retreat. Returning from halfway up the face two days
later, with one man injured by stonefall, they were unable to reverse the
slab.
As a storm broke, their only hope was to try and abseil directly down over the
huge overhangs. In the confusion of frozen ropes there was a terrible fall.
One man plummeted to the foot of the face. Another was strangled by the
whipping ropes. The third froze to death, jammed against a piton. The fourth
survived dangling in space only to die within a few feet of rescuers who
struggled for hours to reach him.
There have been other morbid dramas since 1936, and over 50 people have died
on the face. Nowadays, however, deaths are mercifully rare and the original
route up the Eigerwand (Eiger wall) is a coveted tick on the CV of any
ambitious alpinist.
But for a climbing novice? Few people in the world can match Fiennes’s polar
record, but he had precious little mountaineering experience when he
announced two years ago that he wanted to overcome his fear of heights by
climbing the Eigerwand, claiming that Everest (where he got to 27,000ft
despite a recent double bypass heart operation) hadn’t been steep enough.
THIS wasn’t just about conquering personal phobias: he chose the most famous
mountain wall in the Alps, because he intended to raise £1.5m for Marie
Curie Cancer Care.
A guide called Kenton Cool agreed to spend two years training Ran in the
basics, and earlier this winter he pronounced his pupil ready. Last Saturday
he got the vital forecast for a week’s fine weather and on Monday I joined
the team as they set off from Grindelwald.
Cool, at 33, looked lean, fit and a touch frazzled. “I’m sure that Ran can do
it if the weather holds, but he likes to be told exactly what to do and
that’s a huge responsibility for me.” His colleague Ian Parnell, large and
genial, built for survival, said “I’m just paparazzi”, patting an enormous
rucksack stuffed full of digital equipment.
And the star of the show? “At least there are no fulmars here,” Ran laughed,
recalling the sea bird which vomited all over him during a training climb on
the Old Man of Hoy last year.
At 4.30am on Tuesday they set off from the foot of the Eiger’s west 1,250ft
flank and I accompanied them for the first couple of hours. Each of us moved
in an isolated pool of torchlight, legs plunging knee deep into snow. The
angle steepened and in the first glimmer of dawn, at 6.30, there was a sense
— ignored resolutely by Ran — of the ground starting to drop away.
The summit, grossly foreshortened, hung over a mile above. Ian, fishing
dutifully for camera sound bites, asked: “Are you feeling positive, Ran?”
“Well at this stage it would be pretty stupid not to feel positive. I just
like to concentrate on each individual pitch and try to keep moving so that
Kenton doesn’t shout at me.”
When it was time for me to leave, I felt a twinge of envy, nostalgic for my
own ascent of the face 20 years ago. But from here on I would follow them
through binoculars, tracking the specks creeping up the wall, including
Ran’s anxious scrabble across the improbable line of the Hinterstoisser.
The team then climbed one more pitch, or ropelength, to the Swallow’s Nest
bivouac. But before they could settle down for the night, they talked to me
on the radio. They were tired and dehydrated, and Kenton used terse
radio-speak, clearly desperate to get on with melting snow for supper. I
asked whether it wouldn’t be a bit cramped for three of them: “I seem to
remember the Swallow’s Nest is quite a constricted little alcove.”
“Affirmative. Roger and out.” On Wednesday they continued up the First
Icefield, then the almost vertical dribble of the Ice Hose, then the long
leftward crabcrawl over the huge Second Icefield. At 2.30pm I spotted them —
three tiny figures in an ocean of rock and ice — climbing up to Death
Bivouac, where the first two climbers to attempt the face froze to death in
1935.
For all its gloomy associations, it’s actually rather a cosy spot, and that
night Ran was tucked up in bed, right arm resting on the edge of a 3,500ft
drop. From his sleeping bag THURSDAY for Ran was “a very bad day. I very
nearly fell off two or three times”. They were climbing the Ramp, a
700ft-high left-slanting gash, overhung by bulging walls of yellow
limestone. The crux pitch, where Ran kept shouting for a tighter rope, is an
overhanging chimney smeared with ice. The rope provided security, but you
can’t actually pull a climber up this sort of terrain.
