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Outside Magazine December 2003

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The Hard Way
Fire and Ice
A journey to the cradle of climbing reveals a strange new alpine environment, where glaciers are melting, mountains are falling, and nothing is as it was

By Mark Jenkins


	(illustration by Guy Billout)

WE'D HEARD RUMORS that the Alps were decomposing, but we ignored them. Europeans can be so querulous, so theatrical, waving their arms as if the sky were falling. John Harlin III and I had been planning this trip for half a dozen years, and we weren't about to change our minds. And, for John, this particular late-summer journey was considerably more than the usual climber's hajj—a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the sport.

John's father, John Elvis Harlin II, died on the north face of the Eiger in March 1966 when his rope snapped and he fell 4,000 feet. He was 30, and John was ten. Harlin II is still remembered in Switzerland for his California charm and his many first ascents. Not surprisingly, the north face of the 13,025-foot Eiger has long preoccupied Harlin III, now 47, an accomplished climber and the editor of The American Alpine Journal.

After many other trips together, we'd finally come to climb the macabre Mordwand, or "Death Cliff" (a play on Nordwand, as the Eiger's north face is called). It would be a first for both of us. But we were too late.

"The Eiger has changed completely," Nicho Mailänder told us upon our arrival in Geneva. A peerless climbing historian, Mailänder is one of the authors of The Tyrol Declaration, a pioneering manifesto on mountaineering ethics and environmental responsibility that was adopted by the Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme in 2002. "It is not the mountain it used to be. To climb it this summer, particularly, would be very, very dangerous."

"The Eiger per se no longer exists," he continued. "There used to be three main icefields on the Eiger. Over the last five years, they have all but vanished. In their place are slick, 50-degree limestone slopes covered in rubble. Rubble which tends to slide off. Who wants to climb rubble? No. I'm sorry, but nowadays, the Eiger can only be safely climbed in winter."

Given that more than 45 climbers have died on the Eiger, safely is a relative term. So much for the Eiger. It was almost a relief.

So John and I went directly to Plan B: a new route on the Fréney Face of Mont Blanc. Rising to 15,771 feet and straddling France and Italy, Mont Blanc is the highest peak in the Alps, and the Fréney Face is its most difficult wall. Free from the shadow of John's personal tragedy, however, it seemed to us a comparatively easy alternative.

But when we got there, the news was the same. "C'est suicide!" announced the French caretaker of the Franco Monzino Hut, a fortresslike hostel on the Italian side of the mountain. "Mont Blanc est ruiné."

The crevasses were hanging open like the mouths of a thousand dragons. The summit snowfields were running with water and setting off torrents of stone. Couloirs that alpinists had used to reach the massif's climbing routes for generations had melted. With balmy obstinancy, John and I decided to go up and have a look for ourselves. Despite a foul-weather forecast, we departed the Monzino lodgings laden with more than a week's worth of food and fuel, a complete wall rack of climbing gear, and Jacques Barzun's 900-page history From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life from 1500 to the Present.

Throughout the day, scrambling vigilantly toward the Eccles Hut, two-thirds of the way up the peak, we heard rockslides thundering all around us. Ice and snow had been the glue that held the crumbling layers of rock to the substrata. Without it, every hand- and foothold was appallingly loose, balanced at the angle of repose. Pull out or nudge off one rock and thousands of tons of jagged blocks could begin slipping downward like a calamitous escalator.

Still, we kept climbing. Denial is a powerful thing.

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Outside columnist MARK JENKINS's latest book is The Hard Way.

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