I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate.
The wind among the trees was my lullaby. Sometimes it sounded for minutes together with a steady even rush, not rising nor abating; and again it would swell and burst like a great crashing breaker, and the trees would patter me all over with big drops from the rain of the afternoon…
When I awoke for the third time, the world was flooded with a blue light, the mother of the dawn. I saw the leaves labouring in the wind and the ribbon of the road; and, on turning my head, there was Modestine tied to a beech, and standing half across the path in an attitude of inimitable patience. I closed my eyes again, and set to thinking over the experience of the night. I was surprised to find how easy and pleasant it had been, even in this tempestuous weather. The stone which annoyed me would not have been there, had I not been forced to camp blindfold in the opaque night; and I had felt no other inconvenience, except when my feet encountered the lantern or the second volume of Peyrat’s Pastors in the Desert among the mixed contents of my sleeping-bag; nay, more, I had felt not a touch of cold, and awakened with unusually lightsome and clear sensations.’
But even earlier, in 1858, the explorer Charles Packe was backpacking across the Pyrenean High-level Route, and sleeping out on the summits of Lakeland.
He spurned the mountain cabanes of the shepherds (a lodging which few Englishmen would prefer to the open air).
‘Throughout the chain, and especially on the Spanish side, there is a great deficiency of hotel accommodation on the mountains, so that a sleeping bag is almost an indispensable part of his kit to anyone who would see and thoroughly enjoy the grander parts of the Pyrenees… More may be seen in the mountains in four or five days’ camping out than in three weeks of hotel life with an occasional excursion. Besides the bag, a tin saucepan with a lid, a frying pan and a few spoons ought to be taken.’
According to Packe’s obituary, there was hardly a mountain top of eminence in Britain on which he had not passed the night, often with no shelter but a blanket or a cloak. His companion Count Henry Russell-Killough used the mountain itself as his bivvybag. After digging several caves into the side of 3298m/10,824ft Vignemale, he had himself buried overnight at the summit. His head alone stuck out into the clouds, and frost formed in his beard.
But whatever we think of the rival claims of Packe and Stevenson, it’s clear that the mystic exploitation of the bivvybag goes back much further than either of them. The quotation at the head of this chapter is from the 4th canto of The Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. This 70-page poem has 30 pages of notes to it. Helpfully, Sir Walter explains:
‘The Highlanders, like all rude people, had various superstitious modes of inquiring into futurity… A person was wrapped up in the skin of a newly-slain bullock, and deposited beside a waterfall, or at the bottom of a precipice, or in some other strange, wild, and unusual situation, where the scenery around him suggested nothing but objects of horror.’
Informal bedroom of the fifth century: St Ninian’s Cave at Whithorn
Although Scott doesn’t say so, it seems clear that the subject should lie naked within the warm and bloody hide, with only his head showing. Leather is moderately breathable – that’s one reason why it’s good for making boots with. However, it probably is not as good as Gore-tex or Milair, if we judge from the contemporary records.
‘One John Erach of the Isle of Lewis was a night within the hide; during which time he felt and heard such terrible things, that he could not express them; the impression that it made on him was such as could never go off, and he said, for a thousand worlds he would never again be concerned in the like performance.’
Much has been written about the North Face of the Eiger (in German, Eigerwand) – in the 1930s the most dangerous and difficult face in the Alps. In the first four years of attempts none succeeded, and of the ten who set foot on the face, all but two lost their lives. (For comparison, of every 30 people who climb higher than Everest Base Camp, four reach the summit and one dies on the mountain.)
What is less frequently realised is that the eventual conquest of this face was down to advances in bivvy technique.
The early attempts fell into a pattern that soon became familiar to the watchers at the telescopes of the Grindelwald hotels. Fit and vigorous, the climbers would make excellent progress on day one, crossing the first icefield and even the second before being pinned down by the afternoon stonefall. They would then bivouac. After the bivouac they would continue much more slowly, hesitating at every difficulty. They would make less than half the height gain of the previous day and be forced to a second bivouac. On the third day they would vanish behind the clouds of an Eigerwand blizzard, and some time later their bodies would be found in the avalanche cone at the foot of the face.
Most famous of the Eiger overnight spots was at the top corner of the Flatiron buttress, between the Second and Third Icefields. This small stance under an overhang, sheltered from stonefall, became known as the Death Bivouac. The first seven to sleep here either died of exposure and exhaustion or were caught soon afterwards by storm or stonefall; the eighth, the Italian Corti, only got away by being winched off the Traverse of the Gods by a climber who descended 1,000 feet from the summit on a wire cable. The bivouac was again used on 28th August 1961 by Adi (Adolf) Mayr, attempting the first solo ascent. He climbed very strongly to reach the Flatiron early on his first afternoon, but was brought to a stop there by stonefall. The next morning he was seen to climb with unaccountable hesitancy and slowness, and fell to his death from the Ramp.
The discovery that was the key to the face was not the famous Hinterstoisser Traverse but rather the bivouac site immediately above: the Swallow’s Nest. Here it is described by Heinrich Harrer (all quotations are from his book The White Spider, translated by Hugh Merrick).
‘We reached our rock knob and were able to fix two belaying-pitons; then we spent hours in digging a small seat out of the ice below it. We tied ourselves and our belongings to the pitons for security’s sake, furnished our seat with coils of rope, and started to cook our meal. The knob of rock afforded us complete protection from stones; the view from our perch was magnificent. All the conditions for a happy bivouac were present…’
At this bivvy, in 1962, Chris Bonington used as a bivvybag the plastic cover of Hamish MacInnes’s motorbike. Coming across another climber who needed rescuing they abandoned their attempt without much regret – a bike cover isn’t an adequate bivvybag at 2500m (8200ft).
It was an Austrian climber called Ludwig Vörg who discovered this Swallow’s Nest, level with the bottom corner of the First Icefield and protected by an overhang. Its comforts allowed the climbers to start the second day refreshed, and to cross all three of the icefields before stonefall.
Not for nothing was Vörg the ‘Bivouac King’ (Bivakkonig). He equipped the Swallow’s Nest with fleece-lined sleeping bags and airbeds, and built it a low wall of stones. And as the ascent unfolded, his bivouac technique was crucial. The four climbers spent their second night on the Ramp, below the Waterfall Chimney (the ‘usual bivouac place, a good bivouac’).
‘We arranged our bivouac about 8ft below that of Heckmair and Vörg. We managed to drive a single piton into a tiny crevice in the rock. It was a thin square-shafted piton. It held after only a centimetre, but it was just jammed.
Obviously,