Age Can’t Stop Him from Reaching Peak : Mountaineering: Switzerland’s oldest guide is gaining new heights, even at the age of 89, and has no plans to stop.

Ulrich Inderbinen cannot see why he should stop climbing some of Europe’s highest mountains just because he’s 89 years old.

Slightly bent, he steadily climbs a knife-edge crest of snow on the 13,666-foot Breithorn mountain, oblivious of the drop of nearly 6,500 feet to a glacier below.

As Switzerland’s oldest mountain guide, he knows the risk but is confident. He climbs not only in the course of his work, but also when he wants to relax.

“Why not? Why shouldn’t I go as long as I can,” he asks down below in the village of Zermatt, smiling through his thick handlebar mustache.

“The first thing is not the money. What I like is that I can do it at my age,” he said, adding another reason: “If you want to see Almighty God, you must go to the mountains.”

A lifelong resident of Zermatt, he climbed the famed Matterhorn for the first time just a few years after World War I, using boots with nails on the bottom to grip the snow and ice.

In the next 60 years, he led other mountaineers up that craggy 14,688-foot peak about 350 times. He cannot remember the exact number.

The Matterhorn belongs to the exclusive club of 13,100-foot Alpine giants in which Inderbinen has specialized. He estimates he has probably stood at the summit of one of those giants between 3,000 and 4,000 times.

He has recently stopped doing the most strenuous climbs--especially those requiring two or three days’ work.

“I’m now a bit older than usual,” he says. His permanently tanned, kindly face is etched deeply like the mountains he loves.

Inderbinen stopped climbing the Matterhorn in 1982, although two years later, he still tackled Mont Blanc, looming at 15,777 feet as Europe’s highest peak.

He now “contents” himself with slightly less-arduous climbs on mountains like the Breithorn, where the oxygen is nevertheless thin enough to give headaches to lowlanders, or nearby Pollux, which requires the breaching of 70 glacial crevasses.

Mountains like these can still be treacherous in a sudden summer blizzard or thick clouds.

“I go slowly and steadily--that is my trick,” he notes, adding that every climb is risky.

Thirty years ago, as he and a client were descending a snow field on the Italian ridge of the Matterhorn, his foot fell into a snow hole and, his balance lost, he slid a terrifying 60 feet.

He dislocated his shoulder, but the companion was safe.

At the age of 86, on a mountain in a nearby valley, an ice avalanche swept over the track where he and a woman climber had walked just two minutes before.

In 65 years of guiding, only one of his clients was injured--a broken arm from stones falling off the Matterhorn.

More than a dozen Zermatt guides have been killed over the years but the guides in general have a safe record. Locals say they know when it is too dangerous to keep climbing, and even if a sudden storm surprises them, they know the best way back.

How does he keep going? “I’m always in training,” he says.

In the winter he skis to stay fit--last January in unseasonably warm weather he even climbed the Breithorn a couple of times and skied down.

For two or three months in the spring, he takes groups ski-touring, away from groomed trails, across glaciers and up and over dangerous passes.

On the trail, he drinks only warm tea, never alcohol. Back in the village he will occasionally have a glass of wine but shuns beer and tobacco.

His wife died five years ago at the age of 87, and he is not sure how long he will be strong enough for climbing. Even if he weakens, he hopes to muster the strength to climb the Breithorn at least once next year--as a 90-year-old.

Until then, he resolves to continue what he describes as his simple life, living with his daughter without a telephone, fearlessly and resolutely climbing another three or four mountains a week.

“I just plan one day at a time,” he said.