At one point, thrashing with ice axes, rucksack jamming in the constricted
chimney, Ran seriously thought that he was going to fail. But then at 4.30pm
I saw them all climbing out of the Ramp, emerging from darkness into light,
heading across a sunlit snowfield where they could cut tiny bivouac ledges.
On the radio that night, Ran said, “I can’t understand how you do this for
pleasure. I think you’re all barking mad. Today was far harder than anything
I’ve done before; but I’m really dreading tomorrow morning, which starts
with the Traverse of the Gods.”
After a torchlit breakfast of tea and nuts, at dawn on Friday he had to face
that potential nemesis. Kenton went first, clipping the rope into fixed
steel pegs on this most stupendous pitch of the route. It’s more delicate
than strenuous — a balancy, sideways shuffle — but you tiptoe above the most
awesome precipice, with 4,000ft of space beneath you.
Taking crampons repeatedly on and off is not an option, so Ran had to tread
with steel points on snow, ice and bare rock. Terrified of damaging the
shortened fingers of his left hand, frostbitten in the Arctic several years
ago, he kept his mitts on, gripping as best he could. He knew that if he
fell he would go for a huge swing over the void before the rope held him.
He didn’t fall. But once safely across he confessed: “My mind crumbled. It was
a dizzy vortex, straight down to hell, and you couldn’t avoid looking down.
If I’d known it was going to be that bad I wouldn’t even have thought of
coming on this climb — not even for Marie Curie.”
But now the worst was over, and already he and Ian were laughing as Kenton
cursed them for jamming the ropes. “I love it when he shouts at me,”
said Ran. “Reminds me of my old sergeant major.”
They had reached the enclosed icefield called the Spider — an avalanche
death-trap in a storm, but today benign, a reasonable proposition with
modern ice-climbing gear. By midday they were on the Spider’s top left leg —
the Exit Cracks.
Nevertheless, they still had another 1,000ft to go, navigating through a maze
of intricate gullies. Ran had to dredge up new reserves. Then there was the
big pendulum traverse, way out left, into the final chimney — two full
ropelengths up a near vertical staircase with the treads all sloping the
wrong way.
Then a slope of loose shale overlaid by snow and, at last, the final icefield
as the huge concave amphitheatre of the face fell away beneath them. They
longed to be off the mountain, but it was too late, so they endured a night
perched just over the south side of the summit ridge.
It was bitterly cold and nobody slept. They shivered through 11 hours of
darkness, waiting for the sun and one of the most stunning summit views in
the Alps. At 9.30am three tiny silhouettes appeared, moving slowly up the
final knife-edge ridge and arriving at 10am on the apex of the Eiger’s giant
triangle.
Heinrich Harrer, one of the four men to make the first ascent of the Eigerwand
in 1938, wrote afterwards that it “is an irrefutable touchstone of a
climber’s stature as a mountaineer and as a man”. I’m not sure that it is
still quite such a test of character for experienced alpinists.
Modern equipment, reliable weather forecasts and the possibility of helicopter
rescue have diminished much of the menace. But for a man with a 63-year-old
body already badly abused by years of polar punishment, a dodgy heart, very
little previous climbing experience and a pathological fear of heights, to
succeed on this immense wall — even with the help of two brilliant young
mountaineers — is an extraordinary triumph.
You can support Fiennes’s Eiger climb at
www.mariecurie.org.uk/EigerChallenge
Ran is one of the last great Englishmen. I can think of very few ready to don that mantle. Perhaps Bear is in the same mould?
Mike Poulsen, Reading, Berkshire
Yeah but can you put a rowntree's fruit pastel in your mouth without chewing it?
Ang
Ang, Sinderland, barely awake