Once again, the walk through the Alpine meadows, and up the steep path to the Monzino Hut; a night at the hut, and another dawn start – this one threatened from the beginning with auguries of bad weather. Wispy clouds of grey were playing round the dark sabre tooth of the Aiguille Noire, and an ominous mackerel-shaped cloud perched over Mont Blanc. It was too warm, and we wondered whether to set out at all, but the forecast was good and John, perhaps as a result of his Air Force background, had a fanatical confidence in the powers of weather forecasters. The ascent was untoward. This was the first big climb I had been on with John, and I liked the steady rhythm of his movement, the confidence of his decisions and his speed of climbing. We were on the same wavelength, climbing with the minimum of verbal communication.
We had reached the top of the Pillar by four in the afternoon; clouds, once again, were boiling up around us. Another storm was on its way. We left a rope in position for the other pair to follow up the last pitch of the Pillar, and began to climb together, up the broken snow-plastered rocks that led towards the crest of the Brouillard Ridge. Even when we reached that, we should still have over a thousand feet of climbing before we reached the summit of Mont Blanc. And as we climbed, the snow came gusting in, blanking out the peaks around us and enclosing us in our own little world. If we had just been a pair, I have a feeling we should have risked all and made a bid for the summit – we were climbing well and strongly enough. But there was no sign of the others – they were not as swift. So, with hardly a word exchanged, we turned tail and retraced our steps to rejoin them near the top of the Pillar.
Another storm-racked night in a small bivvy tent; a straight repetition of the previous experience, but now we were four and not two. We knew the way down, and our descent next day was merely an exercise in patience.
We had climbed the Right-hand Pillar, though total success still eluded us; we had not tasted that delicious moment when, on reaching the top of a mountain, the ground suddenly falls away on every side, and new vistas are opened before your eyes. We had been pinned within the close confines of the Brouillard Cirque, with its now familiar, magnificent views of chaotic icefall, the jumbled mass of the Pic Innominata, the split tooth of the Aiguille Noire and, to the south, the haze of the Italian foothills and the gentler peaks of the Gran Paradiso.
But we had gained all there was from the Right-hand Pillar, and we should not go back. Although we were supremely fit, ready for the Eiger Direct, and all it had to offer, the weather was not. August crept into September; October was approaching with commitments back in England.
There was no choice, we would have to delay our attempt on the Eiger Direct until the winter, and so, towards the end of September, Wendy and I took the tent down, packed the Minivan and set out for home. In some ways we were relieved to escape from the close confines of Leysin and from the demanding, all-embracing presence of John Harlin. For eight weeks I had been caught up in his dreams and plans, like so many others before me, having arranged to climb the Eiger Direct, help with the International School of Modern Mountaineering and with plans for a mammoth flight down through the Americas.
As we drove from Leysin, the spell lifted and the ideas seemed distant, far-fetched and improbable. Reality was the touch of Wendy, Conrad, and our cottage at the foot of Ennerdale, with Tom Cat waiting for our return. We drove hard on the way back, overjoyed to be in England once again. We couldn’t wait to see our Lakeland hills.
– CHAPTER ELEVEN –
EIGER DIRECT: PREPARATIONS
Our return to the Lake District was like an escape from enchantment. Becoming too involved in John’s fantastic schemes, I had felt my own individuality and freedom of action curtailed. From the sane quiet of Ennerdale, even John’s winter plans for the Eiger seemed filled with question marks. For one thing, I had never climbed in the Alps in winter, and knew too little of the problems involved. John reckoned that the climb could take up to ten days in winter, and that there was usually a period, some time every winter, when the weather remained settled for ten or more consecutive days. My worry was the thought that you could not possibly tell, at the start of any one good weather spell, just how long it was going to last. What would happen if you got three-quarters of the way up the face after seven or eight days, and then the weather broke? Would you have the strength left to fight your way out or retreat – especially in a winter blizzard? I doubted it.
