Above: the south flank of the Jungfrau (4,158m) sparkles high above the Jungfraujoch.
This week I was in Switzerland, where the first snows have already capped the peaks of the Mt Blanc range and during a couple of days of sunshine, my appetite for the winter season has been gathering force under the dazzling skies around Lac Leman.
Historically, it is not here but further east that my climbing history begins. Seventy years ago, in September 1939, my grandmother's diary records of her trip to climb in the Bernese Alps and, incredibly, of her return home to England on 3 September, the day Britain declared war on Germany. The years leading up to this point marked a defining period in the history of Alpine climbing, and typically for the 1930s, as the world became more polarised economically and more torn politically, it was contrasting ideologies that underscored many of the routes pioneered in rock and ice and snow, across the range known for its extreme difficulty as 'The Little Himalayas'.
Above: the ghostly north face of the Monch (4,107m) laden with ice and snow, with the famous eisnollen embossing the north-west spur. The north-east spur is home to the challenging but less-frequented Lauper route (TD+).
Little over a year before my grandmother's adventures, July 1938 had seen the first ascent of the North Face of the Eiger, with four climbers from Austria and Germany 'uniting' en route (and, ironically, little more than three months after the Anschluss of those two countries), surviving two days of fierce storms battling the upper third of the face, and finally planting the German swastika (no less) on the summit of the Eiger at 3,970m on 24 July 1938.
Don't expect to find mention of these aspects (including the flag, Harrer's SS membership, the athletes' subsequent feting by Hitler at Berchtesgarten, the memory loss after WWII despite continued ties with former Nazi figures) in Heinrich Harrer's book, The White Spider, or in most accounts written since. Whether by choice (as it seems) or by the curse of association that belonged to the times (the Schmidt brothers who made the first ascent of the Matterhorn's north face in 1936 had also been congratulated and rewarded by Hitler and his acolytes), it is difficult to say, but generally memory loss seems to evoke guilt rather than innocence or duress, just as the ice-fall of the Eigergletscher threatens more than it is beautiful.
More surprising than this, is the fact that on 22 July, as Harrer's party struggled hidden in the stormclouds, an Italian trio led by Ricardo Cassin arrived quietly at the base of the mountain, intent on making the first ascent. When news arrived of the Harrer party's success, Cassin immediately set a new objective: the 'last great problem' of the Alps, the unclimbed Walker Spur on the Grandes Jorasses. Cassin completed this climb on 6 August, 1938 with his companions Esposito and Tizzoni, a postcard photo their only guide to conquer a mountain none of them had ever seen before. Two of the six classic north faces had been climbed in the space of three weeks, but it was the people's hero Cassin, survivor of the Badile just a year earlier in 1937, who solved the last great problem of the Alps.
After 1938, Harrer went on to tackle Nanga Parbat, the Himalayan peak which had been beseiged obsessively by German expeditions since 1932. Notoriously in 1934, the Nazi government had lavishly sponsored the second expedition to the mountain, which included Willo Welzenbach, whose first acscents of the Bernese Alps still stand out today for their extreme difficulty and bravery in the face of objective dangers. Trapped in a terrible storm at around 7,500m sixteen of the expedition began to battle their way down the mountain in a blizzard, at the loss of Welzenbach, Uli Wieland, half a dozen sherpas and the expedition leader and three-time Nanga Parbat veteran Willy Merkl. For its 'protracted agony', this would have been undoubtedly the worst Himalayan tragedy of the times, were it not for the fact that a worse disaster was to befall the fourth German expedition in 1937, when all sixteen members of the team were overwhelmed and killed instantly by an avalanche as they camped high on the mountain's Rakhiot Face.
Harrer and three companions, while conducting the much smaller sixth expedition to Nanga Parbat in 1939, were arrested in September, following Britain's declaration of war on Germany (no doubt as the latch dropped shut in the yard as my grandmother returned home). Harrer himself soon escaped from an internment camp in India into the Himalayan winter, his north face epics no doubt helping to sustain him in flight through to Lhasa, friendship with the Dalai Lama and post-war fame as a (selective) writer on subjects ranging from his exile in Tibet to a history of the Eiger and musings on the last great problems of the Alps.
Ricardo Cassin, the blacksmith and boxer from Lecco who was so close to depriving the Nazis from seizing their measure of glory on the Eiger, volunteered to fight Fascism in his own country when war broke out, applying his alpine skills to maintaining links between the partisans operating in the hills and in the cities, rather like my hero Robert Jordan from Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Cassin's closest climbing companion from the 1930s was killed in a street-fight; Cassin himself survived the war, and was decorated for his actions in the campaign against the 'Salo' republic after it came crashing down in the partisan uprising of April 1945.
My grandmother's adventures remained locked in our family memory, until I found out about them earlier this year. Seventy years have passed, and the Bernese Alps are little changed from their wild, intimidating early days. The currents of history run deep, like frown lines, across their tremendous limestone faces clotted with ice and snow and shrouded in spectral clouds. Far below, dark green paint is peeling from the eaves in Kleine Scheidegg, where crowds of skiers flit around the slopes and the fogged-up train carriages reek of schnapps and the small affluence of bliss. I am standing there, in boots, while all this goes on around me, watching the afternoon sun bleaching the faces of the Eiger and the Monch, quietly wondering if Harrer, or Cassin, or my grandmother have stood in this place and felt the same sense of wonder.
Above: In front of the Eiger's vast and complex north face at Kleine Scheidegg in February 2009, little more than seventy years after most of the pioneering drama in this area, but still feeling close to it.
Above: the crux section of the Eiger's Miteleggi Ridge, the last of the great Alpine ridges to be climbed in 1921. The ridge leads via a series of difficult gendarmes to the precarious summit, above the steep north-east face which has its own fair share of extreme routes.
Above: the Schreckhorn from the south, showing the south-east pillar in the centre of the face. A sustained grade V climb, this is one of the classic rock climbs of the Bernese Alps, with a long glacial approach and descent, like so many of the routes in the Oberland.
Above: the classic view of the Monch from a more benign south-westerly angle. The south-west ridge offers the normal route to the summit but, as with everything in these high mountains, is a serious undertaking.
Above: The enormous west pillar of the Scheidegg-Wetterhorn seen in profile, from Grindelwald. The pillar offers 1,000m of fabulous, committed climbing at Grade V-VI and is one of the best routes in the entire Alps.
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