The Beckoning Silence (21 page)

Today I was climbing at far harder grades than in 1985 when we had made the first ascent of Siula Grande’s west face. I had led rock routes four or five grades harder than anything I had attempted in the early 1980s and my ice climbing had come on apace. Attempting something like Bridalveil Falls in 1980 would certainly have led to an early death for me. It was simply beyond anything I could have climbed at the time.

In many ways the terrible experience on Siula Grande had made both Simon and me better climbers. It was a steep learning curve, but we made mistakes that we would never make again.

I looked after myself more carefully, I was a better judge of my abilities and possessed a far more experienced eye for the objective dangers and technical challenges that mountaineering presented. I had no problems with retreating from a route if I wasn’t entirely happy about how things were going. The more I thought about it the more tempting the idea of climbing the Eiger became.

My mind turned to what I had written about Mallory, who so wholeheartedly believed there was no dream that must not be dared and whose life stretched to the very end. It might be good to stretch our dreams a little. I had always longed to climb the north face of the Eiger. So perhaps the time had come to dare the dream.

9 The Eigerwand

The great black amphitheatre of the north face of the Eiger rises for over a vertical mile straight out of the sunlit meadows of Alpiglen. The face is the biggest continuously steep mountain wall in Europe. For most of this century it has been the climb that has defined extreme mountaineering. It remains a lonely and unrivalled peak, widely regarded with awe and respect by all aspiring alpine climbers. It is a place of shattered rock and polished ice-fields. To date, sixty climbers have died attempting to climb the face. Its history is one of bleak tragedies played out in the full gaze of an uncomprehending public. It is a horribly public place to die.

The sombre northern wall of the Eiger has an intimidating and brooding menace. Few approaching the foot of the face would do so without an aching sense of dread. For over sixty years it has killed some of the finest climbers of their generation. For those brave enough to attempt the face there is the added weight of its tragic history. This brings to bear upon the climber such psychological stress that many have failed before even laying hand on the lower rocks. The intricate line of the classic first ascent route involves 13,000 feet of climbing – almost two miles uphill on hands and knees – over some of the most inhospitable terrain imaginable.

The Eiger is part of the northern bulwark of the Alps which is prone to sudden savage storms, frequently generated by the powerful warm
Föhn
winds, often prolonged and lethal. In an instant the face becomes a maelstrom of avalanches, waterfalls and falling rocks, cutting off all hope of retreat for anyone trapped high. Water that has cascaded down the black limestone walls in the relative warmth of the storm freezes solid in the cold front that always follows. Previously dry rock becomes glazed with verglas, a glassy sheen of hard water ice, filling the cracks and fissures and covering all protection points. The rock itself is layered in a distinctive downward strata so that all holds are now sloping, ice-coated and lethally treacherous.

The concave shape of the vast wall seems to generate its own distinct weather systems so that while a ferocious storm lashes the wall the meadows below bask in sunshine. Far below, yet less than an hour’s walk from the foot of the face, tourists crowd the terraces of the hotels and peer morbidly through binoculars and telescopes at the life and death struggles being enacted on the wall above them.

The Eiger has a well-earned reputation as a killer. At one point the north face became so notorious that the Swiss government banned all climbing on the wall, something unheard of in the history of alpine climbing – but still climbers came and men died. Since then the fearsome reputation of the mountain has grown. Despite the huge advance in climbing standards, the Eiger north face remains the pre-eminent alpine route coveted by aspiring alpinists. For those given the grace to succeed, it is an achievement for which they are forever grateful and which they will never forget.

The first ascent in 1938 was one of the great landmarks of modern mountaineering, comparable with the ascents of Nanga Parbat, Annapurna and later Everest in the way in which it advanced the standards. The great climbers of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s – Kasparek and Harrer, Herman Bühl and Diemberger, Cassin and Bonatti, Lachenal and Terray – became my inspirational heroes. It was their standards, ethics and traditions that guided me in the formative years of my climbing life. Now, in my fortieth year, there was still one thing missing from my climbing career: the north face of the Eiger. For years I had shied away from its imposing shadow, persuading myself that I didn’t really want to attempt the face. I knew all along that this was a thinly disguised lie.

