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Getting to the Top Is What’s Important : Mountain Climbing in Switzerland Tests One’s Courage and Love of Adventure

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Times Staff Writer

The deed is all, the glory naught. --GOETHE

To nonbelievers, humans who try to climb treacherous mountains are nothing but masochists trying to prove something to themselves.

Climbers don’t look at their sport in that light, of course. Men who take unusual risks, they believe, are not the worst types. To them, the climbing of the most horrific wall is an irresistible joy and a challenge to their courage and love of adventure.

If a mountain beats them, they lose to it less out of fear than to human failings such as doubt, ambition and an obsession with competition. Climbers, after all, are human.

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Climbing a mountain, they say, tests a man’s worth. An Austrian journalist, Kurt Max, once wrote: “Climbing is the most royal irrationality out of which Man, in his creative imagination, has been able to fashion the highest personal values.”

Said John Harlin, a U.S. climber who perished on a mountain in 1966: “Control of fear is the spice.”

Mountain climbing, like skiing and running trains on time, is a way of life in Switzerland. In this pretty little country only half the size of Maine, there are 38 mountains towering more than 13,000 feet. The Swiss call them “four-thousanders,” because they are at least 4,000 meters tall.

The two most famous ones both are forbidding slabs of rock on which men and women, for more than a century, have tested their worth and courage.

One, the Matterhorn, soars 14,690 feet above the village of Zermatt near the Swiss-Italian border. Isolated in lonely splendor from dozens of other awesome-looking peaks in the Pennine Alps, the Matterhorn is perhaps the most photographed and recognizable mountain on the planet.

The other, the notorious Eiger, measures 13,042 feet, seemingly soaring straight up from the picturesque Alpine village of Grindelwald. It is a stunning blend of ice, rock and sharp, knife-like ridges. If you have seen Yosemite’s El Capitan, you have an idea of what it looks like.

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The Matterhorn has become famous less for its height than its forbidding appearance and sheer cliffs. Viewed from the streets of Zermatt, which lies at its foot at 5,315 feet above sea level, it looks like a solitary rock pyramid with a hooked profile.

Humans are dwarfed by its immensity when they view it from closer range, say, from Schwarzee, which can be reached by gondola from Zermatt and is the station from which climbers begin their ascents.

The Matterhorn has become probably the most fashionable peak in the world to climb. It is such a soft touch to scale under normal conditions, in fact, that 3,000 or so climbers try it every year. One of five is a woman, and about 80% of the climbers make it to the top.

With a little training and a good guide, a novice can climb it. Some rank amateurs scale it easily on good days in the summer and a few try it in jeans and sneakers, which disgusts and embarrasses the Swiss mountain guides.

On a clear day in the summer, said one local cynic recently, “There are 600 or 700 people running up the Matterhorn. They go up in slippers and tennis shoes. It’s too dangerous for mountaineers; they’re afraid they’ll be killed by falling rocks caused by all the traffic.”

The fellow, a Swiss tourist official, was exaggerating, of course, but in truth, on a good day last summer there were as many as 80 climbers on the mountain at one time.

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Zermatt guides are quick to warn visitors, though, that the ease with which the Matterhorn can be climbed on some days is misleading. An average of 12 persons die on it every year, and Othmar Kronig, the president of the local guides’ association, said that more than 1,000 have lost their lives trying to climb it since it was first scaled in 1865.

The recent season was one of the best in years for a climber to be on the Matterhorn, Kronig said. It was also one of the safest, since only five climbers were killed. The rock was dry all summer and the weather was so good that climbers were still going up in mid-October.

Still, Kronig said: “You shouldn’t go home and say it was easy. It can change overnight.”

Kronig speaks from long experience on the mountain. At 47, he has been a guide for more than 20 years and has climbed it about 80 times. “That’s not much,” he said. “Some have climbed it more than 500 times.”

The other mountain in question, the Eiger, is one of the most dangerous in the world and is usually much more difficult to scale than the Matterhorn. Oddly, however, only one or two climbers usually die on it every year.

During the recent season, however, six were killed despite almost perfect climbing weather that continued into October.

Fewer climbers are killed on the Eiger than the Matterhorn because there is less traffic and because only experienced alpinists usually try to scale it. It is too dangerous for the novices who try to climb the Matterhorn.

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In a busy season, only about 500 climbers will attempt an ascent of the Eiger. Many more come to Grindelwald to look at it because they’ve heard so much about it, then climb one of the taller but easier peaks in the neighborhood.

The normal and easiest route to the top of the Eiger is the west flank, where the movie, “The Eiger Sanction,” was filmed.

Still, loose rock makes it treacherous, so the wise climber stays on the track that has been followed since an Englishman, Charles Barrington, first scaled it in 1858. Legend has it that Barrington really wanted to scale the Matterhorn but the climb cost too much.

The most popular route for an experienced mountaineer is the Eiger’s east ridge, or the Mittellegi, which is more dangerous and difficult than the West. Viewed from the east, the Mittellegi appears as sharp as a knife. It is so sharp, in fact, that a climber can go up it only one way. To the Swiss, the east ridge is a classical climb and attracts the most climbers.

