‘We must have the wall, or it must have us.’
TONI KURZ
Translated from the German it means ‘the Ogre’. For a climber, the very name evokes terror and respect. If it doesn’t, you’re in the wrong game.
This 13,000-foot mountain in the Swiss Alps has attracted the most determined mountaineers for as long as the sport has existed. Not because of its height, but because of its unrelenting difficulty. And it is one of the few mountains whose fame extends beyond the fraternity of mountaineers.
Like Everest, the Matterhorn and K2, young children learn its name. And they learn that it hosts one of the most fearsome, epic climbs in the world: the North Face.
In German, it’s called the Nordwand. In the 1930s, it was nicknamed the Mordwand. Which means ‘Murder Face’.
This is not the story of how the North Face of the Eiger was finally scaled in 1938 by a brave German–Austrian team. It’s the story of a failed attempt just a year before that. A cautionary tale – that sometimes extremes of courage are not enough when you’re battling against the natural world for your own survival.
And a reminder of the many, horrible ways in which a mountain can kill you.
Toni Kurz was a handsome 23-year-old in July 1936 when he decided, along with his three companions Willy Angerer, Edi Rainer and Andreas Hinterstoisser, to make an attempt on the North Face.
These were the sports stars of their day. Their exploits were recorded on the front pages of newspapers.
When the day of the climb arrived, crowds of people stood at the foot of the mountains with telescopes and eye-glasses to watch the death-defying entertainment.
The four men knew that if they conquered the Murder Face they would be heroes. As they set out, they were overheard telling the local climbers, ‘We will have to climb your wall for you, if you will not climb it yourself.’
But mountains require respect. Fail to give it, and Mother Nature has a habit of reminding us – often the hard way.
The climbers started off roped together as two pairs, but before long they chose to rope themselves together as a foursome. It was more than just a mountaineering decision. It was almost as if they were making a statement: they were in this endeavour together. Any triumph would be theirs to share.
So, too, would any tragedy.
They started off well. They climbed the early stages of the North Face, across areas whose names – the First Ice Field, the Second Ice Field – were well known to Eiger-watchers. But then the mountain sent a warning shot clean across the climbers’ bows.
It was a warm day. And on the Eiger that’s not a good thing. As the sun’s rays hit the face, the ice melts and the meltwater starts to pour down the cliffs, bringing with it rocks and ice-debris. It is a big part of what makes the North Face of the Eiger so treacherous.
One small rock, falling like a bullet, smacked into the side of Angerer’s head. A shower of blood spurted out. He was alive but bleeding badly. Rainer was forced to hold back from the group and tend to Angerer’s injuries.
Soon he had staunched the wound, and the team decided that Angerer’s bleeding head wasn’t serious enough to abort the mission.
Despite this incident, they made good progress on the first day. They had scaled half of the North Face before they bivouacked for the night.
The following morning, the crowds at the base of the Eiger were even bigger. They knew that Angerer had been injured, so perhaps they’d come out to witness a retreat. But there was to be no retreat, and the team continued to climb.
It was apparent that Angerer was flagging, but still, by the end of the day, the climbers had reached the Third Ice Field. They bivouacked there for the night.
The following day, the spectators watched as Kurz and Hinterstoisser pushed on towards an area of the North Face called the ‘Death Bivouac’. But their companions, Angerer and Rainer, didn’t move. The wounds that Angerer had sustained on the first day were now taking their toll.
And so, despite being so close to success, the two leaders retreated back down to their companions.
The team might have started the North Face with an air of cockiness about them but, as climbers and as friends, they knew that Angerer’s life was worth more than the glory of scaling the North Face. The mountain was teaching them humility – and fast. If Angerer was unable to climb, he would need the help of all his companions to get back down to safety.
And they were there to give him that help. All for one.
*
If you’ve read the stories of Edward Whymper (see here) or Joe Simpson (see here), you’ll know by now that descents can often be as dangerous, if not more dangerous, than ascents. To help an injured and weakened companion down the sheer North Face of the Eiger would be a mammoth task.
At first, it seemed they were up to it. The Second Ice Field – a large, sweeping slope of compacted snow – seemed to the watchers below to present no great difficulty. They crossed it fairly quickly. But when they reached the area known as the ‘Rock Step’, which led to the First Ice Field, they started to slow down. Dramatically. At the top of that ice field, they had to bivouac for another night.
That day, they had only descended 1,000 feet. There were still 4,000 to go.
That third night, stranded on the North Face of the Eiger with an injured man, must have been a frightening one. Not only were they wet, cold and sapped of energy, but they also knew that the following day they would have to ‘carry’ their companion across some of mountaineering’s most fearsome climbs like the ‘Traverse’ and the ‘Difficult Crack’. Each man knew that it would be the hardest climbing of their lives – much harder than their original goal of the summit.
It would either make them or, quite literally, break them.
