by Clint Willis
Chris said good-bye to Anne at the Geneva airport the next morning; six hours later, he arrived at the entrance to a black skyscraper—his employer’s London headquarters. He stood for a moment looking up the city street, past rows of glass and stone. The buildings put him in mind of mountains, of what he was leaving as he stepped inside.
4
BONINGTON SPENT SIX months as a management trainee. He began his work as a sales representative early in 1962. He visited grocers’ shops in London’s Hampstead district, where he took orders, closed six existing accounts—and failed to open any new ones.
He went to a party at someone’s flat with a young freelance illustrator named Wendy Marchant, the daughter of a clergyman-turned-illustrator. Wendy was physically slight, unconventional and quietly determined. She had told friends she meant to marry an explorer and was a bit surprised to find herself dating a margarine salesman. She figured it wouldn’t last. Chris took her climbing; she didn’t like it, but the couple meanwhile had fallen in love. They married in May, five months after their first encounter.
Chris was by now fed up with his job. He received an invitation to join an expedition to the unclimbed Towers of Paine in Patagonia and asked for a leave of absence. His superiors responded as he had assumed they would: Bonington must choose between margarine and mountaineering. Chris talked it over with Wendy and resigned his job with the vague notion that he might go to teacher training college when he returned from Patagonia.
The Patagonia expedition wasn’t scheduled to leave England until the autumn. Chris immediately began preparations for another summer in the Alps. Once again, he meant to go with Don—and once again, they meant to try to climb the North Face of the Eiger.
Chris was short of cash, and Don had spent more than he could afford on an expedition the previous winter. The trip had been a success. He had stood on the summit of an unclimbed needle in Patagonia’s Fitzroy Group. He had balanced that success against the news that Audrey wasn’t able to bear children. Don had shrugged off the news; he told Audrey he wasn’t bothered—but it was another defeat, and it weighed upon him. He had admired his father, had wanted a chance at being a father himself.
At any rate, Whillans was as broke as Bonington. Chris thought back to his encounters with journalists the previous summer; clearly, an English attempt on the Eiger was still a big story. He asked London’s Daily Express to support the venture in return for exclusive coverage. The editors agreed to contribute some funds, and the paper ran a photograph of the two climbers departing London on Don’s latest motorbike.
They arrived at the cliff in late July. They climbed the lower sections through torrents of meltwater. Chris dropped his axe at a chimney below the Hinterstoisser Traverse. His heart sank as he listened to the tool clatter down the face. Don vetoed any notion of retreat; he was sick of trooping up and down the slabs at the bottom of the route. They continued to climb. They reached the Swallow’s Nest, below the First Ice Field, and spent a wet night there.
Nothing froze. The risk of rockfall was even greater than on their last attempt—but they were both losing patience with the climb; they wanted it done. Morning came and they set off up the 50-degree slope of the ice field. Stones bounded down the face, smacking into the ice that surrounded them. The two climbers moved quickly. They didn’t stop to chop steps. The risk of falling frightened them less than the thought of spending more time exposed to this bombardment.
Chris Bonington and Don Whillans depart for the Eiger
CHRIS BONINGTON PICTURE LIBRARY
They reached the top of the ice field and Chris took the lead. He was now climbing rock, working his way up on small holds slick with ice. He could find no cracks or other features that would take protection, and he soon ran out 150 feet of rope. He climbed in a state of growing fear until he reached the start of the Second Ice Field; here he found a crack for a piton. Don climbed up to join him, and something—seeing each other’s faces—broke their momentum. They eyed the gray ice that loomed skyward and listened to stones whistle past. It wouldn’t do. They turned to retreat—and saw two climbers approaching their stance from below. One of the men was shouting at them in German.
The new climbers had come to rescue two Englishmen who were in difficulties higher on the route. Chris and Don agreed to accompany the rescuers, and started back up the face. They forced themselves to stop and cut steps as they made their way across the Second Ice Field amid the whistle and shriek of falling stones; they might need the steps to bring down an injured climber. A single figure in red came into view and made its way slowly down toward them; after a time, the figure seemed to collapse. The rescuers continued to climb until another sound made them look up.