The south face is even harder than the east. “It is a very hard, steep climb,” said Frei Ueli of Grindelwald, an Eiger guide for 15 years. “It is a technical rope climb and takes about 10 or 12 hours.”

It usually takes about four or five hours to climb the Matterhorn but the record is three hours for a round trip, 1 hour 50 minutes up and 1 hour 10 minutes down.

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But what really sets the Eiger apart from its taller neighbors such as the Monch, Wetterhorn and Jungfrau is its infamous north face, or Eigernorwand . The Germans call this immense mass of rock, snow and ice Mordwand, which means murder wall.

The north wall has rare beauty and unique size. It is a sheer, smooth precipice of limestone that rises straight up for 5,900 feet from a 7,000-foot shelf. Because much of it is vertical and smooth, snow does not cling to it as it does to the surrounding mountains, and the wall stands out starkly from its neighbors.

Wrote Austrian Heinrich Harrer: “The Norwand is the epitome of everything tragically sensational in mountain climbing. It is a 6,000-foot bastion of rock and ice, a test of technical ability and character.”

Indeed, from Kleine Scheidegg at the foot of the north wall, the human eye can detect no place to graspits polished surface. The bottom half of the wall is usually icy, winter and summer, and on the upper wall lurks the treacherous “White Spider,” a mass of snow and ice that looks, well, like a giant spider.

Its body and legs are snow and ice, and all the gullies, cracks and crevices surrounding it are filled with ice. Every climber must cross it. There’s no way around it. It is the most difficult part of the climb, and often is a peril faced when a climber is tired after long, arduous hours of climbing.

To an experienced guide, every mountain is dangerous. But the north face of the Eiger is special. Sudden blizzards strike it and the temperature can plunge 25 degrees in an hour. That’s known as Eiger weather.

The mountain’s exposed position as the northern terminal of the Swiss Alps is responsible for the quick changes. One minute the sun will shine, the next minute a thunderstorm will hit the mountain, followed by an avalanche. At the same time, the weather may be clear on other peaks in the area.

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Arnold Glatthard of Meiringen, a former guide, was one of the first climbers to make it up the north face. “It’s not just a question of difficulty, it’s the danger,” he said of the climb. “All the time on the Eiger it’s winter. The north face is a terrible wall. It is not a nice mountain. To be on it, it’s ugly.”

Compounding the problems of climbers on the Eiger is the instability of the limestone. Falling stones have taken a dreadful toll in the last half century and, as Heinrich Harrer once said, “Falling stones are a danger over which man has no control.”

Stones fall so frequently, in fact, that they create what the Swiss call “the concerto of the Eiger stonefall.” Small stones are said to have a high whistle. Medium-size rocks hum fiercely. Some stones howl and others sound like drums or cymbals.

Mountain surfaces and climbers vary from year to year, even day to day, guides say, and there is no mountain, no face anywhere on earth, of which that can more truly be said than of the Eiger and its north face.

The north face got its reputation as a killer early. The first nine climbers who tried to scale it in the mid-1930s perished. The difficult east ridge had not been climbed until 1921 and the north wall was thought to be unclimbable when two Germans, Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer, started up it in August, 1935.

The Germans were stopped by a terrible storm, which sent the temperature plunging below zero and set off avalanches. They survived on the wall for five days before freezing to death. Four more climbers died the next year, trying to retreat.

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Then, in July, 1938, four climbers, Harrer among them, made it to the top. It took them more than three days. They cooked meals and slept while hanging on the mountain. Harrer said after his safe return: “I was conscious of the privilege of having been allowed to live.”

Later, after he had had time to reflect on his stunning achievement, the Austrian climber wrote: “Climbing on so incomparable, so immense, so desperately lonely a face as this is in truth an advanced school and supreme testing place of a man’s worth as a human being.”

Nobody else scaled the Norwand from 1938 to 1946 and, in fact, the Swiss government banned climbing on it in the early 1940s. The ban was lifted after three years. Today there are no laws in Switzerland to prevent even an inexperienced climber from killing himself on any mountain.

“I can kill myself if I want to,” said Othmar Kronig, the Zermatt guide. “That’s the way it should be.”

More than 40 climbers perished on the north wall in the first 40 years after it was conquered. It was so difficult to scale that only a dozen climbers reached the top in the first 15 years.

Today, although it is still one of the most dangerous rock faces in the world to climb, the north wall is, by all accounts, easier than it used to be. One reason is better equipment. But there are also about a dozen well traveled routes up the wall now and in some treacherous places, pitons or ropes have been left to aid climbers.

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It was climbed by a woman, Daisy Voog, a secretary from Munich, Germany, for the first time in 1964, 90 years after American Marguerita Breevort had become the first woman to scale the Eiger. Breevort went up the west flank.