Dawn came. The spectators down below watched through their telescopes as the four men emerged from their bivouac. They descended the First Ice Field with reasonable speed. Things were looking promising, after all. But as they approached the Traverse, the weather took a turn for the worse. The mountain hadn’t finished with them yet.
Tendrils of mist started wrapping themselves around the North Face. Avalanches of powder snow, ice and rock started cascading down the mountainside.
Cloud continued to cover the mountain. The temperature at the rock face dropped dramatically. The streams of running water turned to bullet-hard ice. The observers down below could only catch occasional glimpses of the foursome.
The situation was getting brutal for the climbers. As they battled against the cold, the wind and the exposure, clinging to the sheer face for life itself, the reality of their predicament must have been beginning to dawn on them: they were going to struggle to get themselves off this mountain, let alone with their injured partner.
When the clouds parted, the crowds could see that only three of the climbers were attempting the Traverse. The fourth – Angerer – was at the rear.
Then the clouds covered them again.
As the mist unfurled once more, it revealed that the three able-bodied climbers had been forced to give up on the Traverse. Covered with treacherous ice, it had proved impossible to cross. The three men had spent the whole morning trying, but had succeeded only in exhausting themselves further. The stricken climbers were going to have to find another route of descent.
The trouble was, from their position, there was only one.
Vertically, straight down.
*
Straight down was the lesser of two evils, but it was still evil.
It meant that three able-bodied and one injured man would have to rappel 700 feet down a rock face that they couldn’t see the end of. And that is one hell of a long way to rappel.
In places, where outcrops of rock bulged out from the vertical, the climbers would be forced to rappel over overhangs with no idea whether their rope would lead them back to the face. And even if it did, they had no idea whether there would be anywhere for them then to anchor their next section of rope to, in order to continue down.
With no communications or guidance on whether the route was viable, they would effectively be rappelling blind. And, all the while, the falling stones and avalanches would be raining down on them like skittles in a bowling alley.
To attempt this rappel, and in a blizzard, would be suicide – but they had no other option.
They went for it.
At first, it looked like the team might pull off the impossible. Down on the ground, onlookers heard the group yodelling that everything was fine. As they got lower, they even sounded excited, as if they were starting to believe they could actually now make it.
What happened next occurred behind a veil of thick cloud, and we can only try to piece together the unfolding tragedy. But we do know that it was an avalanche that killed the first of them.
As the brutal weight of the tumbling snow smashed mercilessly into Andreas Hinterstoisser it ripped him free from his rope. He plummeted to his death, falling like a rag doll through thin air. His body slammed on to the rocks, thousands of feet below.
Hinterstoisser’s death was no doubt a devastating blow to the three remaining survivors when they were so close, but they couldn’t allow it to break them. They could mourn him later. For now, they had to survive. But survival was much more difficult with only two of them left to help their injured companion.
It wouldn’t stay like that for long.
The wounded Angerer was the next to die. Quite how it happened is not clear, but it seems that he slipped and fell, and the rope that was meant to save him ended up strangling him. Now he was suspended in mid-air, a hanged man, his corpse limp and gruesome.
The mountain was teaching some harsh lessons to those bold enough to have attempted the Face.
And the mountain hadn’t finished yet.
Rainer had been on the top end of the rope securing both Kurz and Angerer. But the combined weight of the men on the rope below him – one living, one dead – was crushing his chest. The pressure must have been immense and there was no way he could fight it. The force and the weight of the rope around him squeezed him in a vice-like death grip. He died of asphyxiation where he lay.
Only one man was left. Toni Kurz. Surrounded by cloud and death. But alive.
He was suspended in his harness, hanging from a rope thousands of feet above the ground on the Eiger’s brutal North Face. One dead body was attached to the rope above him, one dead body attached to the rope below him. He couldn’t move up. He couldn’t move down. And he couldn’t swing in to the rock face.
He could do nothing but hang there, and hope that somebody had the guts to come to his rescue.
*
There were mountain guides in the area, but their chief refused to force anybody to join the rescue mission. Kurz and his companions had known the risks of their undertaking, after all.
But the mountaineering community has always been close-knit, and it’s testament to the bravery of those guides that they agreed to mount a rescue mission, despite the very real dangers involved.
The guides struggled through snow-blasted winds to reach a point 300 feet below where Kurz was hanging. They called up to him through the screaming wind, and Kurz yelled back down. He explained what had happened to his three companions. Then he told the guides that their only hope of rescuing him was by coming down from above. He explained that he had left some climbing pitons (spikes) embedded in the rock above, from which the guides could lower themselves.
But the day was drawing to a close, and such an ambitious rescue would take time. To attempt it in the dark would be suicide. The guides yelled a question up to Kurz: ‘Can you manage one more night?’
The response was definitive, and delivered with a clear, strong voice. ‘NO!’
