“Oh, are you still here?” A bagmans view of the Eigerwand

Friday, September 7, 2007

My alarm went at 3.30am. The weather looked fine. Up I got. A cup of tea on the stove, a cereal bar, pack-up and off.

Off once more with Mark Seaton, a close friend and my guide for a decade and a half. We had made many climbs together, but thought always of one, the North Face of the Eiger.

We departed the hotel at 4.30am and reached the tunnel entrance of the railway at 4.45am. On two previous failed attempts (2005 and 2006) we had climbed from Alpiglen, but repeating this unpleasant scramble on the lower slopes seemed pointless and we really wanted to be on the ‘face proper’ by first light. So instead we spent the first 45 minutes marching up the railway line in the tunnel. With a handrail as aid and our headlamps for light, this was perfectly pleasant ….until….there was a noise, almost indiscernible at first, but getting louder. Then a faint glow ahead, which became a light. It was 5am, what was a train doing coming down the mountain at 5am?

All of a sudden explanations seemed much less important than reality. There is no passing room on this single line track and we were about to be run over by a train, a somewhat ignominious end to our not yet hour-long attempt on the Eigerwand.

Mark and I turned tail and hoofed it back down the track. With seconds to spare, we found a tiny alcove and forced ourselves in. The train was upon us and Mark just had a moment to yell ‘headlamp’. I switched mine off and we prayed the driver hadn’t seen us. The train continued a little way then stopped. Did they see us? I don’t know, but anyway they continued down and left us in peace. A close call and an unexpected one!

The rest of the stroll up the tunnel was rather more nerve-wracking as a result, but at 5.30am we at last reached the Stollenloch Tunnel Entrance. There we ate an orange – our last fresh anything for a while – adjusted kit, and ventured out onto the Face. It was not a hospitable place. There was a great deal of snow and a dark, wintry feel. Mark admitted to feeling depressed. The whole thing did not look promising.

But, as so often happens, our spirits rose with the dawn. We needed a ‘break’, though, and hoped we might have found one in the form of a thick fixed rope going up from the tunnel entrance. Where did the rope go? Would it take us to the Hinterstoisser (a triumph!) or to some dead end under the Rotefluh (a disaster!)?

It turned out neither. The rope did take us, with some considerable exertion, to a very comfortable bivouac under the ‘sports wall’ of the Rotefluh, but a relatively easy traverse allowed us to get across from there to a position beneath the Difficult Crack, back on our route. Although we had probably gained nothing, we had lost little.

This was the third time Mark and I had taken on the Difficult Crack and we did it in ‘time-honoured’ fashion. He removed his pack and then climbed on one rope. With limited ‘tat’ and lots of ice, it wasn’t easy. Indeed at one stage the only purchase Mark could get was through backwards leveraging on an under-cut hold with the point of his axe! But he made it and I followed, heaving up my own sack and pushing Mark’s ahead of me.

As the previous year, the pitches over to the Hinterstoisser Traverse were unexpectedly demanding, although this time on rock rather than ice and névé. Here in 1936 Anderl Hinterstoisser, leading a four-man team, the second ever to attempt the Face, succeeded in crossing the bare limestone, polished smooth by rock fall. Fatally he took back in the rope after him, cutting off retreat and leading to an awful tragedy. Hinterstoisser himself fell and each of his comrades died in turn, leaving only the desperate young guide, Toni Kurz, fighting for survival. His final words, “I’m finished”, uttered almost within reach of rescue, have resounded ever since through the annals of mountaineering history.

However, without the storm of last year swirling around us, the famous Hinterstoisser Traverse was much easier. It was badly iced, but there were strong fixed ropes in place and I easily got myself across using a combination of Tyrolean Traverse and a lot of pulling. This time, mercifully, Mark did not fall and we reached the Swallow’s Nest Bivouac without incident.

The bivouac looked distinctly different from when we had slept there the previous October. There was much less snow now, which made it seem larger, but less flat. It was for me quite a significant moment, because this was as far as I’d ever climbed on the Eigerwand. It was also a decision point: from here we could still retreat easily; beyond here any retreat would in all likelihood have to be a rescue. To use Mark’s words, we would “no longer be cragging on the Eiger”.