In 1963, a lone climber, Swiss guide Michel Darbellay, made it to the top of the north face in 18 hours. He was the fourth to try it without a companion. The first three were killed. An Italian, Walter Bonatti, also tried it alone, retreated and said what most nonclimbers probably think: “No mountain is worth as much as one’s life.”

The north face has been climbed as fast as 10 hours with the climbers, Rinhold Messner and Peter Habeler, descending to Kleine Scheidegg the same day.

But in 1970, four Japanese finally reached the summit, a sharp ridge about five feet long and three feet wide, after nine days on the face. Six Italians needed seven days to climb it in 1962.

In 1959, two Swiss climbers, Adolf Derungs and Lukas Albrecht, made it to the top, Derungs wearing only four shirts against the cold and Albrecht an old overcoat, which he threw down the wall before he reached the top.

The normal ascent of the North face begins at the Eiger glacier, which is about 7,500 feet above sea level. The first quarter of the climb, said guide Marco Bomio, takes only one or two hours. “You could do it,” he told a reporter.

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The easy way to do it, Bomio said, is to climb to the ramp the first day, bivouac there, then go to the summit and down the West flank the second day.

That schedule leaves the climber facing the White Spider while he is fresh and the loose rocks are still frozen. Fall, in fact, is the best time to climb the Eiger, Bomio said, because there are fewer loose stones to knock you off the wall. However, there is a danger of running out of daylight.

The use of helicopters to rescue climbers, begun in 1971, is one reason deaths have declined. Climbers are responsible for paying for their rescue, though, so most of them take out an insurance policy for less than $10. A record price for a rescue was paid by a Japanese climber in 1970, about $12,500.

Mountain climbing here often is a spectator sport. When someone is on the north face, word quickly spreads and Eiger watchers head by train, or on foot, up to Kleine Scheidegg to view the show. The element of danger makes it good theater. Many watch through binoculars while having lunch or a drink.

A climber can risk his neck on the north face for about $235, which includes the cost of a guide, food and a night’s stay in a mountain hut. A climb up the Matterhorn costs about the same. Climbers must equip themselves, however. The guide will supply only a rope.

“It’s a risk for a guide to go up the mountain with an inexperienced climber, and it is his duty to refuse you,” said Christian Kaufmann of the Grindelwald Mountain Guides Assn. Most climbers who try the North face, in fact, go with another alpinist rather than a guide, Kaufmann said.

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Although normal ascents of the Matterhorn scarcely exceed a moderate degree of difficulty, a climber must at least be fit, and those who have trained in the Zermatt area usually get priority from the guides.

Guides here warn that it is still a difficult climb and should be taken seriously. Sudden changes in the weather often turn a seemingly harmless track into a hazardous route. In bad weather, even an experienced alpinist can lose his sense of direction.

The famous peak was first climbed July 14, 1865, a seven-man party making it to the top on two ropes. Four of the climbers perished on the descent, however, when an inexperienced climber, apparently tired, slipped and fell, dragging three others to their deaths.

Conditions can deteriorate rapidly in high Alpine climbing. “It happens when you get snow on the rock, which you do on the Matterhorn quite often,” Othmar Kronig said. “It snows even in the summer.”

On bare rock, a climber gets good friction between the sole of his shoe and the rock. He gets less friction in snow. “It gets more delicate,” Kronig said. “I’m surprised there aren’t more accidents.”

Accidents occur when climbers lose the route and stray from the path that is solid and free of loose rocks, overestimate themselves and get tired and careless on the way down, or continue an ascent in bad weather, he said.

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“Guides’ parties turn back in bad weather; guideless parties continue. It’s foolish,” Kronig said. “They have come from a long distance and think they have to climb it today because they will not return. They have gone to a lot of expense, so they push it, as we say. This can be very dangerous.”

The Matterhorn also has a dangerous face, and like the Eiger’s it is the north wall. “It is only climbed by experts,” Kronig said. “Not too many try it. Only six or eight this season.”

Three previous attempts to scale the north face ended in failure before two Germans, Franz and Tony Schmid of Munich, made it to the summit in 1931 after arriving in Zermatt on bicycles. Yvette Vaucher became the first woman to climb it in 1965, 94 years after Lucy Walker had been the first female to scale the Matterhorn.

Felicite Carrel was the first woman to attempt to climb the mountain. She was accompanied by two men who wanted to prove that even a woman in a skirt could make it to the top.

They left her about 400 feet from the summit, however, which still was a great achievement, considering the way she was dressed. Photos in the Matterhorn museum in Zermatt show many women climbing in long skirts and bonnets.

Princes, queens and kings have climbed the Matterhorn, among them Albert I of Belgium, Queen Elizabeth of Belgium and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands.

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If climbing to the top seems too strenuous, you can always fly up and circle the summit in a helicopter. Japan’s Yoshimasa Wada had a helicopter drop him on the top of the mountain last May and he went down it on skis in 4 1/2 hours, flying 984 feet down the sheer north face with the help of ropes.

Why use a helicopter when you can go up and down on foot? Because it’s there, of course.

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