Things were looking up. At long last, a mere two years behind deadline, I had finished my book. My fee from the Cheddar broadcast provided a little money in the bank and I was full of ambitious plans for an Alpine summer, with some good partners to share them. In addition, Wendy was going out with me, and we had bought a large, Agincourt-style frame tent, especially for our family holiday.
And then, a few weeks before we were due to leave, I had a call from Tom Patey.
‘I’ve just been nominated by the Alpine Club as the British representative for this year’s International Rassemblement. They’ve left me to choose my companion. Joe can’t make it this year, so I wondered if you’d like to come.’
I accepted immediately, arranging for Wendy to join me later, as planned. A holiday with Tom was guaranteed to be unusual, varied and exciting. The previous year, when Tom had been climbing with Joe, the arrangement had not been satisfactory since, as a team, they were so much faster than Robin Ford and myself. But this time Tom and I would be climbing as a team. In addition, we should be living it up, for the International Rassemblement, or meet, was based on the Ecole Nationale de Ski et Alpinisme in Chamonix. The function was held every two years, and national clubs from all over the world were invited to send their representatives. I had already heard tales of superb food, free lifts on all the télépheriques, and free stays at the huts.
The international meet was due to start early in July, and I drove out with Tom. We had with us Tom’s bible of potential new routes; in it were a few additions to the previous year’s collection, the products of his ingenious research. The cuisine at the Ecole Nationale lived up to its reputation, with succulent steaks for lunch, unlimited red wine and masses of vegetables. The actual meet was a cross between Noah’s Ark, with pairs of different nationalities, and the Tower of Babel. Already a healthy element of competition was springing up between the big league climbers of the Alpine countries, fostered by the custom of listing everyone’s ascents as they were made. This was a little like a league table, which we all examined with care as we decided what to do next. An ascent of the Bonatti route on the Grand Pilier d’Angle would have rated ten points, probably by virtue of the fact that it was by Bonatti and had not yet had a second ascent, while that of the South-west Pillar of the Dru, once the most prestigious of all Chamonix rock-climbs, was little more than a trade route, and therefore would only rate two points in the prestige stakes.
Climbing with Tom, I was on safe ground – he was interested in nothing but new routes, which really defied any imaginary point count system.
The range of ability assembled at the Rassemblement was impressive. From Italy came Roberto Sorgato, one of its finest climbers – among many other routes, he had made the first winter ascent of the North Face on the Civetta, and had also made a couple of attempts on the Eiger Direct – at that time the most outstanding unclimbed problem in the Alps. Never bothering to indulge in competitive stakes, he was happy to eat, drink and flirt with the girls down in Chamonix. Equally uncompetitive were a pair of Mexicans, with neat little black moustaches. They wore beautiful blazers bearing their mountaineering club badge, but had no climbing equipment at all. To every invitation by their French hosts to actually go out climbing, they replied that the hospitality of Chamonix was so delightful and they were gaining so much from meeting their fellow mountaineers that they were happy to stay within the confines of the École Nationale. We shared a room with two inscrutable, but immensely courteous Japanese.
The International side of things started well, with two Americans, Steve Millar and Lito Tejada Flores, going up with us to do a new route on the West Face of the Cardinal, an elegant little rock spire above the Charpoua Glacier. Having cut our teeth on a comparatively small peak, I was keen to get on to bigger things. Ever competitive, I had my eye on the international point count. Tom, ever easy-going, agreed, and we worked through the Patey bible.
‘How about the Right-hand Pillar of Brouillard?’ I suggested. ‘Crew and Ingle failed on that last year. They couldn’t even get to the foot of the Pillar.’
‘Aye, that could be pleasant enough.’
The Right-hand Pillar of Brouillard, one of a trinity of three, is a rock buttress at the head of the Brouillard Glacier, the widest and most difficult glacier in the Mont Blanc region. Walter Bonatti had climbed the Red Pillar of Brouillard in 1958, and the chapter in his book devoted to this ascent comprises a hair-raising description of his crossing of the glacier and then dismisses the actual ascent in a couple of paragraphs – a tribute to the horrendous difficulty of the glacier. Crew and Ingle had fared no better, getting lost in a maze of giant crevasses, and finally, after falling into one, they retreated before even reaching the foot of the Pillar.
