That night my right arm rested on the very edge of a 3,500-foot drop, and Kenton’s pan of breakfast muesli tasted none the worse for his half-joking warning that some previous climber had used his end of the ledge, from where he had scooped our brew-up snow, as the Gents.
As before, Kenton set out at dawn. He led some pitches and handed over to Ian for others. I remained always in the middle. Since I was by far the most likely to fall, this system would hopefully minimise the chances of my body dragging both the others off the mountain with me. That, of course, assumed that neither of them were knocked off by a rock first.
That day, our third on the Eiger, began badly for my mental state because, expecting to continue heading in an upwards direction, we actually had to move diagonally downwards across an extremely steep slope, known as the Third Ice-Field, to the base of a crucial feature known as the Ramp. This 700-foot-high left-slanting gash overhung by walls of limestone contains many nasty surprises, and was graded in 1997 by two skilled Irish climbers as ‘a solid VI.6’, a grade more difficult than I could climb without a number of falls when attempted during my British climbing outings. However, I had not used axes or crampons in Britain, so I hoped that they would make a key difference. (For comments on the severity of grading the North Face, see Appendix 5.)
I had read much about the Ramp, which some Eiger pundits describe as the most technically difficult section on the wall. Harrer, one of the first group to try it, wrote, ‘The “Ramp” – well, it fits that Face, on which everything is more difficult than it looks. You cannot run up it, for there are no rough slabs, no good foot-or hand-holds. Here too the rock-strata slope outwards and downwards, and the crannies into which a piton can be driven can be counted on one hand.’
Twice over the next few hours, inching up the central chimney of the Ramp, I came within an ace of falling, but on each occasion, my axes caught hold on some tiny unseen nub and halted my downwards rush. There were icy chimneys, awkward rock slabs, tricky and frightening overhangs, side-pulls, hand-palming off sloping holds, and the occasional hand-jamb, all techniques I had been taught by Paul Twomey on his Bristol church climbing walls. Near the upper reaches of the great gully there were two or three stretches of rock that nearly defeated my every attempt. Looking down at any point during the Ramp climb would have been a big mistake, as the airy ice-fields immediately below had a hypnotic effect. Looking up was not to be recommended either in the Ramp’s narrower reaches, for then my rucksack lid’s contents would jab the back of my neck.
Somewhere on the Ramp in 1961, an Austrian climber with a brilliant repertoire of ultra severe Alpine ascents, the twenty-two-year-old Adolf Mayr, came to grief attempting the first ever solo ascent of the face. Down in Grindelwald, queues of tourists waited their turn to gawp at ‘Adi’ through the hotel telescopes. Somewhere in the mid-section, at a spot named the Waterfall Chimney, he needed to traverse across wet rock. Watchers below saw him hack at a foothold with his axe. Then he stepped sideways, missed his footing and fell 4,000 feet to his death.
Above the Ramp there were sections of slippery ice and treacherous patches of soft snow into which neither my axes nor my crampons could be trusted to hold firm. By always checking I had three reasonable holds before advancing a leg or arm to a fourth higher hold, none of the many slips that I made proved disastrous, merely heart-stopping at the time.
Unbeknown to me, both my companions had been concerned that the Ramp might prove too technically difficult for my meagre rock-ability and that the expedition would end there. Ian recorded on his camera tape that evening:
The Ramp is about three pitches high, or three rope lengths high, and the most difficult bit is the final rope length. There is no ice which would give good purchase for the axes, it’s only rock. It’s very steep in places and it’s also overhanging. That pushes you out and, with the rucksack, all the weight is on your arms. You’re looking for features either side on the wall and they are pretty smooth in places, so you are scratching on tiny holds to get up. Ran is doing excellently; today was probably the point at which he could have failed. He managed to do it very well, so we were very pleased.
At one belay I met up with Ian just below a single boulder the size of half a standard UK red postbox. As we conversed a rock struck the boulder and shattered into shards, one of which struck me hard on the helmet. The rest passed harmlessly over our heads. Just above the boulder, Kenton traversed to the right of the straight-to-heaven route we had been following for 700 feet up the gulley of the Ramp. Here we ran out of ice at a place of much loose slate aptly named the Brittle Ledges.