Chris saw a body falling—sliding across steep ice and gathering speed, flailing through air and tumbling over rocks like a cooking pot some clumsy person might have dropped. Chris held a wordless understanding that these passing moments were more real for the falling body than any mere observer could imagine. Chris couldn’t believe what he was seeing; he couldn’t acknowledge what was happening to flesh—to a state of awareness and being—so much like his own.
He froze for a moment. It was tempting to turn over in his mind this new event—this horror—but he knew better. He fixed his attention on his next step and carried on. He felt his mind recede and he was intensely aware of his body. He was not going to fall. He looked up. The weather had turned; clouds filled the sky. The second climber, the figure in red, was still there.
Chris and Don continued to climb the Second Ice Field. The barrage of stones and ice went on: sharp cracks and softer thumps, muted by the sheer expanse of the face and the blanket of sky. A rock—a very small one—slammed into Bonington’s shoulder and bounced off to clatter on. His arm went numb but he could move his fingers.
The other two would-be rescuers turned back. Chris and Don climbed on—a seemingly endless series of pitches—and at last reached the figure in red. He was a young Englishman named Brian Nally. His partner—a student named Barry Brewster—had been hit by a rock the day before while leading a pitch at the start of a wall known as the Flatiron. The blow had knocked Brewster from his perch, and he had taken a very long fall. Nally had carved out a ledge for his injured partner, but Brewster had died some time in the early morning. His corpse had somehow fallen from the ledge, perhaps swept from it by falling rock or ice; Chris had watched it tumble past.
Nally’s eyes were blank and his face wore an expression of dull shock. He asked Chris and Don whether they were going to the summit—and if so, could he come with them? They stared at him for a moment. Don broke the silence with an uncharacteristically gentle suggestion—perhaps it was time to get down to the valley for a cup of tea—and he and Chris quickly set to work.
They tied into opposite ends of the rope and put Nally in the middle. Chris helped him navigate the steps down the Second Ice Field. Nally performed surprisingly well—he was a competent climber—but a falling rock struck a glancing blow to his bare head; he had given his helmet to Brewster. The blow staggered him, but Nally shook his head and went on with the descent. He moved more slowly now. The weather grew steadily worse and a hailstorm broke around them as they left the ice field. Don placed a single piton and the three men hung from it until the squall blew past; then they continued down.
They descended the Ice Hose, the gully leading down the First Ice Field. They were approaching the Hinterstoisser Traverse. It would be difficult if not impossible to cross with an injured climber. Young Tony Kurtz and his three partners had died in 1936 because they couldn’t find a way to reverse this section of the route. Whillans the previous day had noticed a spot where a simple rappel would bypass the traverse altogether. He guided the others to it now.
The rappel behind them, it was a simple matter to shepherd their charge to the Stollenbach Window—an entry to the train tunnel that burrows through the Eiger. Here they turned Nally over to an official rescue party. A pair of Swiss journalists had hired
a special train to come up to the tunnel and get the story before their competitors. The journalists immediately accosted the climbers—including Nally, who answered their questions in a state of shock.
Chris and Don left for Innsbruck the next morning. Wendy and Audrey joined them there. The men climbed on limestone cliffs while the story of the dramatic rescue on the Eiger played in newspapers and on television in England and abroad. The party ran short of money near the end of August. Wendy and Audrey set out to hitchhike home; Don and Chris took the motorcycle. They stopped for a route—the imposing North Face of the Badile—and found it easy. They were climbing extremely well. They made one last stop in Chamonix, where Bonington saw blue sky over the mountains and realized he wasn’t ready to leave.
He proposed one more climb to Whillans. Don refused. He had made up his mind to go home—he had a lecture to give—and he wasn’t going to change it to suit circumstances or his partner’s whim. I’ll meet any bugger halfway, he’d often told Chris. Don’t ask me to go further.