That afternoon, we happened to call in at the Bar Nationale, at that time the meeting point of all British climbers in Chamonix. Crew and Ingle were sitting at one of the tables.
‘Just arrived?’ I asked.
‘Yes. Conditions aren’t much good, are they?’ Pete replied.
‘Hopeless,’ I agreed. ‘What are you thinking of doing?’
‘Probably push off to the Dolomites,’ Pete replied.
‘You might just as well; nothing’s in condition.’
And then we had some beers and started talking about the south side of Mont Blanc. Tom, less competitive than I, even mentioned our interest in the South-west Pillar and then went on to suggest we joined forces. I kicked him under the table, and Crew looked nonplussed, muttering something about preferring the idea of climbing in the Dolomites, and shortly afterwards made his excuses and left.
‘I’ll bet you anything they’re going for the Pillar,’ I told Tom.
We crossed over to the south side of Mont Blanc the next morning, availing ourselves of the free télépherique tickets given to us at the Rassemblement. At this stage, judging Crew by my own competitive values, I was convinced he was probably on his way to the foot of the climb. I was all in favour of going straight up to the hut and, if possible, stealing a march on them – unless, of course, they were already ahead of us. Tom, the traditionalist, was convinced that no one could be guilty of such overt competitiveness, and insisted that we seek out their campsite in the woods of the Val Veni, and proffer our invitation once again.
We found them in a woodland glade, just out of bed and, over a cup of coffee, we quickly agreed to join forces. It was midday when we got away, plodding through the richly perfumed pine woods of the Val Veni and then up the winding path to the Gamba Hut. It stood on a grassy spur running down from the Innominata Ridge of Mont Blanc, flanked by the frozen cataracts of the Frêney and Brouillard Glaciers. On the other side of the Frêney Glacier soared the West Face of the Aiguille Noire de Peuterey – a petrified brown-yellow flame.
On we tramped, past the new Monzino Hut, solid and lavish, with granite walls and plate-glass windows, to the shell of the old Gamba refuge, a little wooden and stone hut which seemed part of the fell-side. It had seen a thousand exploits – some victorious, some tragic. Bonatti, with his client Gallieni, had staggered here that June day in 1961, through a blizzard, after four companions had died in their retreat from attempting the first ascent of the Central Pillar of Frêney. This disaster had highlighted just how remote are all the climbs on the south side of Mont Blanc. Now the hut had been superseded, and was already partly demolished. I was sad to see it go, for it seemed in keeping with the wild beauty of that outlying spur of Mont Blanc. The new hut represented civilisation’s cloying encroachment on the fast-shrinking mountain wilderness, when even the climbing huts begin to resemble hotels. Gone was the crusty old pensioned-off guide, who lived in a little cubby-hole at the end of the single, dark bunk and living-room.
But the ruins of the old hut still stood and, to save money, we stayed there. Next morning we watched clouds scudding over the summit of Mont Blanc; the weather was obviously unsettled and somehow our little team had not coalesced into a determined group. Perhaps it was too early in the season, and we were insufficiently fit, and so we turned tail, went back to the valley and then returned to the flesh pots of the International Rassemblement.
The next fortnight passed pleasantly enough, with another new route on the West Face of the Aiguille du Midi, a sortie into the Vercors with the great French climber, Lionel Terray (tragically, to be killed in the same area only a few weeks later), then the final party to close the Rassemblement. All the climbing dignitaries of Chamonix attended, and a list of everyone’s climbs during the fortnight was displayed, giving full vent and satisfaction to our competitive instincts. There was plenty of champagne, superb food, and Wendy, with a grubby and bewildered Conrad in tow, arrived halfway through the reception. She had driven out from England in our Minivan, with the girlfriend of a friend of ours.