For a while I could find no way up one layer of slate, for every rock I tried to use for a hold simply broke off. My axes were no help. Eventually I had to remove my mitts and bury my bad hand deep into a vertical cleft to achieve the needed purchase. This move coincided with the failure of my last available hand-warmer pouch. Resupplies were unobtainable deep in my rucksack, and my hand soon grew numb with cold. This was bad timing because, above the Brittle Ledges, Ian led up a vertical wall of slate about ninety feet high. Maybe I was too tired to think clearly, or perhaps my cold, numb left hand, incapable of gripping anything but my ice-axe (and that thanks only to the crutch of its wrist loop), left me pretty much one-armed at the time.
Whatever the reason, I worked harder and with greater desperation on that single ninety-foot wall than on any previous part of the North Face. Despite the brittle nature of the rock, the first few metres up from a little snow-covered ledge on to the Brittle Crack are really overhanging. The upper twelve feet involved an appallingly exposed traverse around a corner with space shouting at you from every direction. The tiny cracks and sparse piton placements available for my axes disappeared as I neared the top. All apparent handhold bulges were smooth and sloped downwards, and my bare fingers simply slid off them. My arms and my legs began to shake, my biceps to burn. Pure luck got me to the ice patch that capped the wall, into which I sank an axe with great relief and hauled myself up, a wreck, to the tiny snow ledge where a grinning Ian was belayed.
‘This is it,’ he said. ‘We spend the night here. Lovely view.’
A bit of axe burrowing formed a fairly comfortable ledge for the three of us, and again the mental stress and physical toil of the day overcame my worries about that drop a few inches away from my sleeping position. I lost a mitt off the ledge during the night, but I had a spare immediately available. The stumps of my left-hand fingers ached, but far less than all ten fingers had hurt on most polar trips. I felt fine as I fell asleep, worried only by tales I had heard of two of the obstacles to be faced the next day, the hugely exposed Traverse of the Gods and the technical problems of the final Exit Cracks, rated more difficult than the Ramp. I had just spent hours ascending by far the most difficult climbing of my admittedly short climbing life, and yet, by repute, the worst lay ahead.
Ian recorded his night perched above the Brittle Crack, during which he was scheduled to conduct a live interview. This, according to our ITV friends, would – if it worked – be the first time ever that anyone had managed a live interview on the national news from somewhere as remote as the Eiger Nordwand. A digilink was used in order to achieve this, utilising microwaves to send high-quality television images through the air so that Philip and the ITV crew at the base of the mountain could see and talk to me. Ian recorded:
I knew the film crew were getting my footage from the helicopter long line pick-ups of my tapes, but I really wanted to make a breakthrough and manage a live broadcast with Ran being interviewed on the face. I’d painstakingly shivered through the hour of preparation and tested both previous evenings, but first communication problems scuppered things and then a breaking story of a stabbed Welsh vicar knocked us off the News roster. This time, as I knelt on the edge of the drop, camera held out in one hand and the broadcast antennae in the other, I felt a muscle begin to spasm in cramp. ‘Three minutes to go’, and the cramp starts an inexorable rise up my back. ‘Two minutes, could you hold the camera st
eady, Ian’, and my neck has joined the knot. I try to meditate and breathe through pain. ‘Thirty seconds, keep the light on Ran’, and I’m gasping for air now. Must try to stop breathing. ‘So, Ran, could you tell us how you keep your spirits up in such hostile terrain?’ It’s happening, we’re live! ‘Excellent, chaps, you can relax now. London says it’s some of the best footage they’ve seen all week.’
On the morning of our fourth day on the face, I woke with a dry mouth and butterflies fluttering about in my stomach. Joe Simpson’s professional description of the Traverse of the Gods was clear in my mind. ‘For 400 feet the points of protection – weak, damaged pitons, battered into shattered downward-sloping cracks – are marginal to say the least. Most climbers would prefer not to weight such pitons statically, let alone fall onto them . . . and the drop beneath the climber’s feet is 5,000 feet of clear air . . . The hardest climbing comes right at the end of the traverse around a protruding prow of rock and close to the edge of the Spider.’
