Monte Zebru (3,735 metres)[1] looks like the raised fin of a giant fish. Sunlight, catching its north-east face obliquely, reveals a fine design like radiating bones. These are snow and ice ribs, varying in number according to the prevailing conditions on the face. Up to the right, the piscine image is fortified by an overall pattern of dark speckles – islands of rock penetrating the thin skin of snow and ice. The top edge of the fin runs more or less horizontally, though it carries a summit-point on either end. The face below the one to the right – the northern – was unclimbed from this side, although a route had been pushed to the south summit, up a completely white flank which lies almost always in shadow, being inclined towards the north. There is a plinth of out-cropping rock at the base of the fin, surmounted by a small hanging glacier – except that nothing is really ‘small’ here. The height of the face itself is some 700 metres. My two-fold climb of this giant fin took a full day, giving many adventurous hours: a first ascent to the north summit, followed by a first descent from the southern summit, both solo.
In some way it was another birthday.
I was climbing on my own because my friend Albert Morokutti’s leave had run out before I felt ready to go home. I don’t really consider myself a soloist; I far prefer sharing an adventure with someone else. That is not to imply anything against solo mountaineering: it is just a different kind of experience, often more dangerous, sometimes more intense, and one which takes you to the limits of existence – no other human can help you find the answers, only the mountain … and yourself.
Thinking about this climb, I sat alone in the hayfields of the Pfundser Tschy, waiting for Charlie to organise recovery of the damaged plane.
What brought it into my mind? During my solo on Zebru all those years ago, just as in the crippled aeroplane, there had been moments when I longed for some good flat earth beneath my feet. And it had been just as far away.
***
A thirty-metre hemp rope over my shoulder, some pitons in my rucksack and an ice axe in my hand: that’s how lightly I set out for Zebru. The hut warden had thoughtfully provided a couple of sandwiches, but these weighed scarcely anything, and my rope was quite thin – sufficient only for a self-belay on some of the more difficult passages, or for abseiling if it became necessary to retreat – you never know.
It was still only half light as I approached the face. The pale bulk of the Ortler rose to my right with its snow patches and the rock bastions of the Hinter Grat; and to the left, the Königspitze soared into the sky. Only a few days ago I had climbed that great face with Albert; true, the Giant Meringue still beckoned, the impressive summit cornice which no one had yet managed to overcome, but as a soloist, without the possibility of help or belay, I saw no chance of doing that for the time being.
Thus, everything was uncertain, as so often in life, even today. But casting light into uncertainty, transforming it by degrees to clarity, is the adventure of the mountaineer, an adventure for life. I will never be able to do without it!
The first rays of sun come up as I put on my crampons, but the spectacle affects me less than usual: I am tense with anticipation. What lies in store for me on this Zebru north-east face; and how will I cope with it, just on my own?
I feel in great shape. It is autumn now, and a whole summer of climbing lies behind me. Across the gently sloping glacier, I approach the steep face where it sweeps down from the north summit. The snow surface sparkles all around, scattered with crystals from the overnight frost – but I keep my attention on all the troughs and hollows, which could indicate a hidden crevasse. Falling into one of these is a great danger of soloing, when you have no lifeline, no companion with a rope to haul you back to the surface. Usually, nobody even knows where you are. You might manage to extricate yourself if uninjured, but the odds remain against you. A big transverse crevasse bars the way. I had already noticed it from below, had even discovered a snow bridge – but now, close up, I don’t fancy it at all. It is frozen bone-hard, but very flimsy. I probe around with my axe, but in the end I can see no other possibility and rush across it with momentum, catching a second’s-long glimpse into the frigid blue depths. Otherwise, the glacier holds no problems, it simply becomes increasingly steep. On all fours, I crawl up the white flank, plunging in the pick of the ice axe with every step. (I call it an axe, but it also has a hammer head.) The front points of my crampons, too, I thrust into the white surface, and I clutch a pointed ice piton in my left hand to make the fourth point of contact. I take great care always to have at least three points in contact with the mountain before making a movement: either two hands and one foot, or two feet and one hand …
To an outsider, this juggling of holds might sound a complicated and risky procedure, but when you have been climbing for years, it has long passed into your flesh and blood and you don’t think about it. The precision demanded by each step becomes second nature. On a mountain, imprecision takes bitter revenge, sooner or later!
At last I reach a vertical barrier of grey rock. Friable limestone, very similar to that on the Ortler, or over there on the Königspitze. For a while, I pause to study the possibilities ... Then, I inch my way carefully higher, testing every hold. No one has ever held this rock in his hand before! I am right to be cautious: a handhold crumbles away ... Frozen with horror, I watch the jumping pieces disappear into the depths. If more than one hold comes away at a time, so much for my good shape!
