The Eiger Northface - Dying In The Spotlight

Dear James,

In my native German language there is a term we use, when we want to express that something is the most difficult and/or most prestigious task in a whole field. We call it: The Eiger Northface. Like leading a horse fully free through a set of the most difficult dressage exercises, just by gestures without any equipment, is my Eiger Northface of free horse training. We also can use it, if we feel annoyed by someone hesitating before doing a quite simple task: “Jetzt komm schon! Das ist ja nicht die Eiger-Nordwand!” (Oh, come on! It’s not (as difficult as) the Eiger-Northface!). So, I was always curious to know, what stories lie behind this reputation, what makes the Eiger Northface that difficult to climb, that it got into our language. And one day, I started my little research and it – as usual – escalated quickly. There are a lot of stories to unpack! Way too much to fit into this format. But let’s start with the basic facts.

The Eiger is a famous mountain in Switzerland near Grindelwald and not too far away from the also famous Lauterbrunnen. Together with Mönch and Jungfrau it builds a beautiful mountain range, high enough to be covered with the white blanket of a glacier . The Eiger is the smallest of the Dreigestirn with “only” 3.970 meters, the Jungfrau is 4.158 meters high in comparison. So it is not the height, that makes it so legendary. And the first ascent happened already 1858 and didn’t cause too much fuzz, because that route is not that hard. But there is the north face and when you look at it, it is really something special. It is a harsh vertical wall, 1.800 meters up from the foot. It is slightly concave, so the sun never touches it directly. It stands quite free, so weather fronts hit it directly. This and its concave shape let storms blast over it in very uncomfortable velocity to say the least. Temperatures are usually in the minus spectrum and can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius, which is also not the best surrounding for a nice stressless climb. Avalanches and rock falls are also a huge problem on the vertical wall, as you can imagine. To ascent the Eiger Northface was the last of the three “last problems of the alps” (as it was later titled), after the Matterhorn Northface and the north face of Grandes Jorasses have been climbed. I can imagine that it became kind of the holy grail of the alpine world of mountaineers or, differently put, it became the Eiger Northface of mountaineering 😉. Of course, people wanted to climb it. There was triumph to pick up and a challenge to be wrestled with. Easy to understand, why it got so famous. But the Eiger has more surprises up its sleeve.

The first attempt was in 1935 by two climbers from Munich named Sedlmayer and Mehringer. And it was also the first drama of the Eiger Northface. The stories of the Eiger sound not so different at first sight from other mountain dramas. At the start, everything was fine, then bad weather hit. They had to stay in the wall longer as planned. Friends and Sedlmayer’s brother drove over from Munich to try to save them, but it was still snowing, avalanches were going down left and right and they had to give up at some point. A few days later a plane spotted one dead body in the snow. The spot where they were last seen alive got the cozy name Todesbiwak - yes, “bivouac of death”.

Shortly afterwards another tragedy unfolded and it is probably the most famous one. But before I start telling you about it, we should stop for the question, why I am able to tell that story in great detail. I wonder how you had reacted, reading it. I could imagine, that you might have read the story with interest, just patiently waiting, how it enfolds in front of your inner eye. But I am an author. For me every sentence bears the question, who wrote this? Who knows these details? Who has given that record?

The story starts with two German climbers, Toni Kurz and Anderl Hinterstoißer, and two Austrian climbers, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer. The Austrians had already done some preparations and had tried to get up the wall, but had to climb back. Now they bumped into the two Germans. Hinterstoißer created a path, where the Austrians hadn’t found a way a few days before. Because Hinterstoißer made a Pendelquergang, a manouver, in which you let yourself a bit loose to get a bit of momentum to start swinging. I imagine him kind of running along the wall to reach a point on the other side of the plate, where he fixed the rope. The others could just use this rope to climb the traverse that is since then called Hinterstoißer-traverse. But he didn’t leave the rope at the traverse, he needed it higher up, so he took it with him. You can taste the bitterness of this “but”, I bet. But why would you leave a rope when your plan is to go to the summit and then descend on a way easier route that is more like hiking then wall climbing? And here is a main difference to the tragedies of Mount Everest and co, where people mostly die whilst descending. If you get in trouble on the Eiger Northface, going down again might not be the fastest and probably not the safest path (yeah, and you can get high altitude sickness like in the Himalaya, but it is not as likely at 4.000 meters than it is at 8.000). Our climbers did very well that day, they climbed through the first ice field, then through the Eisschlauch and crossed the second ice field, before bivouacking for the night. But the next day, the weather turned and they seemed to only have passed the second ice field on that day. The Germans climbed higher up, passing the point of the Todesbiwak, but did then descend back to the Austrians. Next thing you know, they are all descending. Angerer seems to be injured, very likely from a falling rock. And now you hear it, right? I can tell you where they were at what time of the day, but that Angerer was hit by a rock is only a guess, that I can retell. Are you intrigued? A tiny bit perhaps?

I already mentioned that the Eiger northface stands kind of freely. That means you have a nice view from the close Grindelwald. And you have an even better view, if you take the train to the Kleine Scheidegg. The Kleine Scheidegg is where the foot of the Eiger Northface lies. From the terrasses of hotels like the Bellevue you have a belle view indeed to the Mordwand (“murder-wall”), how some people like to call it. Nordwand – Mordwand, a German pun, very much intended (“north wall – murder wall”).