They had had their share of adventures; a broken fan belt, just short of Dover, caused the car to boil dry before they noticed anything was wrong. Then, reaching the ferry only just in time, they were turned back because we had forgotten to have Conrad put on Wendy’s passport. They ended up sleeping in the van while waiting for the Passport Office to open, and then, next morning –
‘Have you the husband’s consent to take this child out of the country?’
‘But I’m going out to meet him. He’s already in France.’
‘But how do we know? I must have a letter of consent.’
Wendy, near to tears with fatigue and exasperation, then remembered that she had my most recent letter in her handbag. I had written that I was longing to see her. She showed this to the Passport Control man, and Conrad was duly entered on to her passport.
Across the Channel, halfway through France, it was getting dark when the dynamo failed. With lights getting dimmer, dazzled by oncoming traffic, they arrived at a garage whose owner allowed them to sleep on the garage floor while waiting for the mechanic to arrive next morning. At long last they drove into Chamonix. In spite of everything, although sweaty and a bit bedraggled, Wendy, in a mixture of tears of relief at finishing the journey and smiles at being with me again, looked fabulous. We all got happily drunk and then I smuggled Wendy and Conrad up to our room in the Rassemblement, to have one last night under a roof, before spending the rest of the summer under canvas.
Next morning we drove over to Leysin, in Switzerland, where we had arranged to meet Rusty Baillie. Rusty was a Rhodesian climber who had come over to Europe in 1963, immediately making his mark with the second British ascent of the North Wall of the Eiger, with Dougal Haston. I had met him in Zermatt immediately after he had made this ascent, at the time when Hamish MacInnes and I were trying to make our Matterhorn film. Having spent the previous year in Kenya, Rusty had been doing various odd-jobs, acting as a life-guard at a beach club, working as a game warden, and enjoying the hot sun.
High on the list of our possible objectives was the North Wall Direct of the Eiger. This had undoubtedly become the current Last Great Problem of the Alps – one of the most over-used cliches in mountaineering literature and talk. In recent times, a new last great problem has been found, attempted and solved, almost every year. European alpinists were beginning to run out of unclimbed ground – every face and ridge in the Alps had been climbed and had at least one route up it. Wherever there was room for one, a direttissima, or direct route, had been made, straightening out the original route to follow as closely as possible the imaginary line a drop of water would describe in falling from the summit. In many instances, in the Dolomites, these routes had been engineered by drilling a continuous line of bolts, making a mockery of the natural configuration of the rock, and the entire concept of the direttissima.
The possibility of putting a direct route up the North Face of the Eiger, however, did indeed have the ingredients for being the true Last Great Problem in the Alps. No other wall in the Alps combines length, intricacy of route-finding and objective danger to such a degree – a fact grimly proved by the ever-lengthening roll of accidents on the face. True, the original route put up by Heckmair, Vörg, Harrer and Kasparek was not technically extreme by modern standards – there was no pitch on the climb harder than Grade V, one grade below the top grade – but this fact ceased to have much significance to a climber caught in a blizzard, or confronted by rock covered by a thin and treacherous covering of ice; and all too often the North Face of the Eiger was either caught by bad weather, or was in a dangerously iced condition.
Strangely enough, it was Sedlmayer and Mehringer, the first serious party to climb on the face who, in effect, made the first attempt on a direct route up the Eiger. In the summer of 1935 they embarked on the bottom rocks of the face and took a fairly direct line up to the First Ice-field, climbing the first rock barrier near its centre. (On all subsequent ascents this line was turned, by the Difficult Crack and Hinterstoisser Traverse, well to the right.) They reached the Flat Iron, a prominent prow of rock in the middle of the face, and there their luck ran out. Hit by a savage storm, probably knowing they could never have got down, they tried to sit it out, and were frozen to death – the first victims of the Eiger.
Their deaths at least taught those who followed that the Eiger does not lend itself to direct ascents, for the strata stretch across the face in a series of smooth rock bands and ice-fields in the lower part of the wall, and in the upper part the lines are all diagonal, seeking to lead the climber to the edge of the wall. The route finally completed in 1938 was, therefore, essentially a wandering line, searching out the lines of weakness through this huge maze of ice-filled chimneys and galleries.