In the valley below, Stephen Venables, who had climbed the North Face over twenty years before, watched our every move through binoculars. He wrote: ‘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, 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.’
Stephen was assuming that the rope would hold me, but, having just come away from the unreliable region of the Brittle Crack, I envisaged the scenario of a pendulum plunge with my full weight tearing out the feeble flaky placements, together with both Kenton and Ian who were attached to them.
The Irish climber, Paul Harrington, who had climbed the Traverse of the Gods at exactly this time of year, had observed: ‘Everything revolved around balancing crampon points on snow-covered ledges. There were no positive handholds. Only rock that could be pushed down upon to take some weight off the feet. It was a psychological passage.’ Ian was behind me as I stepped out along this hellish cliffside. He described his thoughts. ‘It’s dramatic, nervy climbing for experienced climbers, but for someone like Ran who suffers from vertigo, it can easily become a complete nightmare. The rock here is loose, covered in verglas in winter and frighteningly exposed. In fact, at one point your heels overhang the whole drop of the wall to the snows of Kleine Scheidegg below.’
Suddenly, well ahead of me and appearing to be glued to the sheer wall merely by his fingertips and booted toes, Kenton disappeared around an abrupt corner. For no good reason this unsettled me badly. Behind me, Ian observed my reactions:
He is no drama queen, so I didn’t expect him to break down sobbing, but by the methodical and calm way he worked across the first half of the traverse, he looked to be in complete control. Once he’d disappeared out of sight, I packed up my cameras and began climbing. It soon became evident that all wasn’t as well as it seemed on the surface. I can’t repeat Kenton’s comments here, but it was a classic example of what is known in British alpine circles as a ‘Kentrum’ – the toys were well outside the pram. The issue seemed to be that, caught out of rope, Kenton had been forced to take a belay on two pathetic rotting bits of tat. Ran, swinging round to the second half of the traverse, felt the full impact of the sickening exposure and suffered an attack of the vertigo he’d so far successfully kept at bay. Reeling in their own worlds, a frank exchange of views followed.
Ian’s interpretation of events was close to the mark. Something snapped as soon as I rounded the sharp bend in the wall. I may have inadvertently allowed myself a glimpse downwards beyond my normal carefully regimented focus point – my crampon points and not an inch beyond them. The onrush of sheer terror that this error sparked coincided with a tightening of the rope between me and the still invisible Kenton.
‘Give me slack,’ I shouted.
I had the rope back to Ian jammed behind me round an ice nub. I had to retreat a metre to loosen it. I was teetering on my front points on a mere rock scratch. I was terrified. My voice rose to a bellow.
‘GIVE ME SLACK!’
This brought a furious response from my unseen leader. Furious, but to me unintelligible, so I had no idea what his problem was, no idea that his position was precarious. He knew that, if I fell at that moment, he was unlikely to be able to maintain a hold on the mountain. He was desperately doing his best to screw ice-screws in to improve his belay point. The last thing he wanted to do was to give me slack.
Fortunately, my instant reaction to the angry tone of his voice was to get angry myself, and that eclipsed the power of the vertigo attack. I controlled myself, closed my eyes, thought of a huge plate of steaming porridge laced with maple syrup and clung to the miserable rock face. After an age, or so it seemed, I felt slack rope from Kenton, reached back to flick Ian’s rope free, and crept onwards above that sickening drop until I could see the still muttering Kenton perched on a patch of naked ice. I joined him and stayed silent as he berated me for my impatience, knowing that his moods of thunder never lasted long and were usually well deserved. There was nobody, not even Ian, who I trusted so completely in what, to me, was the most frightening environment on earth. Without Kenton, I could never have even contemplated setting foot on the Eiger’s North Face.
‘Lighten up,’ Ian advised Kenton. They knew each other well.
We moved fairly quickly up the steep hard ice of the White Spider, so called due to its shape – a blob of white ice with white gulleys stretching up and down from its centre for hundreds of feet. In bad weather detritus from above can turn the Spider into a death zone for any climber caught on its face. Above and just to the right of the Spider was another, smaller ice-field, the Fly.
