We managed to manufacture a sort of seat with the aid of rope-slings, and hung out some more to prevent our legs dangling over the gulf. Next to me there was a tiny level spot, just big enough for our cooker, so we were able to brew tea, coffee and cocoa.
Heckmair and Vörg were no more comfortably lodged. The relaxed attitude of Vörg, the ‘Bivouac King’, was quite remarkable; even in a place like this he had no intention of doing without every possible comfort. He even put on his soft fleece-lined bivouac-slippers, and the expression on his face was that of a genuine connoisseur of such matters. It is absolutely no exaggeration to say that we all felt quite well and indeed comfortable… Our perch was about 4000 feet above the snowfields at the base of the precipice; if one of us fell off now, that was where he would certainly finish up. But who was thinking of falling off?
It was a good bivouac.’
On the third day the weather, as usual on the Eiger, got very bad. Their final bivvy was above the White Spider, in the Exit Cracks.
‘After we had climbed an ice-bulge, we came upon a rock-ledge protected by overhangs from falling stones and avalanches. When I say a ledge, I do not mean a smooth comfortable feature on which it is possible to sit; it was far too narrow and precipitous for that. Heckmair found a place where he could drive in a rock-piton firmly, and with great patience fixed enough hooks on which to hang all the stuff, as well as securing himself and Vörg. Fritz and I arranged our overnight abode about 10ft away. The ledge was scarcely as broad as a boot, and only just allowed us to stand erect, pressed close against the rock; but we contrived to knock in a piton to which we could tie ourselves. Even then we couldn’t sit, not even on the outer rim of the ledge.
However, we found a solution. We emptied our rucksacks and tried fastening them too to the piton, in such a way that we could put our feet in them and so find a hold. We were sure it would work all right, and so it did.
Between us and our friends we had fixed a traversing rope, along which a cookery-pot went shuttling back and forth. Vörg had taken on the important post of expedition cook… Fritz, being Viennese, is a coffee connoisseur, and praised Ludwig’s concoction…
It was now 11pm. Ludwig had given over cookery and “retired to rest”. Even here, on this tiny perch 12,300ft up, and 5000ft sheer above the nearest level, he hadn’t foregone the comfort of the bivouac-slippers. Andreas had to keep his crampons on, so as to get some kind of stance in the ice for him to maintain a hold; but his head rested on Vörg’s broad back… Fritz and I had pulled the Zdarsky-sack over us; our rucksack architecture served splendidly as support for our legs, and very soon I could hear the deep, regular breathing of my friend as he slept by my side. Through the little window in the tent sack I could see that there were no stars in the sky and the weather was still bad; it looked as if it were snowing. There was an occasional small snow-slide from above, but they only slid over the skin of the tent, with a gentle swishing sound, like a hand stroking it… I wasn’t worried about the weather. I was possessed by a great feeling of peace; we would reach the summit tomorrow. This sense of peace increased to a conscious glow of happiness. We humans often experience happiness without recognising it; but here, in that bivouac of ours, I was not only genuinely happy; I knew I was.
This, the third bivouac for Fritz and me on the North Face, was the smallest in terms of room; in spite of that it was the best. And if you ask me why, the reason was the rest, the peace, the joy, the great satisfaction we all four enjoyed there.’
Harrer’s book not only gives a detailed description of the route, but the all-important data on the various bivouac sites, from the Bivouac Cave, above the shattered pillar and below the Difficult Crack (narrow and wet; too low), to the ‘Comfortable Overnight Spot’ to left of the Ramp icefield – first used by Rébuffat and French members of the European ascent of 1952. Ludwig Vörg himself was killed fighting on the Russian front in 1941.
This Eiger expertise was slow to spread to the flatlands. Even in the comparative humpiness of the Scottish Highlands, the hard men were wrapping themselves in groundsheets, or constructing howffs out of heather and stones in the hollows below various dripping boulders. But all that was about to change.
In 1938, William L Gore discovered Teflon and started wondering what it was for. ‘Teflon’ (which is a registered trademark) is the lightweight name for polytetrafluorethylene. In the 1960s men started going to the moon. In the process they discovered that Teflon was useful for non-stick saucepans. In 1969 Bill Gore’s son Bob Gore was playing with a sheet of Teflon and discovered that if he stretched it suddenly in both directions, it grew billions and billions of tiny holes.
The Age of the Bivvybag was about to begin.
Chapter 3 THE BREATHABLE BAG
FIVE NIGHTS IN GREEN PLASTIC
1 Overnight Ochils
You can’t find more suitable hills to walk in moonlight than the grassy Ochils. No need to use torches on these easy slopes, and the views are even better in the dark because of the lights. The Ochil valleys are deep holes of darkness, and a great orange sea of sodium light stretches away to the south.
We unrolled bivvybags in a grassy canyon between two hills, with a small stream trickling somewhere. Here we lay in a floating bowl, looking out and down at the cities of the plain.
The thistles were so comfortable we overslept till 5am. The water bottles froze in the night and so did we – but it didn’t matter about the water bottles as mine had been left lying downhill, so the ice was all at the end where the little lid wasn’t. Dawn crept up from behind, warming the fingers and sculpting the hills with rounded light. The Forth valley was all mist, with oil refineries sticking up like island castles; their chimneys poured wide white stripes across the morning. Vapours ebbed and flowed like slow thoughts in the mind of a giant whose alarm clock hasn’t gone off yet.
There’s a certain incentive not to get up – it’s literally freezing out there. On the other hand, it’s also very cold here in the bag, and the only way to get warm will be to get moving. We’ll eat once our fingers thaw.
Weak sunlight gleamed on the distant Firth of Forth and on us. Four hours into the walk, we met our first fellow-walkers. And down in civilised Stirling at lunchtime, it was quite a surprise to find overnight ice still knocking about in the water bottle.
2 Wet Wooler in November
The green undulations stretching dully to the horizon; the solitude; the wet bedclothes – I’d be a single-handed yachtsman if I could pay for the boat. As it is, I must make do with the not terribly dry land of the Southern Uplands. A crossing of the bottom of Scotland in November offers every important feature of the solo transatlantic except seasickness.
Walking in the dark does strange things to the mind. After an hour of stumbling through mud, 7pm felt like the middle of the night. I was, on my eventual return to houses and electric light, to suffer from jetlag. The map ahead said, ‘stream, plantation; high valley walls’ – in other words, bedroom – and the map didn’t lie. I unrolled the bivvybag on a voluptuous bed of pine needles below the branches.
In November, if nights are clear they’re unbearably cold; otherwise it rains. This was one of the warm wet ones, so I slept for quite a bit of the time. In the expensive sort of bag, you zip yourself into a featureless green slug-shape the same at both ends, and alarm innocent householders when they wake to find you on their lawn. My bag is what it says: a simple bag. So it was necessary to wake up every hour to drink the water in the entrance before it flowed over the doorstep.
Untroubled even by thirst, then, I lay listening to the drips till six in the morning before setting off through the drips to look for the Cheviots.
3 Hoover Bag
On a May evening in 1994, I lay between two