As crowds gathered throughout the day to watch via telescopes the pair's progress from Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald, Sedlmayr and Mehringer made rapid upwards progress. By the time the last of the summer twilight was fading in the west, they had climbed the easier lower third of the face and were looking likely to succeed: perhaps two more days on the face and they would have it in the bag. Thursday morning dawned clear and the pair recommenced their upward push.
However, the increasingly difficult terrain of mixed rock and ice slowed their progress considerably. Whereas on the first day they had climbed 900 vertical metres, by the end of the second day they had only covered a further 300 vertical metres. Although the gallery of spectators in Kleine Scheidegg and Grindelwald had been initially confident of the pair's success, by the end of the second day many were questioning whether they had any chance before the next storm arrived. And rightly so. The Friday morning brought with it thick mist and fog, an eerie calm before the storm, and by the end of that day neither Sedlmayr nor Mehringer had been sighted on the face for some hours.
On Friday night, the calm weather finally broke and all of Saturday and Sunday a fierce storm lashed the mountain with thunder and lightning, strong winds and snow. The night-time temperatures in Kleine Scheidegg dropped to –8 degrees Celsius – how cold must it have been up on the face? During a short period of respite on Sunday afternoon the storm backed off and afforded the spectators in the valley the briefest of views of the face, where they momentarily saw Sedlmayr and Mehringer bravely battling onwards and upwards. This was quite remarkable, especially after five bitterly cold days and four nights on the face. But the reality was that Sedlmayr and Mehringer had climbed themselves into a trap: the icy conditions had frozen both the rock and their ropes, making descent impossible. Soon enough the clouds closed in again, and the pair were never seen alive again.
Numerous searches were conducted in the days and weeks following their disappearance, but no trace of the men could be found. It was only on 19 September, nearly a month after they had been last seen, that a search plane piloted by a famous German flying ace passing extremely close to the face spotted the body of one of the men, knee-deep in the snow and frozen standing upright, still a long way beneath the summit. The North Face had claimed its first human lives.
The following summer saw a second serious attempt on the face, made this time by a young but skilled four-man party comprising two Germans and two Austrians, seemingly unperturbed by the previous year's events. If the expedition of 1935 was a tragedy, the events of 1936 were truly macabre.
After four days the team had made excellent progress up the first two-thirds of the face, but they were forced into a sudden retreat when a rockfall caused a head injury to one of the team members. Over the ensuing 24 hours, and in a worsening storm, the four climbers progressively succumbed to the elements, with the last climber literally freezing to death and whispering his infamous final words, I'm finished, within an arm's reach of the rescue party. These events are to this day considered to be among the greatest mountaineering tragedies ever documented.
It was in the summer of 1938 that success on the North Face of the Eiger was finally achieved. Again, a team of four young men comprising two Germans and two Austrians tackled the face, and after four days of considerable hard work and suffering, accompanied by the requisite storms, rockfalls and avalanches and stories of near death, the party stood atop the narrow summit. The celebrations were, however, all too brief, as before long the fog of World War II descended on Europe and feats of daring on the great mountain were relegated to history.
Over the ensuing decades, more attempts were made on the face, some successful and many unsuccessful. Many more climbers lost their lives. But the world had moved on. No longer did an ascent of the world's most dangerous mountain face garner the attention of the global spotlight. Not, that is, until 2008.
Switzerland, February 2008
Early on the morning of Wednesday 13 February, leading Swiss alpinist Ueli Steck took the short train ride from his lakeside home town of Interlaken up to the small ski resort at Kleine Scheidegg at the foot of the Eiger. Most of the people on the train would have been dressed in thick, warm clothing, ready for a day of skiing: some light-hearted recreation, and nothing more. Indeed, Steck probably looked inconspicuous: rather than thick clothing and skis, he wore only lightweight attire and carried with him a tiny backpack, a thin climbing rope and a pair of short technical ice axes. Few, if any, people on the train that morning were aware of what Steck was about to do.
Less than three hours later Steck was standing on the summit of the Eiger, having completely rewritten the mountaineering record books and in doing so creating a new genre of mountaineering known as extreme alpinism. Steck made history that morning by climbing the North Face in record time, dramatically changing perceptions around what is possible when a commitment to climbing light and fast is made. What had taken the first ascensionists in 1938 four days – or 96 hours – to complete, Steck had finished in a staggering time of only 2 hours, 47 minutes and 33 seconds.
The sport of mountaineering would never be the same again.
How did he do it?
How did Steck achieve such an incredible feat?
On the surface, Steck's approach was staggeringly simple: he climbed light and he climbed fast.
Steck chose to solo the route fast, meaning he climbed without a climbing partner or team members. This enabled him to climb the entire face unroped (although he did carry a lightweight rope just in case), meaning he did not have to spend time belaying other climbers up each pitch. The benefits of this approach then greatly amplified his ability to travel light: the time he saved meant he was able to climb the entire face in one day, removing the need for heavy overnight bivvy equipment such as a sleeping bag, mattress and gas stove. As a result, Steck's pack was incredibly light. Steck was himself also extremely light. In preparation for this attempt he had trained particularly hard, with his aim being to strip all unnecessary fat and muscle from his body to improve his power-to-weight ratio. Renowned as a highly disciplined trainer, he shed nearly 10 kilograms in preparation for the climb, which was approximately 15 per cent of his body weight.
Steck also flipped the wider climbing community's prevailing beliefs about the best time of year to climb the Eiger. Most parties attempted the route in summer, when the face is relatively free of snow and ice. Steck on the other hand had chosen to climb the face during winter, when it was completely iced up. The benefit to this approach was that by using ice axes and crampons for the entire duration of the climb, he could skirt across the frozen winter ice much more quickly than he could if the rock were dry. In addition, the risk of rockfalls was significantly reduced as the rocks freeze in place during winter.
Describing his speed climb of the North Face, he said (with a rich Swiss accent):
You reach the point where you are into it … As fast as possible to the summit … your hands, your ice axe and your crampons, and they have to just move … You're progressing … that's what it's all about. You want to keep moving, having progress in your life.
Belying the apparent simplicity of his approach, underneath the surface was a very complex web of prior experience from which Steck was able to draw in order to achieve his record time. Steck was no one-hit wonder: he had begun climbing at an early age and by the time he was 18 he had already climbed the North Face of the Eiger as part of a team of four, an incredible feat in itself. By the mid 2000s Steck had built up an extensive résumé of difficult climbs in the European Alps, the Alaska Range and the Himalaya.
Starting out as a rock climber, he progressed towards technical mountaineering and then high-altitude mountaineering, before starting to further refine his specialty to fast solo ascents, initially on the relatively lower mountains of the Alps (such as the Eiger), before taking this approach to the ultimate mountaineering testing ground of the Himalaya. (In 2011 he soloed the south