Climbers did not start thinking of a direct ascent until early 1963, though on my own ascent of the North Wall in 1962, Ian Clough and I caused a great deal of excitement amongst the ubiquitous watchers at Kleine Scheidegg, by losing the route in the upper reaches, and making one desperately difficult pitch, straight up towards the summit from just above the White Spider, before realising our mistake and coming back down.
In the winter of the following year, two Polish climbers, Czeslaw Momatiuk and Jan Mostowski, made the first recorded attempt to climb the Eiger Direct. They chose winter, hoping to reduce the objective dangers, since the Direct line also goes straight up the main line of stone-fall on the face. In winter the stones would be frozen into still silence. Following the Sedlmayer-Mehringer line, they were forced to turn back by bad weather at the start of the First Ice-field. Between 1963 and 1965 several more attempts were made by various leading European climbers, with little progress; no one did better than Sedlmayer and Mehringer, thirty years before.
From the start, the name Harlin had been closely linked with these attempts. He climbed the original route on the Eiger in 1962, a short time before Ian Clough and I made our ascent. His thoughts had immediately turned to the possibility of making a direct route, and he had camped below the face in the summer of 1963, but the weather had been too bad to make an attempt. He did, however, meet the Italians, Ignazio Piussi and Roberto Sorgato, who were also interested in the Eiger Direct. In the winter of 1964 he joined them, and two other Italians, in an abortive attempt, returning in the following June with the famous French climbers, Rene Desmaison and Andre Bertrand. They reached the top of the Second Ice-field before being forced back by bad weather.
Harlin had already made for himself a considerable reputation with a series of revolutionary new routes, using the newly developed technical climbing techniques which had been evolved in Yosemite. Tom Patey drove over to Leysin with us, and sociable as ever, suggested we should call and see John Harlin.
At this stage I regarded Harlin as a potential competitor for the direct route, and was a little defensive, perhaps, since he had already made several attempts, and presumably knew more of the problems than I. I had already heard a great deal about him – he was known in some quarters as the Blond God – a nickname not entirely affectionate, for his flamboyance and drive had made enemies as well as friends.
His house in Leysin was perched on the hillside overlooking the broad sweep of the Rhône Valley, with the Dent du Midi, standing like a Gothic cathedral on the other side of an empty void, hiding Mont Blanc: the Verte, Droites and Courts, whose snow-clad North Faces, white-etched with the black of distant granite, peered from behind the Dent du Midi, like three sirens tempting the climber to their cold touch.
We knocked and John opened the door. His title was well earned – he had a Tarzan-style physique and looks, from his blond hair to his thigh-sized biceps. He greeted us warmly, and ushered us into his big downstairs living-room. It was sparsely furnished with a few brightly coloured rugs and cushions scattered over the floor, a low settee and some big, bold, rather brooding abstract paintings on the walls. I learned later that these had been painted by John.
In the course of our conversation, my own suspicions quickly subsided – he appeared outgoing, frank, and immensely enthusiastic. I suspect that he had also viewed me with suspicion, as a potential competitor, but as so often happens, now that we met, antagonism vanished in a decision to join forces in our attempt on the Eiger Direct. We decided to make the attempt as a threesome, since I had already involved Rusty Baillie; we resigned ourselves to waiting until the end of the season, when the weather is often more settled, and the long cold nights reduce the stone-fall down the face.
John suggested that we should camp in the quarry immediately behind his house. We could get water from his outside tap, and even have the occasional bath. And so it was all settled, and things at last seemed to be slotting into place. We had a pleasant base for the summer, our team had been strengthened with John’s inclusion, and now all we had to do was wait, and climb, until the weather was sufficiently settled for the big North Wall. Our routine in Leysin became a leisured round of sunbathing in the quarry, playing on the abundance of boulder problems the crag offered and, in the evenings, wandering up to the Club Vagabond, the social centre for most of the English-speaking people there. It had been opened some years before by Alan Rankin, a Canadian who had tired of travelling in Europe and wanted to settle down. He had seen the need for a non-institutionalised, free and easy hostel, to provide cheap accommodation for travellers, without any of the puritanical overtones which tend to dominate youth hostels. The result was the Vagabond Club. It had a bar, discotheque and comfortable bunk accommodation. Regular habitués, many of whom eked out a living by working in the Club, were mainly Americans, Canadians or Australians who had, at least temporarily, opted out of the rat-race. Its shifting population encompassed thousands of young people wandering round Europe. Some stayed a few nights, others longer. It was a good place to drink at night – if you were alone, there was an ever-changing supply of attractive girls and a timeless atmosphere of slightly aimless pleasure-seeking, one which could be satisfying for a short period, but which could, perhaps, cloy over a longer one.
