Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes

  Jon lobbed off a rock and counted 15 seconds before hearing its distant clatter. The bottom of the north face was 2,500 feet 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 ten 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.

  Somehow that bluff quip didn’t quite account convincingly for this non-mountaineer’s ambition to attempt the climb which one of the first ascentionists described as the mountaineer’s ‘supreme test of stamina, skill and courage’.

  Dangling over that 2,000-foot sheer void would, I am certain, have made me realise I could not face climbing up to such a place (nor the other 4,000 feet above) if I had actually dared to look down. As it was, I had spent the entire ten minutes focusing as hard as I could on watching Stephen and Jon on the cliff edge just above me. On reflection, this rendered pointless the whole rationale of the reconnaissance which was to learn whether or not I could stomach full-scale exposure. I had merely put off the day of reckoning.

  Back in France, Kenton drove me to a cliff face known as La Fayet, an hour or so from Chamonix, and introduced me to a climbing technique known as dry tooling, which he advised me would be especially useful for the mixed rock and ice conditions he reckoned we would face on the Eiger. He headed up the cliff with only the very tips of his axes hooked into tiny rock holes or over fractional rock ledges. Sometimes just one axe’s tip. His legs often hung in space where there was an overhang or the vertical rock offered no purchase point at all for his crampon spikes. I grew really attached to this, to me, new system because it meant virtually no requirement for me to use my stubby left hand to hold and haul up my bodyweight. This gave me the much needed confidence to decide irrevocably to try the Eiger in March 2007. Both Kenton and Ian Parnell wrote off that entire month in their diaries, and the fundraising machine of Marie Curie clicked into action.

  Throughout the post-Everest, pre-Eiger months, I had needed to make a living and accepted lectures to business conferences all over the place. We flew everywhere as a family. One lecture, to 9,000 individuals, all members of the Million Dollar Round Table, in a huge theatre in New Orleans, allowed us a spare day in town. So we walked to the banks of the Mississippi and watched the paddle steamers moored close by. Later that week, after we had left, Hurricane Katrina struck the city, and the conference organisers must have thanked the Lord that they had just got rid of their 9,000 millionaire attendees.

  We flew all the way to Sioux Falls via Chicago to lecture to just thirty crop-spray manufacturers in the middle of the prairies. My US-based German friend, Mike Kobold, who had so helped me research the Nazi horrors of the Death Marches, joined us there for a three-day drive to the Black Hills of Dakota and the high sculptures of Mount Rushmore.

  We went to Cape Town for a forty-minute presentation and, wanting to show Louise my old home in nearby Constantia, took a taxi there. The entire area had altered beyond recognition. Gone were the open vineyards and the dusty roads. Instead, acres of high security fences and tall dense undergrowth lined both sides of the smart tarmac lanes, and this time I failed even to find the home of my childhood. In between the lectures, we managed to slot in brief holidays, including a week in Transylvania with Abby who had bravely bought a derelict cottage in the mountains close by Castle Bran, the original home of the mythical Count Dracula. We trekked along high ridges and saw wolves and bears, but no vampires.

  The Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, part of the United Nations force there, asked me to be guest speaker for their Trafalgar Night Dinner, and a Scottish colonel, Jim Hutton, kindly spent the following day in a jeep tracing from archive material he had researched the exact route along which my father and his tanks of the Royal Scots Greys had advanced in 1944 between their landing at Salerno and his death from a German anti-personnel mine just before the relief of Naples. I was sixty-one years old when I stood for the first time in the leafy Italian lane where my father had been mortally wounded, aged forty-four. I would have loved to have told my mother about that day, reliving his last few months, but, as I have mentioned, she had died the previous year, as had two of his four children. I hope there is an afterlife, as I would love to meet my father for the first time.

  On our last day in Naples, I joined two bus-loads of soldiers, sailors and airmen for the annual Vesuvius Half Marathon, uphill all the way to just below the crater and won by a very fit Frenchman. At the prizegiving he was reminded in a (half) joking sort of way that the French hadn’t done too well at Trafalgar.