So Don left Chamonix alone. The two oddly matched friends would climb together again, but their dealings with one another were becoming difficult now. Chris had come to see himself as Don’s peer in the mountains. And he had begun to weary of Don’s stubborn streak; Whillans sometimes seemed a young man old before his time.
Chris understood that Don was a kind of genius. They were bound together by what they could give or teach one another. Even so, Chris that night felt relief at being free of his crotchety partner. He was in effect single again—but only for a few hours. He saw Don off and went to the Bar National to drink, and ran into Ian Clough.
IAN HAD PERFORMED well on the Central Pillar of Freney the previous year, and he quickly fell in with Bonington’s latest brainstorm: an assault on the 4,000-foot Walker Spur of the Grand Jorasses. Hamish MacInnes had convinced a much younger Chris to join him for a run at the route five years before, but weather had fortunately stopped them. Chris now felt far more prepared to tackle what remained a serious alpine test-piece. He was like anyone who has been afraid and is now less afraid: he was eager to put his new freedom to work. He wanted to run things—no need for a Hamish MacInnes to manipulate him into tackling hard climbs, no need for a Don Whillans to protect him.
Chris and Ian found the Walker Spur crowded with climbers—Italians, French, Austrians. The two young British climbers passed them all, and continued to climb when the other parties retreated in the face of threatening weather. A route-finding error forced them to make an airy traverse across a blank wall, but the detour only added to their sense of exhilaration. Chris was perhaps the stronger climber, but there was no one in charge. Each climber existed in the thrilling state of solitude that comes when you can’t be found or caught or told what to do. They swapped leads, climbing with the economy and pleasure that occurs when a person stops holding back, stops burying what he knows. Chris was happy.
They climbed from the base of the Walker Spur to its top in thirteen hours, emerging into the teeth of a north wind. The weather had an ugly aspect, and the pair began their descent—but the weather improved as darkness approached. Chris had long entertained the notion that a strong team might crown an ascent of the Walker Spur with a traverse of the Jorasses Range. It had seemed a wild notion, but now he put the idea to Ian. Ian was willing, even eager; there was nothing about him of Don’s pinched and stubborn nature. The pair settled down for the night, and in the morning turned and set out across the ridge.
They moved from pinnacle to pinnacle. The views shifted and opened across seemingly endless vistas. The climbing wasn’t difficult—they moved unroped for most of it—and they were aware of something more perfect than a glorious future; what opened before them was rather an endless present composed of emptiness and beauty.
They climbed all day, seeing no one, hearing no voices but their own. Their boots chafed their feet and the climbers felt their growing weariness. They struggled up and over the last high point on their ridge, and began their descent. Bonington felt his happiness swell within him as he set off down the last snow slope. Here he slipped and slithered on the snow, gathering speed and rolling to bury the pick of his axe in the slope to stop his slide.
Ian gently urged him to take care. The great Lake District climber, Arthur Dolphin, had died in almost the same spot not long before—a ridiculous, sliding fall on snow on this easy ground. The two friends carried on down, legs leaden, minds lit by a flickering gray—adrenaline and fatigue and mountain light—and by an interior swirl of feeling that they understood comes only at such times; it would rest in memory until recalled by another such experience.
They’d been moving for sixteen hours when they reached the Torino Hut. Bonington drank some Chianti and found his bed in a room filled with bodies. While the other climbers slept he watched a kind of interior film of seemingly random moments and views; he allowed his mind to roam and it did so, calming and settling him. The Eiger’s North Face arose in this vision and he knew that he could do the route with Ian. He lay awake until dawn and at the first sign of day he woke his friend. They agreed to make the attempt together.
THEY ARRIVED AT Alpiglen two days later. Chris by now had experienced one of his characteristic mood swings. His exalted state of two days before had departed; he was partly convinced that he had come to the Eiger to die.
