“Absolutely not,” he says in a wonderfully wobbling Swiss-German accent. “The fresh snow from the storm three days ago will be a problem to find gear in the rock and for wet slides. I think better maybe to climb some smaller rocks in the sun?” 

A day later we’re on the face, with three quiches from the lovely baker lady’s shop and some Swiss chocolate. It’s all snow and ice and limestone as far as we can see, but it feels different. It feels alive, as if those who have died here left something of themselves. As the lower thousand feet gives way to steeper terrain and more rock, the layered limestone seems to slope off the wrong way, leaving few positive features. We find old pitons bent over and smashed to a pulp, and we clip them, because there is little else. More so than any protection we place, we trust in our climbing. Balancing, camming the ice picks, pulling, reaching, finding the best solution to the individual moves and the big-picture decisions at the same time, and moving on without looking back or down... except for fun. What appeared to be small pillars from below now loom like oil tankers on end. Overlaps have grown into arching roofs that our heels hang over. Crumbling rock and ice fall silently below.

At 5 p.m., we share a few laughs with three Italian alpinists high on the face, the only other people we’ve seen. They ask us to fix a rope for them up a steep rock corner. We do, and then move on. We won’t see them again on the wall.

Just before dusk, sunlight almost touches the North Face. I reach out from the wall and dip my fingers into it like it’s honey. I try to savor those final rays, but the anxiousness that often precedes darkness on a big, unknown route corrupts the moment. Since we are trying to “onsight” this route in a single push, we have no bivouac gear. We do know the legends, however, and the names: the Hinterstoisser Traverse, where Toni Kurtz died; the confusing Exit Cracks; the Death Bivouac, where Karl Mehringer and Max Sedlmeyer were killed; and the crux Ice Hose.

We are strung out across the crumbling Traverse of the Gods as the valley, and then the peaks, slip into darkness. The world becomes small, private, surreal. The job is to react. And in action, anxiety disappears. My headlamp beam exposes an ever-changing display of vertical terrain, from the subtleties of snow, névé, and ice, to rock dihedrals and delicate face holds. Look down, place a crampon point on an edge, and then forget about it until it needs to move again.