In the following week I saw a lot of John Harlin, and came to know him well. He had an extraordinary mixture of qualities, mirrored, perhaps, in the contrasts of his life and career. He had always been a brilliant natural athlete, excelling at almost every game and track event in which he took part. Since his father was a pilot with TWA, he had had a nomadic childhood, constantly on the move from one city to another in Europe and the United States. At Stanford University, where he first started serious climbing, he flirted with the idea of becoming a dress designer, even knocking on the doors of Balmain and Dior, to no avail, finally ending up at the other extreme as a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. At university he had met and married Marilyn, an attractive blonde girl studying marine biology, and by his early twenties had two children, a boy and a girl.
He had made little impact on the American climbing scene, mainly because in the early fifties, when he was at Stanford University, climbing in Yosemite (which was later to become the cockpit of world rock-climbing) was still in its infancy. It was not until the late fifties and early sixties that a small group of American climbers were to develop fully the new equipment and techniques, which were to enable them to tackle the sheer granite walls of Yosemite, and then to revolutionise rock-climbing throughout the world.
John was posted to Germany in 1960, and it was in Europe that he established himself as a mountaineer. Strangely, he was not a brilliant natural climber. On a trip he made to Britain in late 1960, he climbed with Ron James, who, at that time, ran an outdoor activities centre in North Wales. John was at a loss on British rock, and did very little leading. In the Alps, however, his ambition was boundless. He walked to the foot of the Central Pillar of Frêney in 1961, at the same time that Don Whillans and I, with Ian Clough and the Pole, Jan Djuglosz, made our first ascent, and turned back only because there was already too big a crowd there, in the shape of a rival French party In 1963, he established his reputation with his first ascents of the South Face of the Fou (in the Chamonix Aiguilles), and the Hidden Pillar of Frêney. John had been the architect, the driving force behind the venture, though Tom Frost, a brilliant Yosemite climber, had led the most difficult pitches of the climb. This was to be the pattern of many of John’s ventures – he provided the inspiration and drive, often using climbers who were technically more skilled than he, to lead the key section.
Taking the step I had taken two years before, he left the United States Air Force in 1963 to become Sports Director of an American private school in Leysin. Even with Marilyn teaching biology at the school and, in fact, earning a higher salary than he, their incomes suffered a considerable drop from his Air Force salary. That summer of 1965, when I came over to see him, he had taken a further step in commitment, leaving the American school to start his own International School of Modern Mountaineering. With an impressive brochure and a few students, recruited entirely from the United States, the new school was launched.
He had invited Royal Robbins, one of the leading exponents of Yosemite climbing, to be chief instructor, and the two men, both prima donnas in their own right, could not have offered a greater contrast. John, flamboyant, assertive and impulsive – Robbins, very cool, analytical, carefully avoiding any ostentatious show, yet every bit as aware as John of his own position in the climbing firmament. The pair planned an attempt to make a super-direct route up the West Face of the Dru, a line which John had attempted on several occasions with a variety of weaker partners, with consequently little success. With Robbins he was to succeed, and in doing so, to complete a route which to this day ranks as one of the most difficult and serious rock routes in the Mont Blanc Massif.
After the climb, Robbins had devoted himself to running John’s climbing school, whilst John himself put in spasmodic appearances, dreamed up new plans and snatched training climbs for our planned ascent of the Eiger Direct.