With infinite care I retreat back to the foot of the rock barrier, find a fissure in sound rock, and hammer in a piton. Then, belaying myself to this with the rope, I start climbing again. Careful only to trust my weight to holds by pressure – pushing down, not pulling on them – I sneak up the wall, stopping just once on a small ledge to extend my rope belay. That’s the way to secure myself with no partner gradually paying out the rope. At last, the rock band! There is a good crack. Bang! Bang! Bang! In goes another piton ... give it a vigorous wiggle ... it’s solid. Then, descending the rope, I hammer out the first piton. With a rope from above and easier now in my mind, I clamber back across this unfriendly fragile wall. True, it is a long-winded technique, but perfectly secure if the pitons are well placed. Taking out the upper one, I reflect that, alone like this, somehow these pegs become companions. (I could not know then that many years later a sort of belaying device would be given the name ‘Friend’.)
Coiling the rope, I take another look down the barrier ... That was some circus act, and no mistake, only without an audience. I feel totally calm, in balance, not bothered at all by being on my own. My gaze sweeps over the mountains: how blue they are, on this silent autumn morning.
And then it occurs to me that perhaps there is a spectator after all: Fritz Dangl, the warden of the Hinter Grat hut, the only person to whom I confided my intention, maybe he is watching through his telescope? It feels fine to be alone with the mountain – but it is good, too, to know that another soul shares your secret – even if only from outside.
But soon, climbing onwards, I forget all about Fritz and am conscious only, in this direct relationship with the face, of the overwhelming pleasure in discovering something new, a sense which increases by the minute. No, I don’t feel lonely at all! The face and I. Then, having been on the go for perhaps three hours, I find myself among the rock islands which stud the upper part of the giant fin, below the north summit. Every so often I can escape from the steep white snow to catch my breath in one of the faintly defined niches below the rocky islands. I am already high on the face, and totally content. The wall is surely mine! Yes, full of boyish presumption, I look across at the north face of the southern summit: perhaps I could climb down that way instead of the normal route? Pig-steep, it looks, no interruption, no niche, no place to rest. Still ... Ma gia che si balla, balliamo davvero! ... since we are dancing, let’s do it properly! I’ll give it another look from above, from the top – without obligation. Mmm ... but it would be very tempting to descend that way, clinging like a louse on a polished shovel, with everything around tilting away and plunging into the depths! Perhaps that’s not such a good metaphor after all: a louse has the benefit of six legs, which must make everything safer ... my goodness, imagine! Five points of contact …
A cool breeze! Does it mean the summit is close? A breath of wind that plays around the last rocks in this white world? The Ortler – over there – still rises above us, above me and my mountain. So it is higher, the Ortler, so what? What do height and size really matter? This is my mountain, my discovery – my route for all time.
Well, for a moment only.
Nothing lasts longer ...
An edge, the sky above me – and I’ve arrived. The summit! I scramble up the last steps, happiness storming through me – here it is, my summit!
I stand on it.
Yes, I have reached you – and by a path which no one’s eye had so closely beheld before; what streams through me may well be the joy of an explorer. What else? Contentedness, certainly, that the venture succeeded. And satisfaction, too, that I did possess the ability to move up here, to overcome the difficulties; in knowing for me mountaineering was not just a gamble. What else? A feeling of being part of nature. It surrounds you here, this nature, silently, with its greatest creations – the mountains.
Squatting on the summit, I look over at the Königspitze, soaring against the light – it is not yet noon, so it has taken me four and a half hours to climb the face. What a powerful cornice that Königspitze has! Will I ever succeed in climbing that? Not by myself, I won’t.[2] But the big snow roll continues to bewitch me as I skip along the airy waves of the connecting ridge between Zebru’s north and south summits, a bridge of no sighs or problems, wonderful with plunging views on both sides and distant panoramas. Where does the normal route go down? I have completely forgotten to take any interest in that. Probably, the face absorbed me so much that I thought: you will find out when you are up there. A mistake. In the meantime, this is the south summit! The whipped cream roll looks quite close from here. I lie down for a while to ponder it. When I rouse myself, it is time to start thinking about how to get down! What about the north face of this southern summit? Coming up, didn’t I flirt with its white steepness? From where I am now I cannot look into it. Towards its top, the face curves like a belly, and one would need to descend a bit before getting a good view down it. Gingerly, I step lower, turning in to face the mountain as it gets steeper, and continuing backwards on all fours, similar to the usual way of coming up on snow and firn. So far, so good. Finally, below my crooked arm, I catch a glimpse down … Heavens! It shoots off into nowhere! About 600 metres below, I recognise the small glacier where I started out this morning. Of course exposure is a feature of steep ice walls like this – you certainly do feel as if you’re hanging on them, and no better than a louse on a steep polished shovel standing against the wall. I’ll have another think about it – slowly I scramble back to the summit.