They shouldered their gear and set off for the climb in the late afternoon, planning to spend a night low on the route. An Austrian trying to solo the face had fallen to his death two days before. This news had further blackened Chris’s mood—and now in the fading light his eyes fell upon bits of clothing and fragments of flesh or bone clinging to rock. Ian saw them too, but neither man spoke of these artifacts; each was unsure whether his partner had seen them.
Darkness was nearly upon them as they reached their bivouac ledge. They had only a little time to look around—out across the sky, down at the valley unfolded beneath them, up at the mountain whose bulk opposed the space that otherwise surrounded them. There was a sense that they had run out of room, that the universe had borders and the climbers were pressing themselves against one of them.
They didn’t know what was most frightening. There was the silent space that forced itself upon them and into their eyes and mouths, like murky water. There was the yawning expanse of black rock, as real as a geometry theorem; it conjured a wringing and emptying anxiety in the two young men. They felt a sudden wish to hide, as if from the eye of some huge winged being. But they knew that this desire might give way to an equally irrational joy—and that any hiding place they chose would be easy to find.
Their solitude fell away as the last light left the sky. Two figures climbed toward them from lower on the face. The newcomers were a Scot and a German, near-strangers to one another, who had roped up after their respective partners had gone home. They made an odd pair, two more among the growing ranks of climbers, most of them outmatched, who had begun to clutter the slopes of the Eiger. Chris and Ian had come to know each other on the Freney Pillar and on the Walker Spur. They felt afraid, but also strong and engaged. The newcomers didn’t interest them—they were a distraction; worse, they might get in the way.
The night was going to be a cold one. Chris realized that he was hungry; he proposed a feast. Chris and Ian set about cooking and eating all of their canned food, leaving only tea and soup for the rest of the climb. They spread their gear across the ledge, which was protected from stray stones by an overhang. They talked about the spot—how cozy and safe it seemed—and settled into their bivouac bags to sleep.
Dawn woke them. They hurried their breakfast and their packing in order to get on the rock ahead of the other pair. They were at the start of the Difficult Crack, and Chris prepared to lead it. He remembered being here with Don. The recollection gave him pause. He knew that Don would find this hard to forgive.
They climbed the Difficult Crack quickly, and crossed the Hinterstoisser Traverse. The First Ice Field had shrunk in the wee
ks since Chris’s previous visit, and they climbed on the exposed rock at its periphery. They climbed the Second Ice Field in crampons. There was no need to cut steps. The sky was clear. By nine o’clock in the morning they were very high on the face, with many of the route’s difficulties behind them.
Their momentum carried them into a gully that led to surprisingly difficult rock climbing. Bonington climbed more than 100 feet without placing any gear—and suddenly a fall seemed likely. He felt his courage leave him, a flock of birds leaving a tree. He took a breath and felt the air enter his lungs and fill him. His fear settled and grew still without vanishing. It was enough, and he reached higher for a nubbin of rock that allowed him to move his feet higher. The climbing became not easy but obvious and in a general sense familiar. He recognized it as work he loved. He had run out almost all of the rope when he at last clambered onto a ledge where he could build an anchor. Ian followed, and now the two of them moved together across more ledges until they came to a dead end; they had wandered off the route.
They retreated to the top of the Second Ice Field. They had lost an hour of daylight, but they were back on route now—and the climbing again seemed easy. Bonington took the lead and spotted a badly twisted piton in a crack; it was the peg that had anchored Brian Nally when Barry Brewster had fallen. That was five weeks ago, fantastically distant.
They moved up a steep section and then across easy slabs. This was the Flatiron, where climbers could expect to encounter heavy rockfall by the middle of the day; the rock they stood upon was pitted from it. Chris, looking down the face to a spot some 150 feet below, could make out a patch of darkness—perhaps clothing or equipment—at the ledge where Brewster had died. The Scot and the German had fallen far behind; they seemed likely to reach the Flatiron just in time for its afternoon bombardment.