Facing Eiger—the Mountain That Killed My Father
A son’s death-defying quest to fulfill his father’s dream.

By John Harlin III

When I was a kid it always bothered me that Dad hadn’t 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. That’s just how he was, and it would have been strange if he’d 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 don’t think he did. But if he’d had that minute to think, perhaps he would have. Maybe it’s best he didn’t. 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 didn’t want her to be watching; that’s just how it worked out. I’m here, climbing up the Eiger, headed toward the place where Dad’s rope broke almost forty years ago.

When I was young I believed the final sentences of Dad’s 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 father’s. 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 I’d 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 isn’t the ultimate adventure; it’s 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 En glish, to approach my table.

“My friend wants to know,” he said, “are you John Harlin?” The older man didn’t even know I existed. But he’d been climbing in the 1960s, back when everyone knew about Dad, whose name was also John Harlin, and he’d seen my father’s pictures. The next morning he and everyone else in the hut went down, scared off by the storm’s 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 didn’t climb it.

It’s always been the same. I can’t go climbing without Dad’s shadow hanging over me. And I love that shadow as much as it appalls me.

I don’t believe in ghosts, but that’s 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 midforties. 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 longline winch, and the would-be victim is plucked to safety. It’s 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 they’re 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 partner—also fell to their deaths. Dad used to say, “Death is a part of it all.” I say it’s the ugly part. But it’s why I’m 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. It’s hard for me to see this 6,000-foot nearvertical face simply as a piece of Alpine decoration, but that’s all it used to be. Not that it didn’t 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 Mönch. The story goes that the tempestuous Eiger—which is often translated as “ogre,” though others deny the term—wants to put his lascivious mitts on the Jungfrau, but is kept away by the jolly Mönch, 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 Eiger’s summit 10,000 vertical feet above you. You can see a bit of the Mönch 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.

It’s impossible to understand the Alps without understanding relative elevations. On the published page, elevations are just a bunch of numbers, but in real life these differences define the scale of things, and this scale supplies a Wagner-sized dose of melodrama. Absolute altitudes are as nothing before these relative numbers. The higher Mönch and Jungfrau, for example, hold no wall even close to matching the Eiger’s—nor does any other mountain in all the Alps, nor for that matter in either North or South America. You have to travel to the Himalaya to find such imposing verticality for so great a height.

When a climber today speaks of the Eiger, we assume he means its north face. Nineteenth-century mountaineers, however, ignored the north face—to them it didn’t look remotely climbable. At first all that mattered to mountaineers was the summit, and the Eiger’s had been reached way back in 1858 when an Irishman was quoted a cheaper price by Swiss guides for climbing the Eiger than the Matterhorn, which at the time was also virgin. The Irishman and his guide went up a ridge on the west side. Over the following years other ridges were climbed as well. Strangely enough, the north face wasn’t left entirely alone. At the turn of the twentieth century, Swiss engineers put a tunnel through it. They were on their way to the summit of the Jungfrau and put a switchback inside the Eiger, but after twelve years of blasting and picking through the Eiger and the Mönch, they finally called it quits inside a rock pinnacle on the pass between the Mönch and the Jungfrau, where they built a restaurant. The goal was simply to entertain tourists, giving them a cog-driven ride to Europe’s highest and most spectacular rail-served observation deck. I suspect it is the most amazing feat of tourist tunneling in the world.

Maidens, monks, ogres, ski lodges, and cog railways are not the reasons Dad and I came here. Our Eiger story begins in 1935 when a new breed of climbers from the Eastern Alps—Germany and Austria—brought their fresh vision to Switzerland in order to climb the biggest wall of all. Their new vision was that nothing was impossible. Every summit in the Alps had long ago been reached, and most of the ridges and easy faces had been climbed more recently. Now their goal was to climb the biggest and steepest of the faces, the ones that had been dismissed as ridiculous in earlier decades. Usually these faced north, where glaciers of old carved deepest and today’s ice and snow freeze longest. To accomplish their goals they did three things: they learned how to climb better than anyone else, they used pitons as artificial aids to help them get up what they couldn’t climb with hands and feet alone, and they risked their lives as no one had before. In short, they rose to the challenge. By 1935 all the great north faces in the Alps had been climbed. Except one.

The first two emissaries from the East arrived here in August—of 1935. Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer hiked to the base of the Eiger’s wall and in two days climbed halfway to the top, displaying the boldest, most technically proficient climbing ever seen in the Western Alps. They then froze to death in a storm. The site of their final ordeal has been known as Death Bivouac ever since, and Mehringer’s body sat there entombed in snow and ice until it was discovered in 1962.

Four more Germans and Austrians came the following summer, in two pairs of two. They met and joined up on the mountain, and in a brilliant display of navigation, they discovered a line of weakness on the lower face, which is somewhat easier than the route followed by Sedlmayer and Mehringer. The four made it almost as high as Death Bivouac when they turned back. The throng of journalists and other spectators at Kleine Scheidegg speculated that one climber had been injured by a falling stone. This had happened two days earlier, but they’d climbed on nonetheless until apparently the injured man was too weak to continue upward. All four were climbing down, slowly and carefully, when disaster struck. Below them was a section of rock on which they had used a special trick: the leader had traversed across smooth rock using tension from the rope. Now they had to reverse the tension traverse—but there was no place to fix the rope in this direction. As they searched for a solution, one of them slipped, plunging to his death. Another was pulled up to the piton, where he froze. A third strangled in the rope. Toni Kurz was still alive, trapped on the overhanging rock.

By one of those twists of Eiger fate, these events occurred within earshot of a tunnel window leading to the cog railway inside the face. Minutes before the accident, a workman had leaned out the window and shouted for them, since everyone knew there were climbers on the wall. A climber had yelled back a cheery “All’s well!” When the worker heard this, he put a pot of tea on the stove to warm his arriving guests. But an hour or two later they still had not shown up. According to Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider, the worker’s mood grew sour from impatience and he walked back to the window to find out what was delaying them. He yelled out into space, where wind-whipped clouds raced by. A desperate voice called back, “Help! Help! The others are all dead. I am the only one alive. Help!”

To continue reading, order John Hargin III’s The Eiger Obsession: Facing the Mountain That Killed My Father, published by The Lyons Press, 2009.

John Harlin III is the editor of the American Alpine Journal and a contributing editor for Backpacker magazine. A former host of PBS’s “Anything Wild,” he lives in Hood River, Oregon, and Oaxaca, Mexico, with his wife and daughter.