Following in Edward Whymper’s footsteps — my ascent of the Matterhorn

A hundred and fifty years ago this summer, Edward Whymper had no such doubts. When he looked behind him, down the same ridge disappearing into the clouds far below, he saw his “old enemy” in the process of being vanquished by him. When he gazed back up at the horizon he did not just see the full alpine range spread out before him, he also saw in each peak a little imperial outpost of England.

What he was to achieve that fateful day would launch a debate that raged, including in the pages of The Times, throughout the summer of 1865 – and to an extent still does to this day.

In a little over half a century before Whymper’s climb, the Alps had been conquered and they had mainly been conquered by Britons. The conquerors had been men on honeymoons and men on the Grand Tour. Some had climbed them on a whim — and in one case, after being unable to find a Union Flag in time, while carrying a fir tree. Some had climbed them in vast expeditions; one kit list included 60 bottles of vin ordinaire, six bottles of Bordeaux, three bottles of cognac and “35 small fowls”. A surprising number had climbed them, then held champagne bottle-throwing competitions from the summit.

By 1865 only the most precipitous of them all had defied the members of London’s newly-formed Alpine Club. Many considered this peak, the Matterhorn, unclimbable. Among the locals there remained a belief that on top of this sheer rock fortress was a craggy city of dragons.

From above me, in the direction of the dragons, the chip chip chip of the ice axe stops. Leaning out from behind a rock, Julian, my guide, calls for me to follow. Between us a steep snowfield glows pink in the dawn light. It is beautiful and unspoilt, and — ominously, I think — it shouldn’t be there at all.

What should be there — at least in the pub conversations of “proper” climbers, deriding the 21st-century Matterhorn as a mountain for tourists — is people. These days, in grumpy-climber folklore, the Matterhorn is a motorway, an overcrowded scramble where inexperienced climbers pay guides to bolster their midlife crises with a bit of glory.

This year, however, snow has replaced people. After a cold, wet summer the mountain is in the sort of conditions found normally in winter and none of the local guides will climb it, however much their middle-aged clients offer. Whereas, in good conditions, 200 climbers reach the top a day, by the time I begin in late August 2014 just 12 have done it all summer.

In order to have someone willing to climb it with me I have had to get Julian to travel from Germany especially.

When Whymper looked up at the same ridge as me, he saw not dragons, nor impossibility, but destiny: he was going to claim the greatest prize in mountaineering for Britain. What happened next is a tale that would be known by every Victorian schoolboy. Even for a man whose previous dispatches to an eager public back home included tales of perilous leaps across crevasses and treacherous falls down cliff faces, this would be his finest — and most tragic — story

The Matterhorn is an overpowering presence in the valley. Physically, there are few places you can walk in Zermatt without seeing its jagged pyramid rising, impossibly picturesque, above a church steeple or a tumbledown Swiss chalet. It feels almost coy — posing and pouting for the daily busloads of tourists in Zermatt’s main square, like a beautiful woman who pretends she doesn’t know she is beautiful. “Who, me?” it seems to say, as the cameras continue to click.

It may no longer be the acme of climbing, but few climbers can honestly say they have not dreamt of standing on top of its perfect summit. I am no exception. This is my third attempt.

My first, from the Italian side in 2007, failed in spectacular circumstances. Before we were due to start, there was a big rockfall. A group of climbers, who probably set off the landslip, narrowly escaped death by running as fast as they could when they felt the house-sized rock beneath them totter. Afterwards, the police closed the mountain.

My second, in 2011, came after I had already had two weeks of high-altitude mountaineering. Fully acclimatised and fitter than I’ve ever been, I thought it was my best shot, but there was once again a bit of snow up high and my climbing partner decided to pick alpine flowers instead. Perhaps he was right; it is difficult to be blasé about the Matterhorn when you are in Zermatt.

There is a place on the Zmutt Glacier where the bodies collect. A small patch of ice beneath the north face, it is to here that the cliff face funnels anything that falls. Beforehand, waiting in the valley, Edith Zweifel, of the Zermatt tourist board, considers it her duty to tell me about it.

“You don’t want to know what happens to the bodies,” she said. She then proceeded to tell me. By the time they land, the bodies have been shredded by the fall — limbs snapped off, faces disfigured beyond recognition. She has a friend, an artist, who likes to go along to take photos of random parts. “Foot bones, sticking out of boots.” She smiled, the welcoming smile of a tourism chief.

Zweifel was speaking to me from the alpinist’s graveyard, a monument in the town not so much to doomed youth — no one forced them to climb — but, at least in some assessments, to foolish youth. Later, we will go to the alpinist’s memorial, after that to a statue in honour of guides who have fallen and finally to the English Church, where some of the dead English climbers are buried. Five hundred people have died on the Matterhorn. This year, not content with three graveyards, they also added a “grave of the unknown climber”.

150 years ago, the grim tally began. Before midday, Whymper and his party — Lord Francis Douglas; Charles Hudson, an Anglican chaplain; Douglas Hadow, a complete novice Whymper had met in Zermatt; Michale Croz, a French mountain guide; and a father-and-son pair of Swiss guides both called Peter Taugwalder — reached the summit ridge.

“The last doubt vanished! The Matterhorn was ours! Nothing but two hundred feet of easy snow remained to be surmounted!” Whymper writes in his book Scrambles Amongst the Alps, still one of the finest accounts of climbing. They stayed on the top for “one crowded hour of glorious life” before beginning the descent.

This was when, still far above the valley floor, it suddenly went terribly wrong. “I heard one startled exclamation from Croz, then saw him and Mr Hadow flying downward; in another moment Hudson was dragged from his steps, and Lord F Douglas immediately after him. All this was the work of a moment.”

