while they were crossing a snow-slope, an avalanche broke away, carrying them with it for some six hundred feet. Teufel struck the lip of a crevasse, breaking his neck. Herbst got away with his life.
That was a bad enough beginning….
A few days later two Austrians, Angerer and Rainer, arrived and put up a tent near the Scheidegg, both proven climbers, especially good on rock. As such, they were particularly outstanding at route-finding on vertical cliffs. They remembered how difficult the great rock-step below the First Ice-field had proved, and how Sedlmayer and Mehringer had taken it out of themselves on it. They felt sure there must be a direct route over to the right—up what later came to be known as the “First Pillar” and the “Shattered Pillar”—towards the smooth, perpendicular, unclimbable wall of the Rote Fluh (the Red Crag, a long-established feature of the Eiger’s base). Below it, there must be some means of traversing across to the First Ice-field. Would such a traverse be possible?
On Monday, July 6th Angerer and Rainer started up the Face by their newly conceived route.
What did the wall look like at that particular moment?
The late Othmar Gurtner, the great Swiss climber and well-known writer on Alpine matters, wrote the following on July 8th in a Zurich paper, Sport.
An unusually changeable period of weather has hampered the progress of glaciation during the last few weeks. Heavy falls of snow and cold, raw days have preserved powder-snow down as far as 8,000 feet…. If one examines the North Face of the Eiger thoroughly for its conditions, one is led to the following possibly deceptive conclusion: on account of the heavy covering of snow the lower parts of the Face, and also the two great shields of ice above Eigerwand Station, invite climbing in the cold hours of early morning, when the snow ruined by the evening sunshine has become crusty again. It is possible to kick safe steps without use of the axe and to move forward very quickly in such snow; at the same time it lacks solid glaciation, i.e. firm consolidation with the old snow beneath. Because of the slight amount of sun on the Eiger’s North Face it behaves like typical winter snow. Higher up on the Face and especially on the almost vertical summit-structure itself, the powder-snow is plastered on the rocks like sweepings from a broom. And, in between, there is the glitter of water-ice … this ice has its origin in the melting water which runs down from the mighty snow-roof of the mountain. So long as there is water-ice hanging from the summit structure, the whole Face is seriously threatened by falls of ice. Then one can actually see whole torrents coming down and craters made by them very closely situated in the snow. The Face is at the moment in the terrifying conditions which persist between winter and summer….
As we write this report, the Rainer-Angerer rope is moving “according to plan” up the death-dealing wall on whose actual conditions we have reported above….
The warning expressed in that report was written by a very great expert.
But Angerer and Rainer were no suicide squad; they, too, were well aware of the great danger, transcending all human strength and courage. They succeeded in opening a new route up the lower part of the Face to just below the Rote Fluh, where they bivouacked; next morning, July 7th, they climbed down again, and reached their tent wet through and tired, but safe and sound. “We shall go up again,” they said, “as soon as conditions improve.”
The papers scented a coming sensation. Now that climbing attempts have been focused in the limelight of public interest, their readers had a right to be kept informed in detail about proceedings on the Face of the Eiger. The reports were almost like communiqués of the General Staff during a war, even down to the constantly repeated titles: “The battle with the Eiger Wall”, “The Acrobatic Contest on the Eiger’s Face”, “New Life on the Face”, “Lull in the Eiger Battle”, “The all-out Investment”, “First Assault Repulsed”. And sometimes they even went to the length of puns, such as Mordwand for Nordwand.1
The ill-fortune of Herbst and Teufel appeared in many papers under the common headline of “Accidents and Crimes”. Many sarcastic comments appeared on the subject of “extreme” climbers and the public, avid for a show. But was it really surprising that people who knew nothing of mountains should make pilgrimages in their thousands to savour a shiver of horror while standing in perfect safety at the eyepiece of a telescope? The Eiger’s Face had become a magnificent natural stage.
The newspapers of July 7th and 8th certainly carried widespread expressions of delight at the safe return of Rainer and Angerer. All the same, every word and movement of the two men was recorded, and interpreted however it suited best (for gladiators must needs bow to the wishes of their public); yet the climbers themselves wanted only to be left in peace and, finding they were not, defended themselves after their own fashion. Many high-sounding phrases were uttered and accorded more weight than is normally given to the pronouncements of V.I.P.s. “We are having another go!” they said. What presumption, after the grim bivouac, which many papers had described as a life-and-death battle, while Angerer and Rainer laugh it off scornfully with: “Grim? No, only just a trifle wet!”
And since these were no men of worldly affairs, but just ordinary lads, who did not weigh every word in the balance, and certainly didn’t suspect that under the tension of the moment it would be given undue emphasis or be wrongly reported, they gave this answer to the barrage of questions as to why they came here bent on such a venture: “We have to climb your Wall for you, if you won’t do it yourselves!” Or, still more in keeping with their pathetic youthfulness and the age in which they lived: “We must have the Wall or it must have us!”
That sparked off a new storm.
In this context, an article in the Berner Bund, which read: “Everyone who has come to know these charming, good-natured lads heartily wishes them a successful outcome to their venture,” did much to pour balm on wounds.
Yet neither ridicule nor solemnity could influence events. On Saturday July 18th 1936, the two ropes Angerer-Rainer and Hinterstoisser-Kurz started up the Face. At first they moved independently; at the level of the bivouac previously occupied by the two Austrians they roped up as a foursome. The rope joining them was no longer a dead length of hemp for them but, as it were, a living artery, seeming to say: “for better or for worse, we belong together”. This was an uncommonly daring, but in no sense feather-brained undertaking.
They climbed the exceptionally severe crack below the Rote Fluh successfully. Above it, Andreas Hinterstoisser was the first to achieve the traverse to the First Ice-field, climbing in text-book fashion with the help of the rope. This technique of the “rope-traverse” had already been discovered and developed before the First World War by that master of rock-climbing, Hans Dülfer, during his first ascents of the East Face of the Fleischbank and the West Wall of the Totenkirchl in the Kaisergebirge. In this way Dülfer showed how to link climbable pitches by the use of a diagonal “lift” from the rope on unclimbable ones. The current joke about the Dülfer technique ran: “You go as long as it goes, and when it doesn’t go any more, you just do a traverse and go on.”
It was this kind of traverse which Hinterstoisser did on the Eiger Face. He had discovered the key to the climb. When they had all completed the traverse, he retrieved the traversing rope. In doing so he threw away the key. If it came to a retreat, the door to the way back was now locked behind them … but who was thinking of a retreat?
Many were watching the four men through field-glasses. And the spectators forgot their criticisms in admiration, even astonishment, at the speed and assurance with which the two ropes crossed the First Ice-field, climbed up beyond it and reached the barrier between it and the Second—the greater—Ice-slope. Since the Sedlmayer-Mehringer attempt, everyone knew how difficult those rocks must be.
But