I crawled up the Spider. I felt really tired; perhaps due to the stress of the Traverse of the Gods or because the previous three days of climbing had slowly taken their toll on my reserves of fitness. I was also getting clumsy in a place where this was inadvisable. The sun beat down from a clear sky and the extreme exertion of hauling myself and my rucksack ever upwards made me sweat. Kenton, at a belay, helped me take off my windproof jacket, but I fumbled and lost my grip on it. A breeze grabbed it and, in an instant, it slid away down the slope, gathering speed. A bad item to lose at that height on the Eiger. We still had 1,000 feet to go straight up a maze of intricate gulleys, the notorious Exit Cracks, the final chimney of which included two rope-lengths up a near vertical ice staircase with the treads all sloping the wrong way.
From the White Spider on there were many obstacles that would, back in the Avon Gorge or on the Welsh sea cliffs, have been too much for my inadequate technical skills and lack of upper body strength. But this was the last rock problem I would face. The summit was tantalisingly close, so I attacked each new problem as though my life depended on it. Perhaps it did. The walls on both sides of various grooves and chimneys were smooth, featureless and often at eighty degrees. I remember a whitish wall called the Quartz Crack which looked evil but turned out to be merely nasty. And a smooth walled runnel which nearly stopped me and where Kenton pointed to a tiny ledge. ‘Corti Bivouac,’ he said, and I remembered Harrer’s tale of this Italian wrongly accused of cutting his companions’ rope.
Corti and Longhi had joined up with two top German climbers in 1957 down near the Hinterstoisser Traverse. They later missed the Traverse of the Gods altogether and tried to reach the Spider by a far more perilous route. Longhi fell 100 feet on to a ledge, where he sat for five days before he died. His body dangled on the rope for two years, ogled by telescope tourists. High in the Exit Cracks Corti took a bad fall, so the Germans gave him their tent and key supplies and climbed on, hoping to raise help. Corti camped on a tiny ledge, the one Kenton showed me, until he was eventually rescued by the pioneering use of a winch cable from the summit. Longhi was too far below to be saved. The Germans disappeared and Corti was suspected of being responsible for their deaths until, four years later, their bodies were fou
nd. They had reached the summit, but died of exposure on their subsequent descent down the western flank.
I had reflected more than once on our climb how often Ian and Kenton must secretly have dreamt of cutting their ponderous client off their rope, since I knew they could both move like ballerinas over ice or rock as a team of two. Mountaineering was their passion and their profession and they had reached the pinnacle amongst their brilliant international peers.
The nightmare of the Exit Cracks ended with a great pendulum traverse, way to the left of our previous axis of ascent, a long icy shute and a treacherous bulge of mixed shale and snow, both ingredients being unpleasantly loose underfoot. The evening sun was welcoming as we emerged from the last of the gullies. I craned my neck, arching my back, and saw a wonderful swathe of open sky where for four long days I had seen only the ever-rising, dark wall of the Eiger. Above us now was only a steep wall of snow and ice leading up to a knife-edge, the summit ridge. This sharply angled snow wall was the reservoir, the source of the avalanches that sweep down the North Face. New, often wet, snow that settles here frequently fails to cohere firmly with the névé and ice beneath and sloughs away in lethal waves down the Exit Cracks, out over the Spider and beyond.
Ian led up this last steep climb, taking his time with care and caution. From an ice-screw belay I paid out Ian’s rope. I could see the outline of his rucksack high above as he fixed another screw into the snow. He straightened up to move off and I felt the rope go taut. I obviously had him on too tight a leash. I quickly paid out more rope, looking down at the coils to check against knots forming. At the same moment, Ian, caught off balance by the taut rope, had slipped, fallen over on to his back and begun to slide head first down the Eiger.
He wrote later: ‘I began to head down towards Grindelwald. Kenton luckily heard my screams, saw that Ran was paying out the rope and yelled at him. This seemed to reawaken Ran to the appropriate rope procedures and, thankfully, my downwards journey was brought to an abrupt halt.’
Mad, Bad & Dangerous to Know Page 37