In that moment the rope went tight, tugging on Whymper and the Taugwalders. Then, unable to take the strain, it snapped. “For a few seconds we saw our unfortunate companions sliding downward on their backs, and spreading out their hands, endeavouring to save themselves. They passed from our sight uninjured, disappeared one by one.”

What were the emotions of those who fell, as the rope snapped? Probably surprise. Anyone who climbs knows, intellectually, that there is a chance they will die, but no one thinks it will be them. I am no exception.

I look back on how I used to climb when I began and shudder. I was self-taught (read: not taught) and an impoverished student; it is difficult to know what was more incompetent: me or my equipment. Between ice axes that shattered mid stroke and “navigation” that would find me on the wrong gully on the wrong mountain — and, ultimately, not on the summit until very much the wrong hour of night — there were moments that frighten me still (although, weirdly, they often didn’t at the time).

The thing about looking back is it gives a level of smugness — I wouldn’t do any of that now, I tell myself. I’m safe now. Of course I thought I was safe then too (Admittedly with occasional pangs of doubt. Once, just before going up the Dent de Géant — a stunning rock pinnacle 4,000m above Italy — I called my mother and, uncharacteristically, dropped into conversation that I loved her. It can’t have been the most consoling of chats).

The real difference today is that as well as having a mother, I have a wife and son. Whenever I head off and do things like this I have the same conversation with my wife. She asks me if I will be safe, if it is dangerous. I assure her that I will be, that it isn’t — that I am not reckless, that I am only climbing easy routes. She treats such assurances with partial, but not total, scepticism. Which is probably the most sensible reaction.

As I lay awake at the base of the Matterhorn, occasionally activating my phone to see if it was 3am yet and we should start, I thought about the assurances I had made. They were not untrue, exactly. I am not an especially good climber but I am also not an especially bold one.

Even so, my problem was not the magnitude of the risk. That remains lower than in many activities people think nothing of — especially given that this time I have a guide. Rather it is how I would feel, in that brief instant before nothingness, if it did all go wrong. I would feel like a total pillock and — with a one-year-old son at home — an extremely selfish one at that.

The Times, when it heard the news back in 1865, agreed. It was appalled by this new sport of alpinism. “Well this is magnificent,” it wrote. “But is it life? Is it duty? Is it common sense? Is it allowable? Is it not wrong?”

Should we be here at all, on this empty mountain? By 9am we are at 4,200 metres — 280 metres from the summit. We are moving slower but steadily, and find ourselves bunched with the other two pairs of climbers on the mountain. Are we, these six men who have gone up when no one else is climbing, foolhardy; in the words of The Times, “martyrs of passion”?

I can’t exclude the possibility that I am. I know, though, that Julian is not. There is something comfortingly Germanic about Julian, a guide from the Mammut alpine school. I get the impression he climbs as much for the love of being extremely competent as the love of mountains — or maybe it is just that being extremely competent is how guides survive. Normally, ropes are there to protect both parties. For him, though, the most dangerous part of this climb by far is having me on the end of the rope; a novice whom he must assume could fall at any moment.

As we roped up, Julian called back to me. “Ja,” he said. “If I fall in a crevasse, please just sit down and wait for me to climb out.” I mentally assigned him as hardcore level: reasonably hardcore.

Later, on the same mountain, he met some of his friends. They stopped to chat, while I caught my breath. They talked about manly things until, five minutes later, we moved on. At no point did anyone mention that one of them was squatting down, trousers off, and defecating. I raised him to hardcore level: very. On the way to the base of the Matterhorn, where a new hut has just been built to accommodate the growing numbers of climbers and cater for those tourists walking up to see where the climbers begin, I asked him which is the most difficult route. “The north face,” he said. “Have you climbed it?” I asked. “Ja, of course,” he said. Of course. “Was it hard?” I asked. “Ja, it was challenging.”

I asked him if he needed to spend a night on the face. “No, some people do but I climbed on my own, so I went faster.”

“Blimey, was that hard?”

“Ja, it was challenging.”

Our conversations often go this way.

Eventually, I extracted from him that he’d climbed the north face, on his own, in four hours. Only a very small handful of people in the world have done it faster. I would have problems getting across it that fast if it were horizontal.

We have already taken more time to get this far up the easy route than Julian took to do the entire north face. No individual section of the route is especially hard, at least by modern rock-climbing standards, but what sets it apart is that it is relentless and continuous. Sections of cliff that might present little problem on a climbing wall at sea level are a very different prospect in the thin air of 4,000m after six hours of climbing, and wearing gloves and crampons. So it is that as I look towards the summit, the wind blowing drifts of snow off into the sky, it is no longer glowing in the pink of dawn. Time is running out.

A rope-length above us, the group ahead announce they are turning round. Above them the snow, which still shouldn’t really be there, has turned slushy. They are worried it will take too long to do the final few pitches and be a little too risky. I confer with Julian — or, rather, he confers with me — and we decide to turn around too. Above, the clouds slowly envelop the summit.

A half day later and I am down. Sitting outside the Matterhorn museum, where the rope that snapped is the prized exhibition, nursing a beer and a blister, I finish Whymper’s book. “Still, the last sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier times,” he writes. “There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell.”

In the evening the Matterhorn emerges again from the clouds, posing pink and coquettish between the rooftops of Zermatt for the tourists who wait in the town square. The sun slowly sets until just the summit remains lit: the last 200 metres that eluded me. Do I regret turning round? Before he was successful, Whymper had six attempts. “Climb if you will,” he cautions, “but remember that courage and strength are naught without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime.”

Of course I regret it. I’ll be back.
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