Whatever you do, you ought to have a rest first, my inner voice tells me. And so I lie down and it doesn’t take long till I fall asleep, stroked by the light breeze which plays around the summit, warmed by the mild autumn sun ... It is about an hour later when I wake up. Hop-la, time to go! If it takes as long to get down here as to come up the other face – this is going to turn into a very full day! There must be no more hanging around!
With no real relish, I set off down, into the abyss – it was so pleasant lying dreaming there on the summit. Yes, I definitely have to re-discipline myself to being on such steep ground again, to pay attention to every step and not make any mistakes. Sometimes, I glance through the gap between my arm and the wall, and the drop immediately concentrates my mind!
Zack! Zack! I ram the front points of my crampons into the steep and rather hard white surface. At the same time, I take my weight on my axe, the pick of which I press into the firn. With the other hand, I thrust in the long pointed ice piton, though it will not penetrate very far, so that I have to shorten my grip by putting a karabiner in the ring of the piton. I am wearing my hard hat, of course, since a small piece of ice or even a little stone could be fatal for a solo climber!
Zack, Zack …
Zack, Zack …
Zack, Zack ... the way down is endless.
After about an hour of this, I peer to see if there’s anywhere to rest. In vain. There is nothing. Everywhere, above and below me, is steepness.
So, go on. Zack, Zack …
Zack, Zack …
Finally, I hack a stance out of the wall, and take a breather.
How long I spend, leaning there, I don’t know. At first, I don’t look further than the snow in front of my nose. Then I try to estimate how far there is still to go. But it’s hard to say. Several hundred metres below me the small hanging glacier projects like a ski jump, and then, further down I see the valley floor, and out in the distance the Hinter Grat hut. Once down on the hanging glacier, I should have almost made it. It should be possible from there to traverse to the bottom. Looking down, far beyond the points of my crampons, I notice some rock islands which appear to be just above the small hanging glacier. Could I rest there? But they are still a long, long way down. I sigh, and start off again with increasingly painful calf muscles. How different this descent is from my sunny climb this morning.
Zack, Zack ... another two steps …
I am in shadow, here, and it’s cold – and gloomy. And the depth doesn’t want to come to an end.
Zack, Zack …
Can you ever get used to such monotony?
Is this how you lose attention ... grow careless, don’t give a damn?
It must be like that – all of a sudden one of my crampons slips and I am left hanging on the ice axe and the point of the ice piton. Blood is hammering in my temples! I go rigid.
This face has been storing up even more surprises for me, I realise now – black ice below me! Hell! That makes a difference.
Already, on a steep ice face, it is even harder to go down than up. Especially when it’s smooth and sheer like this. And on black ice? You need to have tried it to know what I mean – and not just for a short section …
I prefer to chip handholds here, and even several small notches for the front points of my crampons: that is not easy because the axe only has a short handle, so that I have to bend right down to fashion the notch for the next step. At the same time I am hanging with my fingers to another nick in the wall – a handhold which needs to be carefully chiselled out!
It is a lonely and acrobatic art, preparing this handhold, and the next, and the next, making them bombproof, so they don’t come off under my weight when I’m hanging on them to carve the next foothold below. I say lonely because, despite knowing that the warden of the Hinter Grat hut is almost certainly watching now, I have for the first time the sensation of being really alone. Nothing else in the world counts, except how to get down. Out of minutes, grow hours ... I have slowed right down, I’m very slow. But the hanging glacier down below, that white El Dorado, which even looks flat from up here, has inched a little bit closer! Its surface, down there, is, for me, the earth to which I return. I am looking down more often now, estimating more often how much is left to do. Fatigue, tense muscles, the continuous need for acute concentration ... all this suffering will fly away like a bird once I’m sitting down there in the snow! I keep thinking of this moment with anticipated pleasure.
Don’t rush it, take time, be precise! The message keeps flashing in my brain. Yet the temptation to hurry grows with every minute. Suddenly, something catches my eye: forty metres below me a black rock projects from the wall, like a pulpit, like an upholstered chair! A resting place, a gift from nature, by good heaven!
It was my greatest discovery on this face – the ‘easy chair’ on the north wall of the southern Zebru. A crazy invention, a cosmic joke: somewhere to sit in this relentless steepness, the only place to draw breath on the whole face.