It still wasn’t 3pm and we had a full 5 hours of light left. We had a choice: sit it out in the known bivouac or try to get to Death Bivouac, but knowing that we might not reach that far by nightfall. I thought it an easy choice and said so. We could not give up 5 hours of light. We must push on. And we did.

We started with a slightly awkward descent from the Swallow’s Nest, but soon established ourselves on good ice on the First Ice Field. This eventually ran thin as rock and ice became horribly mixed in the area generally referred to as the Ice Hose. This was the toughest climbing we had faced so far. Mark was forced by lack of ice onto the rocks on the left and was soon staring back at a long, long run out.

This was followed by a big traverse right – my undoing! It was simply more delicate crampon work and a finer balancing act than I was capable of. Furthermore, Mark had used a tension traverse off a runner that was not available to me. I careered off and fell via a big arc, caught by a well-placed bit of protection. Using my ‘ropeman’ (cambered prussocking device), I climbed almost within reach of this, then the friction went and I descended back down violently with the ropeman still in my hand.

Up I went again and this time reached and removed the protection. But once more I could not hold myself and fell a third time in another huge arc, crashing with great force onto my left knee and butt. I was in pain, but remarkably no real damage had been done. The feeling of free falling down the North Face of the Eiger was not great, but I held my nerve, confirmed that my bodily faculties were still in tact and resumed climbing. The fun was not yet over and there were some further “unimaginably committing” (Mark’s words) pitches before we reached the comparative security of the Second Ice Field.

By this stage a beautiful sunset was unfolding beneath us. In the west we could see the sun for the first time that day as it lowered gently into a sea of cotton-wool clouds. At 8.05pm it sank beyond sight. The light failed rapidly.

It wasn’t entirely silent though. There was the clear noise of a helicopter making repeated sorties. We suspected that there was afterall another party on the mountain, who had needed rescuing, but we didn’t really know.

Mark was above me putting in ice screws to protect our ascent. Meanwhile I climbed the Second Ice Field on the North Face of the Eiger at night with the aid of a head torch. Could things get more exciting?

Oh yes. The Eiger is infamous for falling apart. Climbing at this same point in 1962 with Chris Bonnington, during the First British Ascent of the Face, Ian Clough described how “I tried to make myself as small a target as possible, receding into my crash helmet as a frightened tortoise does into his shell”. Clough escaped the stonefall; I wasn’t quite so lucky. There was a flurry above and a large quantity of ice (and rock?) broke off and descended in the dark onto my head. I could do nothing but cling to my tenuous position on axe and crampon points as the hurtling debris poured over me. One piece gashed open my nose, which began to bleed everywhere. Rather more concerningly, another seemed to shatter my headlamp.

I was able to retrieve the pieces of headlamp and tuck them in a pocket, but didn’t dare try to reassemble them on that steep ice slope. Instead I radioed Mark to update him and climbed up ‘by feel’ to join him at his ice-screw belay. There we together restored the headlamp to action.

All this had used an inordinate amount of time. It was now well after dark and the priority was finding an improvised bivouac. Mark discovered just this at the top of the Second Ice Field. It wasn’t spacious, but with a bit of digging, there was room for him to lie down and me to slouch seated. It was 10pm and we had been climbing constantly for 15½ hours. We were too tired to cook, so it was melted snow water and cereal bars for dinner.

At one point half our belay failed and the sacks set off down the mountain, threatening to take us with them. Fortunately the remaining protection held firm. But, from then on, a couple of tiny rock wires was all that kept the two of us and all our equipment ‘in situ’. I had never had to cope with a real bivouac like this – I did cope, but not well. Indeed I had quite a ‘faff’ before settling down in my sleeping back with my thermarest folded under my butt. Wearing all my clothes, including boots and helmet, I was still cold, but not unbearably so. I did eventually get some fleeting sleep at around 1am, possibly a couple of hours.

The previous year I had thought the Swallow’s Nest a tight bivouac, but it was luxurious compared to this. However, by pushing on, we had put ourselves in a much, much better position for the ‘morrow. And the weather seemed to be holding.