Nursing my doubts, I became involved in another expedition for the summer – to climb Alpamayo, a spectacularly beautiful peak in the Peruvian Andes. Conveniently, I put all thoughts of the Eiger Direct to the back of my mind, until one day in November the telephone rang:
‘Is that Chris Bonington?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is Peter Gillman. I work on the Daily Telegraph magazine and they want me to do a story about your planned route on the Eiger Direct this winter. Could I come up and talk to you? I’ll bring John Cleare along as well, if I may, to take some pictures.’
‘I suppose so. When do you want to come?’
‘Day after tomorrow, there isn’t much time.’
As I put the phone down, all my doubts welled up. This would commit me to the climb and, in facing this commitment, I realised just how worried I was about the entire concept. I could not bottle it up any longer and expressed my doubts to Wendy; doing so rendered it impossible for me to go on.
Wendy has always been prepared to accept any climbing project, providing she can sense that I am confident about it, but it would have been too much to have expected her to be stoical about something with which I was so obviously very unhappy. Quite apart from this, my own uncertainty rendered unwise any attempt to carry through such a scheme. This one seemed all wrong, somehow. Although I had complete confidence in John Harlin as a mountaineer, and had struck a rare accord with him on the Right-hand Pillar of Brouillard, I was less certain about his practical planning ability. With these doubts already in my mind, talking to a journalist about the planned climb would be impossible – I couldn’t possibly let him see them. On top of this was the worry of becoming a gladiator, at the mercy of the watching public. It is one thing to exploit the interest of the media, and through them, the public, to carry out something you truly want to do, but quite another to feel forced to go on a climb about which you are not happy, because you have publicly committed yourself to do so. I was, perhaps, trapped in the cleft stick of the professional mountaineer, faced with the pressure to climb for the sake of a position in the climbing firmament, and it was a position which I abhorred. After an agonising day of indecision I rang up Peter Gillman to tell him that I had decided to withdraw from the climb. At the same time, I wrote to John telling him how I had let him down. It was now early November and he was not going to have long to find a replacement.
There followed a very flat few weeks. I had the nagging feeling that in standing down I had dropped out of top-class climbing – that, for the first time, I had rejected a climbing challenge at a time when my ability as a climber was my only tangible asset. As a writer and photographer I had had published only one short article in the Daily Telegraph magazine, together with a couple of pictures.
Just as my morale reached its lowest ebb, I had a letter from John Anstey, editor of the Daily Telegraph magazine, asking if I would be prepared to act as the magazine’s photographer covering the climb. Having bought the exclusive rights to the story, they planned to send Peter Gillman out as their reporter, but wanted to get pictures from the side of the face and to have someone to meet the team on the summit, should they prove to be successful.
Suddenly, everything had changed. This was the very chance that I had been waiting for. I should be able to use my ability as a climber to exploit a creative skill which could put my entire career and life on to a sounder, and what seemed to me a more worthwhile course. I accepted immediately, and it was arranged that I should fly out to Switzerland as soon as John was ready to start climbing – probably sometime early in February.
> Other opportunities then presented themselves. The BBC wanted to put on another live climbing broadcast, this time on the steep cliffs of Anglesey. Presumably as a result of my performance on Coronation Street, Chris Brasher, who had masterminded the BBC’s outside broadcasts from the very start, approached me asking me not only to perform in it, but to help find a suitable site for the broadcast as well.
I was to meet him on the weekend of the 7/8th February 1966, on Anglesey, above the south stack Lighthouse. The trip was ill-fated from the start. Wendy and Conrad came with me and we drove down early on the Saturday morning. Our little Minivan was now four years old and had done just under 100,000 miles. It was fast falling to bits, and on the way it developed some kind of distributor trouble. In spite of three years in the Royal Tank Regiment, and a driving and maintenance course, my mechanical ability has never gone further than opening the bonnet, pulling at wires and, finally, kicking the vehicle in exasperation, hoping that this would make it go.