  The trouble with being post-middle-aged, I found, was that I needed to spend a lot more time trying to keep fit. The most time-effective way of maintaining basic all-round fitness was jogging but, as the years went by, the number of hours needed per week pounding out the miles kept on increasing if I was still to do things that involved fairly strenuous activity. Added to this, I did not really enjoy the training runs as I once had and was often too busy or travelling when I most needed to put in all those boring jogging hours. My old friend Mike Stroud pinpointed my problem:

  Why is exercise so hard to undertake? Boredom, discomfort, fatigue and lack of time must all be contributory, but there is an additional problem. Goals such as good health in old age are far too nebulous to provide the motivation. For that reason, it is often only those with a more definite short-term goal that succeed. People who need to lose weight, for example, are more likely to continue to put in time and effort than those who are not too fat. If you give yourself a definite aim, exercise acquires a purpose. You need to set yourself a challenge.

  This is what saw me, especially in my post heart-attack years, entering the succession of races itemised in Appendix 4.

  My old nanny from South African days had been a loving correspondent ever since I was eight, but she finally died aged ninety-five, having driven until she was ninety. Ginny’s mother, Janet, died whilst I was on Everest, and my late sister Sue’s husband, John, who I had known for over forty years, died suddenly of a heart attack in March 2006. My family and friends had begun to disperse in an upwards direction, which is what can happen with alarming frequency when you pass by the magic year of sixty.

  I reacted by passing all my old photos, maps, polar documents and gear from the 1970s and 1980s to the Royal Geographical Society and the Scott Polar Research Institute. To our regimental museum in Edinburgh Castle, I gave my own medals from the seventies for fighting Marxists, my father’s 1940s medals for fighting Nazis, and my grandad’s (he had by far the greatest number) for extending the Empire and then defending it in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  In the African summer of 2005, Louise and I interrupted lectures and climbing training to join a team of white Zimbabweans and Zambians on the Zambezi River to recreate the last few days of Doctor Livingstone’s journey to the Victoria Falls. We paddled traditional dugout canoes with steersmen from the same tribe as had accompanied Livingstone exactly 150 years before to the day. We passed a great many hippopotami, an unknown number of crocodiles and, on our arrival at the falls, unveiled a commemorative plaque to the great doctor beside the Zambian edge of the mighty waterfall, which truly deserves its position as one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

  After this enjoyable journey to honour a great Scottish explorer, I contemplated switching future activities from the cold regions of the world, whether the Poles, the Himalaya or the Alps, to places where cool breezes, eggshell-blue skies and verdant valleys can be savoured. It was a nice idea, but my more pressing concern was the North Face of t
he Eiger.

  20

  Murder Wall

  On 1 March 2007 I flew to Geneva with the family and drove a rental car to Grindelwald, where we stayed at a family-run hotel, the Grand Regina, with a reputation among British tourists of being the best in all Switzerland. The owner, Hans Krebs, had kindly given us accommodation free of charge because he approved of and wanted to help our Marie Curie aims. The hotel manager, Ingo Schmoll, warned us of the consequences of the mountains not being as stable as they should normally be in midwinter. The rate of retreat of glaciers throughout the Alps, together with the thawing of the permafrost layer, had created temporary barrages of fallen rock blocking high ravines and creating lakes. Increasingly torrential summer rains then burst the feeble dams of rubble, causing flash floods, mudslides and more loosened rock. The previous autumn the Eiger itself had suffered a major rockfall, a chunk bigger than two Empire State Buildings.

