A trip up the Eigernordwand, 69 years after the first ascent

“Youth didn’t bother its head about the sharp tongues of the wordy warfare that flared up after the first tragedy on the Eiger’s face. It only heard in the mountain’s threats a siren call, a challenge to its own courage. It even invented the pious untruth that it was its own duty to fulfill the bequest of the men who had died. Perhaps it even believed it. But the real spur was that inexplicable longing for the eternal adventure.”

The express train from Interlaken weaves and tunnels through the flying buttresses and dark forests of the Alps. Steve Su and I take coffee in small, strong shots in the caboose café. We roll into Grindelwald with exactly three days to spare, trundling our duffles onto the open-air platform, jumping out, and looking up. There it is: the 6,000-foot North Face of the Eiger. Just like in the movies: Clint Eastwood up there with his mind-blowing one-liners and his license to kill. Just like in the books: climbers plying their skills and dying to be the first up the biggest, baddest face in Europe. In 1938, a tough team comprised of Andreas Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer, and Fritz Kasparek made it up the Eigernordwand after a decade of attempts by Europe’s finest. So many have died on the face, you don’t know how to begin to count.

The hustle and frantic flow of ski season has subsided. Grindelwald is slowing for its typically mellow spring. The pastry and souvenir shops close early, and some don’t open at all. There are more cows with big bells on their necks roaming the hillsides than people sliding down them. Nights are cold. Days are just warm enough to climb gloveless in the sun. But the Nordwand lives in eternal shadow.

We came here because we had to. Circumstance brought us close — Steve was in Spain, and I had been commissioned to shoot photos of a ski traverse of the Swiss Alps. And if you’re a climber, the Eiger carries a magnetism that is impossible to ignore. We were in its vicinity and drawn to its flame. Eigernordwand is the historic embodiment of the “longing for the eternal adventure.” We are fortunate pilgrims at its feet.