We reached Holyhead that evening only to find that the BBC team had long departed. Tired and bedraggled, with Conrad bored and whining in the back, we drove to the Pen Y Gwryd Hotel, where the recce team were staying. We hardly had time for introductions when I was called to the phone. It was the Daily Telegraph magazine – John Harlin had just informed them he was about to set off for the face; could I fly out first thing the next day? John Cleare, a member of the recce party, drove me to Holyhead that night to catch the midnight boat-train to London. Leaving Wendy in the Pen Y Gwryd Hotel with a lonely bed, I was in the air by ten o’clock the next morning on my way to Zurich. I couldn’t help being wildly excited at the prospect of covering the climb, and had no regrets about not being a member of the climbing team.
I reached Kleine Scheidegg that evening; there seemed little risk of the team having set off, for the sky was covered by a scum of high grey cloud, and the forecast was bad. The team, which numbered three, were comfortably installed. Dougal Haston and Layton Kor had joined Harlin and I found them all in the room which had been allotted to them, at cut rates, by Fritz von Allmen, the hotel proprietor. It was an attic in one of the outbuildings and presumably was used for putting up his staff.
I only knew Dougal in passing, and had never climbed with him. On early acquaintance he seems silent and withdrawn – even contemptuous of others. He dresses with an almost foppish elegance, in a very mod style, but any risk of effeminacy is avoided in the cast of his features. His eyes are hooded, his face long and somehow primitive – a strange mixture of the sensual and the ascetic. Relaxed to the point of laziness, he has a single-mindedness which, when the need arises, enables him to direct his entire powers in the desired direction.
Layton provided a complete contrast. Over six feet in height, he reminded me of a big, awkward cowboy in some kind of Western comedy. He had the biggest hands I had ever seen, and they were constantly in motion, drumming on the table, clasping and unclasping – not so much from nervousness, more as a culmination of restless energy which could not be contained. In background, Layton and Dougal were very different. Dougal, the son of a master baker, had studied philosophy at Edinburgh University, had been bitten by the climbing bug and as a result had never completed the course. Even so, he was basically an intellectual, widely read, introspective and essentially philosophic in his interpretation of life. Layton, on the other hand, was a bricklayer, never aspiring to much else other than his own climbing. Whereas Dougal gave the impression of being completely self-contained, Layton was like a big, slightly mixed-up puppy, in need of love and care. He was a brilliant rock-climber and was one of the few American climbers, outside the small Yosemite bred and trained group of climbers, who had actually tackled routes in the Yosemite Valley. As a potential member of the Eiger Direct team, I found him intriguing, for this was to be his first taste of winter mountaineering and he knew even less about it than I.
They made me welcome and told me that the face had been in perfect condition a few days before, but that the weather pattern had now changed, leaving them to wait until it was more settled before making their push. This suited me; I was in the pay of the Daily Telegraph, staying at a comfortable hotel, with some of the best skiing in Europe on the doorstep – and I was very happy to spend a week or so skiing. There were problems, however. My relationship with John was no longer as easy as it had been, now that I had split loyalties between my paymasters and the team. I was the middleman. John wanted me on their side, getting as much support from the Telegraph as I could for the team. On the other hand, as representative of the Telegraph, I was hopeful that this would be the first of many assignments and I also wanted to ensure that my masters had a fair deal. This strain grew as the days slipped by without any sign of the promised spell of fine weather. I was becoming increasingly worried about the chances of the team. They had collected an impressive array of food, gear and clothing, but it seemed an awful lot for three men to shift up the face. John, recognising this fact, bent his own climbing ethics. The weight of the gear would have been particularly awkward on the lower part of the face, which was comparatively straightforward with long stretches of snow slopes broken by ice walls. At the top of this section, at the base of the First Rock Band, was the window of the Eiger Station. This was an eternal contradiction on the biggest, most unattainable wall in the Alps – that a man-made tunnel should spiral its way up inside the mountain, with a peephole from which the curious could gaze out on to the face.