  Kenton, in Chamonix, was in touch with Ralph Rickli, the famous Swiss met forecaster in Berne, and with the top European weather bureau, the Met Office in Exeter. We needed a clear good weather window of at least five days and nights on the North Face if a non-skilled climber like me was to reach the summit. Kenton and I cleared the whole of March in our diaries and waited. The ITV crew, led by Philip Reay-Smith, installed themselves in a suite with a balcony looking directly opposite the Eiger which was swiftly transformed into a studio resembling a CIA electronic snooper room, with the intention of transmitting the first ever live news footage from the Nordwand. Philip warned me that, once his team was in Grindelwald, we must start the climb. ITV could make no open-ended commitment, since their team had to be on permanent call to go anywhere in the world at short notice. Indeed, Philip sent me an email warning me not to do the climb during the week starting 19 March, because that was ITV’s ‘Iraq Week’ and there would be much less space on the News for non-Iraq-related items.

  When I told Kenton this, he snorted, ‘If the weather’s good for the week of 19 March, and we haven’t gone by then, we will set out at once, ITV crew or no ITV crew.’ I relayed this back to Philip.

  The March days slowly ticked by in Grindelwald, Louise having to return to Britain to take Alexander back to school. I began to find the bulk of the Eiger, looming over the hotel, a touch oppressive. I tried to keep busy. I went for a daily two-hour run out of the village, along hilly lanes and up the glacial ravines. As I ran I heard the intermittent explosions of avalanches from the heights of the Alpine giants all around. After six days of evil weather forecasts, I was padding about Grindelwald increasingly worried that we would never get a five-day clear period in March. Every time I looked out of the window or trudged through the village streets, I found myself looking up at that great black wall, the upper limits obscured in thick fog. One night I couldn’t sleep and spotted a single pinprick of light high up on the bulk of the North Face. The very sight of it made my stomach muscles tighten as I imagined having to try to sleep anywhere on that hideous cliff.

  I went for a walk to a mountain coffee house and paid £3 in Swiss francs for a ‘Rockslide’ (coffee spiked with schnapps) named in honour of the recent big Eiger rockfall. I sat there for three hours and frightened myself reading Joe Simpson’s Eiger experience in 2002. But at last, our friendly met-experts in Berne and Exeter concurred and a five-day window was forecast for the middle of the month.

  Louise and our baby Elizabeth, eleven months old with blonde hair, large blue eyes and a sunny nature, were back in Grindelwald when Kenton confirmed our imminent departure. I tried to hide the fear, almost panic, that surged with the knowledge that we were about to start the climb. Until then there was always the doubt about the weather, the chance that we might not be able to try the climb at least until the following September. But now the die was cast. I did my best not to reveal my wobbly state of mind, especially at the Grindelwald rail station when saying goodbye to my wife and daughter. And later that day, in the hostel at the foot of the Eiger, I needed to work hard to appear unfazed in the boisterous company of Kenton, Ian, the ITV crew and Stephen Venables, who was back reporting for The Sunday Times.

  We were to leave the hostel for the hour-long snow traverse to the base of the North Face at 4.00 a.m. the next morning and I found sleep elusive that night. I remembered a hundred similar sleepless nights before big moments, but polar fears were something I knew how to handle. Mountain fears were different. I feared my own inadequacies, of being revealed as a coward or, at best, as a wimp. Would the North Face trigger uncontrollable vertigo? Would I freeze to some cliff, unable to move, thereby risking Ian’s and Kenton’s lives, as well as my own? Never mind the ridicule. And what of a fall? I had by now read all the accounts by far better climbers than myself.

  Joe Simpson, survivor extraordinary, wrote about how he felt as he fell, apparently towards certain death.

  Deprived of the ability to imagine the future, you are fearless; suddenly there is nothing to be scared about. You have no time to ponder on death’s significance or fear what it may feel like. In the cataclysmic violence of the accident you lose not only the future but the past as well. You lose all possible reasons for fear, unable as you are to understand the loss of what you once were or what you could become. Time is frozen for you into the present events and sensations, the knocks, and bumps from which you can draw no emotional conclusions. ‘I’m crashing. I’m falling fast. I’m about to die. This is it.’ In truth you have far too much on your mind for such frivolous luxuries as fear.