Every climbing attempt can be watched and that is, what people did. Oh, and the press! How they like to storm up there to report on the missions! “If it goes right, they celebrate the heroes, if it goes wrong they criticize the climbers as selfish egoists that get rescue teams in danger”, I heard a journalist in a TV-report from the first winter ascent in 1961 saying, criticizing quite openly not only the climbers, but everyone who looks at the wall in interest, whilst seemingly disappointed himself, that there was no drama happening this time. I have to confess that the thought of rich people in the 1930’s on their posh skiing holiday in a fancy hotel in the swiss alps makes my Agatha Christie sense tingle. Like Spidey feels danger, I feel a great crime story opportunity coming up. I have to wrestle it down for now. Only for now.

A lot of people, press included, had first class tickets to the drama. They saw the climbers descending through the Eisschlauch and down the first icefield, where they were bivouacking. And then bad weather hit again. A cold storm shook the wall. Someone got into contact through screaming, but heard a “Alles in Ordnung”, coming back. Two hours later as he checked in with them again, they called for help. You remember the rope that lead them through the Hinterstoißer-Traverse? They would have needed it now, because they couldn’t make it coming from the other side in an upcoming storm.

And we come to the point that really took me by surprise. I wrote to you about the dangers of climbing the high mountains of the Himalaya, far away from civilization. Not much climbing, more like a serious mountain hike in life threatening conditions. Here we have a hard to climb wall (back in the 30’s some passages had the highest grade possible at the time), with harsh and fast hitting weather conditions, but with a lot of people watching and noticing, when you get in trouble. But the Eiger Northface has another feature that left me speechless: It has a door in it. Yes, you read that right. About one third up, there is a door right in the wall. And very quickly there came a rescue team through that door to have a look at the situation. I wonder, if there are other hard climbing routes with emergency exists. So, why is there a door in the Eiger north face? Time to tell you about the Jungfraubahn.

At the end of the 19th century, Switzerland seemed to be obsessed with building trains that go up mountains. One of the big dreams was to build a train that goes right to the top of the Jungfrau, one of the most famous mountains in the swiss alps. But it wasn’t that easy to find someone with a solid project that sounded doable. Then one guy had the idea not to start at Lauterbrunnen, but instead start from the Kleine Scheidegg train station. The first part would go overground, but then it would go into a tunnel, that goes round in the Eiger itself and drives over the Mönch to reach the Jungfrau summit. There should be stations along the way allowing panorama views to different sides. The main purpose was as a tourist attraction (and it turned out to be a good plan, because an unbelievable amount of people use this train to this day). Not easy to finance, but doable with little adjustments. The route never went up to the summit of the Jungfrau, but to the Jungfrauenjoch, which is the highest train station in Europe with the Sphinx Observatorium and research station - in James Bond villain lair look - a sight that makes this writer’s heart beating with excitement. There is a station called Eismeer, were you have a lovely view over the glacier and its crevasses. There is also a station called Eigerwand. There you have a precious view through the panorama windows. Yes, the Mordwand has nice Panorama windows in it and on pictures taken at night, you can see the lights of the station glow in the wall, which is nice. There is also a hole in the northface, because of an explosive accident during the construction of the tunnel. And there is the Stollenloch. That is the door, I mentioned.

Back in 1936, a Swiss rescue team was just in the station above and was brought down to the Stollenloch. They went out the door, couldn’t see the climbers, but heard Toni Kurz. The snowstorm was hard and they left again, telling him, that they will be back at daylight. Toni Kurz cried some painful Nein!’s into the night. In the first morning light, they came back to check the situation. I think, they could see Toni Kurz standing on a narrow rockband. The Seilschaft had been probably hit by an avalanche. Hinterstoißer’s rope broke and he fell to his death. Edi Reiner was probably thrown at the wall and had died from that. Angerer got strangled by his rope, his dead body still hanging underneath Kurz. The rest of the story is even more painful. The rescuers couldn’t come close enough. They communicated with loud voices, but couldn’t see Kurz. He was trapped on the wall still connected to his dead comrades. He had to cut the rope to Angerers body to be able to move, but that shortened his rope. He had to untwist another rope to be able to knot it together (those hemp ropes were always made from three strands). His left hand was frozen from the storm and who knows what other injuries he had, it took him three hours to do the task with his teeth and only one hand. Finally he let himself down on the rope. Only three meters above the rescuers he stopped. The knot was too big to go through the karabiner. Because he was so close, they told him, that they would catch him, he just needed to cut his rope. He would have needed to get himself up for the task, to reach above. Just one last difficult move. “Ich kann nimmer”, he said. “I can’t anymore”, and he died.

Till the end of my read, I thought, he would make it - at least long enough to give account of the events, that I had just read about, but no – as said, the press was watching from the ground. That was a shocking surprise. And only when they found Angerer’s body a few days later and found bandages around his head, they concluded, that he must have been the injured climber, they had seen through their telescopes earlier.

This well documented tragedy was the reason, the press started calling it Mordwand. And I guess it is the reason, why the name of the wall stands synonymous for the greatest challenge, the insurmountable wall. There exists a very famous photograph of the dead Toni Kurz hanging in the rope, where you can see, how close he came to the rescuers.

The Swiss government permitted further attempts to conquer the wall, but they couldn’t hold that up for long. But they freed the mountain rescue teams from the duty of having to help climbers in this dangerous wall. I am not sure though, if the rescue teams ever said no to one of those rescue missions. Two years later the wall was conquered by two Germans and two Austrians, who again joined forces on the wall. So the last problem of the Alps was solved. But to this day, the Eiger Northface is a dangerous wall. Weather reports and equipment get better, but the high risk of avalanches and rock fall only increases by the warmer temperatures. Over 70 dead climbers, I read… And so many stories to unfold. Maybe, I will come back another day to tell you some more about the dangerous wall with a door in its middle. Till then, I will look at the pictures of the Eiger at night. This dark sharp wall of storms and drama and the soft light of its train station glimmering like a sunken star in the cold nights of the Alpes.