John saw a way of utilising this. If we took all the gear up on the train, we could lower it out of the window and leave it there, thus saving two to three days’ hard work, ferrying it up the lower part of the face. These two or three days could, at the end of the climb, prove crucial. This was the argument: they were trying to climb the face in the most aesthetically pleasing manner, not by laying siege to it with thousands of feet of fixed rope, and therefore, surely, they should be allowed to make their own rules. I wondered. If you want to lower gear out of a window, why not use the train yourselves and start the climb at the window? But it was their climb – not mine; it was they who were going to take the big risks once they set forth up the Rock Band. So I suppressed my own doubts and, one afternoon, with Dougal, caught the train up to the Eiger Station and lowered three rucksacks, full of gear and food, out of the window. And there it stayed – for the weather still showed no sign of improving.
We skied, did a few practice climbs on the little pinnacles above Eiger Gletscher, drank in the Gastubel in the hotel and, on occasion, danced to the stolid, slightly Teutonic music pumped out by the three-man band resident there for the winter. February was drawing to a close – and I began to wonder whether the team would ever get off the ground – when the weather showed signs of improvement. Then John had an accident. He loved being the centre of attraction, dropped easily into Tarzanesque poses, and enjoyed showing off the odd feat of strength. Skiing down the Lauberhorn, he tried balancing on only one ski, tripped and dislocated his shoulder – the Blond God immobilised! The team decided to retire to Leysin to lick their wounds, leaving me to hold the fort in Kleine Scheidegg.
A couple of mornings later, one of the waiters called me and told me that someone was starting up the face. Looking through the powerful binoculars kept by the hotel proprietor outside his private sitting-room, I saw a number of tiny figures at the foot of the wall. One was undoubtedly starting up the first pitch. John had warned us that a German group was also preparing for the climb but we had never taken the threat seriously, having also heard that the team numbered eight. This was a ridiculously large number for an Alpine route – where on earth would they find sufficient bivouac spots for a team of that size? And so we had tended to discount them. But there they were – actually starting on our climb whilst our men were in Leysin with John out of action for some days to come. I telephoned him immediately. Though non-committal, he said they would return to Scheidegg immediately.
‘You might as well get over there and have a look at what they’re
doing,’ he suggested. Next morning I skied over – rather diffidently, since I am a very poor and timid skier – not at all sure of the kind of reception I could expect from the rival team. My fears were justified, for when I tried to get close enough to photograph them, one of their members started throwing snowballs. Retiring to a respectable distance, I carried on taking my pictures with a long-focus lens.
It didn’t take long to work out why they had a team of eight. Their entire concept of the climb was different from ours. It was obviously their intention to lay siege to the face, fixing ropes as they went, hauling up a mass of gear. Superficially this seemed a logical approach, for they were able to start out up the face even though the weather forecast was poor and snow was falling, while we had been sitting impotent at the foot of the wall for three weeks, and might well have remained there for another three, before starting it up. I was impressed by the systematic approach used by the Germans – it was obviously slow, but nevertheless very effective.
That night I told John what I had seen, and we determined to start climbing the next day. John was still out of action, and so Dougal and Layton were to climb up to the base of the First Band in order to start finding a route through it. I led them across to the foot of the face the next morning, and waved goodbye as they started up the fixed ropes left by the Germans the day before. Following these for about 1,500 feet, and using them part of the way, they made their own route in places. They reached the foot of the Rock Band in early afternoon and Layton started up. It presented very difficult piton-climbing and from a distance it looked completely blank – but this was the kind of climbing at which Layton excelled. At ground level he seemed gangling and awkward, barely able to control his great limbs whereas on rock he came into his own. He had an extraordinarily good power:weight ratio for a man of his size, with a delicacy and precision of movement that was a joy to behold. On the Rock Band he discovered tiny pockets in the rock, filled them with little wedges of wood and then tapped in a peg. He spent all afternoon making about thirty feet of progress and then retired to the small ledge that Dougal had cut out of the snow immediately below the Eiger Window.
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