John Harlin - The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain That Killed My Father

W HEN I was a kid it always bothered me that Dad hadnt been able to survive most of his 4,000-foot fall. He would have wanted to savor the event: his ultimate experience, the one he had been looking forward to, even though he wanted it to come later. My mother made sure that the film in his movie camera was developed, because he would have filmed the whole thing if possible. Thats just how he was, and it would have been strange if hed changed at the last minute.

Or maybe he would have. Changed, that is. Another minute of life might have been enough time for him to reflect on his children, ages eight and nine, and to realize how selfish it was to die when they needed him. Or maybe he would have learned that the opportunity to watch his children grow up, to participate in their lives, is a much greater adventure than dying. And what about his parents? Did he think about how he was hurting them? No, I dont think he did. But if hed had that minute to think, perhaps he would have. Maybe its best he didnt. It was too late, anyway.

But who am I to criticize? My own nine-year-old daughter is watching me through the telescope as I climb past where Dad came down. I didnt want her to be watching; thats just how it worked out. Im here, climbing up the Eiger, headed toward the place where Dads rope broke almost forty years ago.

When I was young I believed the final sentences of Dads biography: Johnny has decided that, when he is grown, he wants to be a naturalist and forest ranger, with plenty of skiing on the side, and some mountaineering as well. Not on the Eiger, though; the Eiger is his fathers. His own eye is on the Matterhorn. That had been true when Dad died, when I was nine and he had promised to take me up the Matterhorn as soon as I turned fourteen. It did not stay true after I became obsessed with climbing and turned my eye on the Eiger.

This morning, when I tied into the rope, I was in the grips of destiny. I knew Id be here someday. I could have changed my fate, except that this is the fate I chose. My only fear was whether I would measure up to the challenge. For me, death isnt the ultimate adventure; its the ultimate failure. And while I can find no evidence that Dad ever wrote about needing his children, I write about my daughter all the time. It would be hard to find two people more different than my father and myself.

And yet a few years ago I was in a hut on the Italian side of the Matterhorn, perched on a sharp ridge at 12,000 feet, overhanging thousand-foot drops on both sides. A storm raged outside, and every so often the door would fling open and otherwordly apparitions appeared, clad in crampons, roped together, and coated in wind-driven snow. The door would slam shut and the climbers would shake off their snow-encrusted clothing. At an adjacent table an older man kept staring at me as my partner and I prepared our dinner. He was lean and weathered, maybe sixty, and reflected forty years of mountaineering past, with at least another decade left to go. His friends were all speaking in Czech, but this man was quietly staring at me. Finally he urged his young friend, who spoke English, to approach my table.

My friend wants to know, he said, are you John Harlin?

The older man didnt even know I existed. But hed been climbing in the 1960s, back when everyone knew about Dad, whose name was also John Harlin, and hed seen my fathers pictures. The next morning he and everyone else in the hut went down, scared off by the storms aftermath: ice-coated rock. My partner and I continued to the summit and over to the Swiss side of the mountain. We were on our way to the Eiger, but fresh storms got in the way and we didnt climb it.

Its always been the same. I cant go climbing without Dads shadow hanging over me. And I love that shadow as much as it appalls me.

I dont believe in ghosts, but thats not keeping me from looking for them here on the Eiger. Dad was the twenty-eighth person to die on this wall, and the toll has now grown to the mid-forties. Protection is now better, skills are higher, clothing has vastly improved, but above all we have helicopters to thank. Now when someone gets in trouble, at the first break in the weather a helicopter goes in with a rescuer dangling from the end of a long-line winch, and the would-be victim is plucked to safety. Its a different world today, a safer world, though gravity still makes missiles out of falling stones, and a flux in temperatures still glazes smooth rock with thin ice. Someone died here just two weeks ago. But theyre not dying at the rate they used to. Eight people died on this climb before it was even a route, before anyone made it more than halfway to the summit. The first three people to try climbing this wall solowithout a partneralso fell to their deaths. Dad used to say, Death is a part of it all. I say its the ugly part. But its why Im here, why Eiger climbers come. We come because they died, and by dying they created this legend, and we want to be a part of the legend, without dying.

Until the 1930s, the north face of the Eiger was just a tourist attraction: a gigantic shadowed wall of rock, ice, and storms, the biggest in the Alps. Its hard for me to see this 6,000-foot near-vertical face simply as a piece of Alpine decoration, but thats all it used to be. Not that it didnt already have stories. The Eiger, with its great brooding wall rising to a 13,022-foot summit, is the leftmost and smallest of three stunning peaks. The Jungfrau, meaning young lady or maiden in German, is the tallest and fairest, at 13,445 feet. In between rises the 13,368-foot Mnch. The story goes that the tempestuous Eigerwhich is often translated as ogre, though others deny the termwants to put his lascivious mitts on the Jungfrau, but is kept away by the jolly Mnch, or Monk. You can buy old cartoonish paintings and more recent postcards attesting to this relationship in the Alpine village of Grindelwald, which rests in the valley bottom almost directly underneath the Eiger. In Grindelwald, you have to crane your neck to see the Eigers summit 10,000 vertical feet above you. You can see a bit of the Mnch from there as well, but none of the Jungfrau. To see those peaks you need to take the cog railway up to a little cluster of hotels and restaurants at Kleine Scheidegg. At 6,760 feet, Kleine Scheidegg is well above tree line and far too high for a village, but it makes a spectacular setting for ski hotels, summer sightseeing, and Eiger gazing.