But the guides knew they didn’t have a choice. A rescue attempt in the dark was impossible. If Kurz was to live then he had to figure out how to survive one final night.
The guides yelled up at him that they’d be back at first light the following day, but as they descended, they heard Kurz’s voice echoing against the rocks and through the gale.
‘NO!’
That surely must have been one of the longest nights ever. Hanging in agony in his harness. Surrounded by death and darkness. Frostbitten and frozen on to the rope. Your friends, all corpses, hanging above and below you. Buffeted by the gale, swinging backwards and forwards. Backwards and forwards.
It was so cold that icicles, eight inches long, formed from the soles of his boots, as his wet clothes seeped and then froze. At some point during that interminable night, one of his gloves slipped from his hand. A cruel blow. Kurz must have known he was now in real trouble.
The cold then ripped into his flesh. First it froze his fingers, then his hand, then crept up his arm.
All the while, wave after wave of powder snow poured over him from the mountain above.
Hypothermia is a silent killer. It steals your ability to move. Then your ability to think clearly. Then it sucks away your will to stay alive. But Toni Kurz refused to give in to it. When the guides returned at first light, he was still there, frozen but alive – still able to shout back to them, albeit in a much weaker voice than before.
The rocks of the wall were now frosted in an icy glaze. Kurz still insisted that the only way they could rescue him was from above, but the guys knew it would take an expert mountaineer to descend that way, even in the best of conditions. And so, four of them ascended from below Kurz’s position.
They got to within 130 feet of him. So close.
They couldn’t see Kurz because of an overhang, but they knew his only chance was if he could somehow get more rope to rappel down on. If he could descend just a little further, they would be able to reach him.
They tried to fire some rope out at him, but the ropes just shot into empty air before falling limply back down.
Kurz had only one other option. One final chance at life.
He would somehow have to lower himself down to where Angerer was hanging and cut the rope. Then he would have to climb back, as high up the rope as he could, and cut the rope that had joined him to Rainer. Then he would have to tie the two ropes together and rappel the final section down to the rescuers.
It was an almost impossible task for an exhausted, frostbitten, hypothermic man with one arm frozen solid.
Almost impossible, but not quite.
The astonished rescuers soon heard the hacking of an axe against rope. The rope split, but Angerer’s body did not fall. It had been partially resting against the face, and had frozen solid to the rock. It took an avalanche – which only just missed the guides – to break the frozen corpse free.
It hurtled with snow down into the abyss.
Then, slowly and painfully, Kurz hauled himself up the rope and hacked away at it, separating himself from Rainer’s body.
Using just his teeth and his one good hand, he unravelled the rope he had freed. So far, the whole operation had taken him five hours. Five hours of unimaginable courage and determination.
Agonizingly, slowly and painstakingly, he tied the ropes together. It would normally have taken a man like Kurz seconds. But his body was shutting down. It took over an hour.
Amazingly, with his reserves of strength almost depleted, he managed to lower the rope down to the rescue team. And then, little by little, he started to lower himself down towards them.
It was slow, excruciating work. Kurz’s body was almost frozen solid. Just moving his limbs a few inches took Herculean willpower. But he fought against the pain, the fatigue and the menacing embrace of death and, little by little, he edged his way down.
And he so nearly made it.
He was in view of the guides, and in easy earshot. But there was a problem. Where the two ropes had joined, there was a large knot. In order to get past it, Kurz had to squeeze the knot through the snap-link on his harness.
Perhaps it would have been possible if one of his arms hadn’t been near frozen solid, or if his utterly spent body was not so totally drained of all his last reserves of willpower. The guides screamed words of encouragement at him over the wind.
‘Keep trying! Keep trying!’
He did keep trying, so far as his body would let him. He was mumbling incoherent words as he did so. The guides couldn’t make out what he was saying. His face had turned purple with frostbite and his lips could barely move.
His body could barely move.
And the knot wouldn’t move.
The guides watched, willing him on, but powerless to help.
Kurz’s movements grew slower still. More laboured, still.
His frozen left arm jutted out from his body, stiff, immobile – and useless.
In a final attempt to push the knot through his snap-link, Kurz summoned up his last reserves of strength and leaned forward to grab the knot with his teeth.
But the attempt failed. Toni Kurz knew he was about to die. He raised his head towards the guides and spoke once more. This time it was not a feeble muttering. The guides heard his words quite clearly.
‘Ich kann nicht mehr,’ he said.
I can’t go on any more.
Then Toni Kurz, having given it everything, slumped immobile and waited for death to sweep over him.
*
Toni Kurz is not the only person to have lost his life trying to defeat the North Face of the Eiger. But he makes it into this book not because of the ambitious courage of his original endeavour, but because of his stubborn refusal to surrender, even as the mountain and the elements threw their worst at him, beating the very life out of him.
Toni Kurz died trying, and his courage and raw determination have always been a humbling and inspiring example to me of a man who gave real meaning to the words: true grit.