  One set of fears I had fought against in the 1960s, which had nothing to do with crevasses or frostbite or falling through weak sea-ice, was that of being shot when fighting Marxist terrorists in Dhofar. It was not so much the fear of being killed outright as the thought of some bullet, shrapnel shard or mine blast ripping out my genitals or blinding me. These were the terror images in the mind. To cope, I learned to keep a ruthlessly tight clamp on my imagination. With fear, you must prevent, not cure. Fear must not be let in in the first place. If you are in a canoe, never listen to the roar of the rapid ahead before you let go of the river bank. Just do it! Keep your eyes closed and let go. If the fear then rushes at you, it will not be able to get a grip, because your mind will by then be focusing on the technical matter of survival.

  That was all very well when coping with rational fears about what might happen. But vertigo is not rational and the trigger likely to set it off was the all too real sight beneath my feet of a great beckoning sickening void. Exactly what would it feel like to spend time cartwheeling, rushing downwards for several thousand feet?

  I have been asked, since Elizabeth was born, if I felt guilty risking my life on the Eiger. Perhaps I should, but being aware I could have another heart attack at any moment militates against such guilt feelings. Additionally, I know that Louise is a truly wonderful mother, as mine was, and I grew up without a father. To this day, although I hugely respect his memory, I have never emotionally missed him, for I never knew him, and Elizabeth, not yet one year old at the time of the Eiger, would certainly not remember me. Both Ginny and Louise married me in the full knowledge that I make a living through expeditions and intend to do so as long as I can. So I could feel no more guilt than would, say, a miner or truck driver, both professions with far higher death rates than mine.

  Once my alarm went off and I began to check all my gear before a rushed breakfast, the dread thoughts and fears of the night did indeed disperse. We left on time in pitch darkness with Kenton leading. Ian’s diary of the week recorded: ‘For Ran, although he hid it well, Everest had been a failure. This time round we were to attempt the Eiger North Face, and while we didn’t have the barrier of altitude, in my mind this was a much tougher challenge.’

  Ian’s backpack was heavier than mine, due to all the camera gear, as he was to document the climb and attempt the live ITV News broadcasts. Kenton’s pack, also heavier than mine, was festooned with climbing paraphernalia, but I still felt dubious about climbing with a pack that restricted my
movement, cramped my arms and limited my ability to look upwards. Dawn crept over the Alps and the mountain tops were tipped with an orange alpenglow. The stars disappeared and the great wall above us came alive. I thought of its German nickname Mordwand, or Murder Wall.

  Half an hour of trudging along a line of boot prints in deep snow took us to the spot Kenton decided to climb from. We said our goodbyes to Philip and Rob of ITV and to Stephen Venables. They should be able to watch our every move over the next few days, providing bad weather stayed away, through their powerful camera lenses. And at night they should be able to spot the pin-pricks of our head torches from wherever we slept.

  We fixed on our crampons beneath a feature known as the First Pillar. Many climbers lose the route in this area, but Kenton seemed confident as he stared up at our first obstacle, some 2,000 feet of mixed snow gulleys, loose scree, shiny ledges of smooth, compact limestone and temporarily lodged boulders. Looking away to the flanks of the face, the lofty silhouettes of the peaks of the Wetterhorn and Mittelhorn seemed dwarfed by our own monster.

  Few of the infamous Eiger tragedies occurred on this first 2,000-foot climb, but the fallen detritus of many an Eiger incident lay all around us. I remember, from one of the Eiger books, a photograph of climber Edi Rainer’s body lying smashed in the scree of this catchment zone. And Chris Bonington, on his Eiger ascent, had among these rubble-strewn lower reaches passed by blood trails and a piece of flesh attached to some bone.

  I knew that the world’s top soloists, acrobats of the top league, could climb the Nordwand in hours, not days, without ropes, in their sticky-soled rock-shoes, as light as woollen socks. A single slip or false move would see them dead, crushed on the rock, but they survive on the confidence born of their expertise. The mere thought of climbing a single rock pitch unroped made me flinch.