I take advantage of its hospitality for, I guess, half an hour; sitting and looking, stretching my overtired muscles and relaxing completely – in the end I like it so much here that I feel it to be the most beautiful place in the whole world; and its only disadvantage is that I have to leave it. Still, the very presence of this heavenly pulpit, in the end made the wall seem a wee bit friendly.
Getting going again, after this long break, is a different matter. I am in high spirits, and the hanging glacier comes nearer. Here is the snow roof that leads to the bergschrund, but it’s still separated from me by a steep cliff. I manage to climb down a short distance on rock and sheer ice – then the business seems too delicate. I bang in a belay piton. Will the doubled rope reach to the bottom? No! Hopeless. Well, then, how about single? I tie the rope to the piton and descend over ice slabs and broken rock. With a deep sigh of relief, I finally stand in the snow of the roof above the hanging glacier. A couple of chops at the rope with the ice axe – it’s cut! I stuff the rest in my rucksack, (It’s not normally my habit to be so brutal with ropes, but I’d had enough.)
Down now, down the sloping roof! Whew, I look forward to being able to sit down there in the snow. Still on all fours, I scramble down quickly – it is almost a joy to move here. Now I am at the upper lip of the bergschrund. Boy, that’s a drop of all of five metres! But down there it’s flat. The snow looks good, no ice. For a moment I hesitate. Then I jump. There’s a flurry of powder; it’s like landing on a feather bed. I sit and laugh and laugh, I am so happy. I have done it! I have done it!
All that remains now is to scamper down to the valley, and back down to the hut, to Fritz. I have so much to tell him!
For a moment, though, I stop at the bottom of the plinth, and look back up at the giant fin. Two firsts in a day: one up, one down! The summit and the abyss. Like the light and the dark side of the moon. I’ll probably never do that again ... not alone.
Even though I have climbed solo from time to time since then, hardly ever have I found myself forced to ask: Where is your place? The soloist experiences the entire might of the mountains, without the outline of someone else between him and his peak. So, he can go beyond limits which the presence of another would impose ... But, in so doing, doesn’t he run the risk of losing the measure of reality? Doesn’t he build a surreal world for himself? What do people still mean to him?
Standing there at the foot of the Zebru face, it became clear to me again that my thoughts needed an echo ... an altered, variegated echo – one which is not reflected just from a wall, but comes from the heart of another. I am no soloist.
While I was busy on Zebru, my friend Wolfi was in the Dolomites with his girlfriend – Wolfi Stefan from Vienna, my rope mate on almost all my climbs in the western and eastern Alps. We continued to be an indivisible partnership until our professional activities separated us. Amongst our friends there were some outstanding soloists; the one who most readily springs to mind was Dieter Marchart. We used to meet him often on the Peilstein, the outcrops in the Viennese woods, and in other places, too. He climbed the Matterhorn north face solo – in five hours, if I remember rightly. And then, he was hit by a pebble from the ice couloirs of the Eigerwand …
Wolfi, Stefan and I have remained alive. Of course we have had our full share of luck. But we never envied the soloists their adventures.
I think of the Eiger: how much it meant to both of us to be roped to someone we’d known for years, finding the way together through stone fall, bad weather, and the vertical maze of slate which makes up this forbidding wall. Someone to lessen the hardship of bivouacs, to share a laugh with ... Seeing plans come to fruition, and the joy of your friend, too, when you are blessed with success ... All that, the soloist misses out on.
Perhaps some do it only because they have not yet found the right companion …
***
Having fallen asleep in the Pfundser Tschy meadows, I am awakened suddenly by two small boys wanting to know how the aeroplane’s rudder works. I do my best and, not entirely satisfied, eventually they leave. The rudder, it must have been, which was responsible for that descending spiral we made, that weird spiral staircase ride that brought us to this place.
The sun is pleasurably warm ... and soon I am dozing off again …
Séracs! A spinning icefall! Oh my, everything is going round again – at top speed. But what are all these shining towers? Crystal shapes of ice. What’s happening here, Charlie? Oh-oh! that’s not Charlie, that’s Jay at the controls. He is a Californian who lives in Courmayeur near the foot of Mont Blanc, and he often goes flying. I met him once, guiding: a blond, open-faced lad. He flings the plane into another steep turn, laughing with excitement. The motor roars and the Brenva face arches over in front of us like a spinnaker before a storm. Now the Aiguille Noire rotates above us, its pointed silhouette an immense dark crystal in the sky. Beyond it, barely moving at all, is Mont Blanc. My Mont Blanc.
1. Not to be confused with Gran Zebru or Königspitze (3,851 metres) to its south.[back]
2. See the chapter ‘The Giant Meringue’ in my Summits and Secrets.[back]