Eleven years after reading Heinrich Harrer’s
The White Spider
I was to find myself hanging helplessly on a single strand of rope in a storming, freezing Andean night waiting to die. It had eerie and disturbing parallels with the death of Toni Kurz on the Eiger in 1937. That experience convinced me that I would never climb the north face of the Eiger.

Yet, as I watched the videos that Ray had sent me I found myself studying the terrain, judging the technical difficulty of the climb. With mounting excitement I began to realise that his idea was not quite as half-witted as I had first thought.

I was now vastly more experienced as a mountaineer. I was no longer the driven, ambitious and obsessed climber of my youth, and although caution and a highly attuned sense of mortality may well have held me back on some occasions it had also meant that I was still alive. The boldness and confidence of youth can lead to striking success or tragic failure. The wariness of age and experience can be just as paralysing. It can be a very fine line to tread and I felt we had the balance about right.

It was a neat little rationale that I found myself warming to as I watched the climbers making their way steadily up the north face. When they finally reached the summit ridge I knew with growing excitement that Ray was right. We had at least to make an attempt on the route. We would regret it for the rest of our lives if we never even went up to the bottom of the face and had, as he put it, ‘a wee look’. If either of us didn’t like what we saw we would just walk away.

I went up to my office, turned on my computer, and sat down to read my e-mails. There were some routine messages and then a surprise greeting from Mick Fowler.

He and Simon Yates had returned for an attempt on Siula Grande’s satellite peak, Siula Chico. They had wanted to try a steep ice line that Simon and I had coveted back in 1985. To their astonishment they had found that the intervening years of high average temperatures had reduced the glacier by almost two-thirds of its original size and the ice line on Chico no longer existed. Fowler also noted the terrible state of the moraines and screes leading up to the glacier which I had crawled down fifteen years earlier. With typical Fowler humour he wrote, ‘If I haven’t said so before I must congratulate you on such a fine crawl. The ground you covered is unbelievably horrible … full of razor sharp boulders that keep toppling over.’

It was strange to be reminded of this. It had suddenly made the whole experience real again, hitting home with some force. Over the years I had told and re-told the story so many times that it had become slightly unreal to me. In fact, psychologists treating victims of stress and trauma frequently make them tell the story of what happened over and over again until the reality becomes a fiction and they can move forward, away from that destructive and traumatic event. I had given so many slide shows and presentations over the years that I began to wonder whether my memory was betraying me. Perhaps it hadn’t been so bad; maybe any good crawler worth his salt would have covered the distance in half the time without so much as a wince to betray the perfection of his stiff upper lip.

I had frequently been asked how far the crawl was and I could never remember. I didn’t think in those terms. The crawling just went on and on and it was hard. So it came as some surprise when I read Mick’s e-mail.

‘I would say that you would be well impressed with yourself if you went back. I’d guess it’s about six miles: perhaps one and a half miles on the glacier, one mile on shit-awful moraines, one mile in the v-shaped bowling alley and about two and a half miles on easier ground back to camp. Wild!’

Yeah, that sounds about right,
I thought.
And it was hard and it bloody hurt.

The message, however, had prompted me into a decision. I picked the phone up and rang Holland.

‘Ray?’ I asked when he answered the phone. ‘When do you want to do it?’

‘What? The Eiger?’

‘What else?’

‘Good God! I was half hoping you’d say no.’

‘Well, if it all goes belly-up I can blame you. It was your idea.’

‘Thanks.’ There was a pause. ‘Winter or summer?’ he asked.

‘Summer,’ I said firmly.

Friends had suggested that winter – although far more serious – would be the best time to attempt the face. The threat of stone-fall would be nullified by the freezing temperatures but heavy powder snow conditions, especially on the lower part of the face, could make it an exhausting ascent taking as long as six or seven days. Everyone I had talked to who had climbed the face in winter had mentioned the fact that the rock was invariably dry and nowhere had they encountered verglas. This was due to the continuously icy temperatures. Whatever verglas had formed at the end of autumn had sublimated away by the middle of January, evaporated by the arid harshness of winter conditions. This meant that the rock climbing in the Ramp and the Exit Cracks would not be coated in a treacherous skim of ice.