One such was on the Dent du Midi – a direct start to one of its ridges. The climb itself was undistinguished, but our way of climbing it was indicative of the nature of the team. We set out spontaneously after a fondue party in our tent in the quarry, which was followed by a long night’s drinking. In the early hours of the morning, staggering back from the Vagabond Club, we noticed that it was a superb, clear night – the first for some time.
‘We could do a route tomorrow,’ I suggested.
‘I know a new line on the Dent du Midi – how about trying that?’ suggested John.
‘How long would it take?’
‘We could be up and back in the day, if we started early enough.’
‘That’ll have to be now. It’s two o’clock already. We’ll have to pack some gear, and we’ve got to get there.’
‘What are we waiting for? Let’s go.’
And go we did; having packed the sacks, we piled into John’s Volkswagen bus, driving through the dark, down into the Rhône Valley and up the other side to the foot of the Dent du Midi. We reached the top of the road and walked through the woods to the sound of the dawn chorus, then up above the tree-line, and by seven in the morning we were at the foot of the vertical step in the North Ridge of the Dent du Midi, which had never been climbed direct. It was our intention to try out the American Big Wall climbing technique. In this technique the lead climber attaches the rope to a piton and then the second man climbs the rope, using jumar clamps. While he climbs, the leader can either rest or haul up the rucksack carrying all the gear for the climb. This was the technique we proposed to use on the Eiger, even though I had never used jumars before. We tossed up for who should have the first pitch, and I won. It gave pleasant straightforward climbing, leading up to a huge roof overhang. Rusty led the next pitch, disappearing round the corner of the roof and climbing a long groove. He reached the top. John was to follow him, being taken up on the rope, while I was to have my first try at jumaring.
‘Nothing to it,’ said John, as he climbed off the ledge, and disappeared round the corner. ‘Just clip on, and swing out on the rope.’
The trouble was, the rope was going straight over the lip of the overhang which jutted a good fifteen feet outwards above me. We had scrambled several hundred feet up steep broken rocks before starting to climb and, as a result, there was a giddy sense of exposure. I clipped on to the rope and stood poised like a trapeze artist under the big top. Had Rusty secured the rope correctly? I had to trust him. Did it pass over any sharp flakes of rock? God knows. I hated the thought of committing myself to that slender strand of rope – was even more determined not to show I was frightened, especially to the Blond God – and so, with a shudder, I stepped off the ledge, and went spiralling into space. The rope dropped with a sickening jerk – it had been caught round a flake. My own heart, already pounding, seemed to plummet down into my stomach. And then my swings decreased – the rope was intact, and all I had to do was climb it.
I now discovered that the length of the slings, which connect the jumars to one’s waist-loop and foot, is of vital importance. Mine were all wrong. They were too long, and incorrectly proportioned to each other. As a result, climbing the rope, especially with a rucksack suspended from my waist harness, was a murderous struggle. Later, I learned that an essential precaution for any jumaring is to tie a knot in the rope, so that if the jumars do slip on the rope, you don’t slide straight off the end. This was a precaution of which I had been blissfully unaware. Climbing with Harlin was a hard school – a constant game of Chicken, with no one prepared to call off first.
The rest of the climb was a romp, and we were back late that night, tired and happy, having completed a 2,000-foot climb and having walked round the entire Dent du Midi – about fifteen miles in all.
And so the summer wore on – the Eiger Direct always in our thoughts, but the weather never settled enough for us even to think of going over to Grindelwald. Rusty and I did, however, attempt a climb which was to give one of the most tense and memorable experiences of my climbing career. There was a fine weather spell in mid-summer and John used this for his ascent, with Royal Robbins, of the Direct on the West Face of the Dru. Rusty and I decided to have another try at the Right-hand Pillar of Brouillard.
We sorted out our gear one morning, assembling our meagre supply of American pitons. I wanted to travel light anyway, hoping to get away with a fast ascent. So much of the pleasure of climbing can be destroyed if you are weighed down by too much equipment.
When John saw our equipment layout, he raised an eyebrow and commented: ‘You guys sure do believe in travelling light.’
He was destined to be proved unpleasantly right.