On the other hand it was likely that they would be covered in a mantle of powder snow hiding all the possible in-situ protection points such as bolts and pitons. Although the weather tended to be more stable in winter and we could hope for as many as ten days of clear skies the predicament of being trapped high on the face in a prolonged winter storm was not something I relished. I had always thought that my winter alpine routes had been some of the most serious climbing I had ever done.

‘Let’s go in September,’ I added. ‘There’s a good chance of cold nights later in the month which might help cut down on the stone-fall. Can you spare the entire month?’ I asked, aware of how busy Ray was with ‘Kathmandu’, his flourishing climbing shop in Utrecht.

‘Yeah, probably, but I won’t be very popular. We’re opening a second shop on September the first.’

‘It’s your call,’ I said. ‘September is best for me.’

There was a long pause.

‘Hell, why not?’ Ray said and I could hear the enthusiasm in his voice. ‘Do you really think we can do it?’

‘If we get the weather I’m certain of it,’ I said. ‘I reckon that once we are on the face all that baggage of fear will disappear and it will just become another climb, another set of problems to solve.’

‘It had better do, otherwise we’ll be a pair of gibbering idiots,’ Ray laughed. ‘By the way, did you see the latest issue of
Climbing
magazine?’

‘No. What about it?’

‘Some Americans have repeated your route on Siula Grande. Hang on, I’ve got it here.’ I waited as he flicked through the magazine. ‘Carlos Buhler and Mark Price …’

‘Carlos Buhler?’ I demanded. ‘The Carlos Buhler?’ He was one of America’s leading climbers with an impressive list of hard ascents to his name as well as vast experience on some of the highest mountains in the world.

‘Yup, the very one,’ Ray said. ‘Here you’ll like this,’ he said and read out the report on the expedition:

Made famous by Joe Simpson in his epic tale of survival,
Touching the Void
, the west face of Siula Grande had its second ascent this June. Carlos Buhler and Mark Price decided to take on the ghosts of Simpson and Yates’ venture of 1985. Buhler writing in his diary before embarking: ‘I sure hope we can avoid the touch.’ Their 3300 foot route differed from the original taking off left up an ice gully at half height. Very technical: twenty four pitches of constant steepness with some of the finest alpine ice Buhler (one of America’s most accomplished mountaineers) has seen, and also some of the scariest.

‘I can believe that,’ I said fervently.

‘It goes on,’ Ray said.

… Buhler was leading on the second day when one of his ice picks broke in the hard ice … climbing on he looked up to see giant chunks of cornice thundering down directly at him … ‘I closed my eyes and prayed,’ wrote Buhler. ‘I kept waiting for the big thud that would break my neck or smash me. But it never came.’ He was forty feet above a runner at the time. There is no easy way off the mountain and after bivvying one night on the north ridge the pair chose to make 20 committing abseils, the first from a pair of knife blades on a rare section of exposed rock along the heavily corniced ridge and then 18 abseils from ice V-threads.

‘Ah ha, so they wimped out of the ridge did they?’ I chuckled. ‘I don’t blame them. I’m glad they thought it was so serious.’

‘Yeah, it goes on to say … .’

On the lower part of the face the dangers from falling debris were great enough for Buhler to write … ‘I felt like it had to be the last time I put myself at such risk.’

‘Clever boy,’ I muttered.

‘You’ll like this last bit,’ Ray said, before continuing:

In 1936 two Germans, Schneider and Awerzger, climbed the north ridge of Siula Grande, although the mountain is remote and high enough, 20,800 feet, even their route is rarely climbed. As for Joe Simpson and Simon Yates’s route on the west face, most people were too spooked by the subsequent
Void
account to consider trying it. Buhler commented, ‘I have a tremendous amount of respect for Joe and Simon for their boldness. Siula is a wilderness climb that doesn’t in any way finish on the summit. That’s what makes it so serious.’