Eiger

Where it sits. The Eiger stands at 3,967 metres on the northern rampart of the Bernese Alps, the easternmost of the three peaks — Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau — that form the skyline above Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen. It is not the highest of the three, and from the south it is an unremarkable snow mountain. Everything about its reputation comes from one side. The north face, the Nordwand, is a concave limestone wall roughly 1,800 metres high and about two kilometres across, the largest north face in the Alps, and it rises almost directly out of pasture: the meadows at Alpiglen sit at 1,616 metres, so the wall's full height is visible in a single glance from ground that cows graze. Because it faces north and curves inward, it catches almost no sun, generates its own weather, and funnels rockfall and spindrift down its centre.

A mountain with a body count. The summit was first reached on 11 August 1858 by the Irishman Charles Barrington with the guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren, by the straightforward west flank. The north face was another matter. In 1935 Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer froze to death high on the wall, at the point still called Death Bivouac. In July 1936 a party of four — Toni Kurz, Andreas Hinterstoisser, Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer — was driven back by weather and all four died; Kurz, the last alive, was left hanging on a rope a few metres above guides who had climbed out of the railway's service door in the face and could not reach him. The wall was finally climbed between 21 and 24 July 1938 by Anderl Heckmair, Ludwig Vörg, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, whose route remains the standard line. Harrer's account, The White Spider, published in 1959 and named for the ice field high on the face, made the climb's vocabulary — the Hinterstoisser Traverse, the Ramp, the Traverse of the Gods, the Exit Cracks — common property. The direttissima attempt of March 1966 cost the life of the American John Harlin, whose rope broke; the completed line carries his name. In November 2015 Ueli Steck soloed the 1938 route in 2 hours 22 minutes.

On screen. The Eiger is the most filmed wall in mountaineering, for a reason that has nothing to do with drama and everything to do with logistics: it can be filmed at full length from a hotel terrace two kilometres away, and a railway runs inside it. The Eiger Sanction (1975), Clint Eastwood's adaptation of the Trevanian novel, was shot on and beneath the face in the summer of 1974, with Eastwood climbing himself and the production paying a real price when the British climber David Knowles was killed by rockfall during filming. North Face (Nordwand, 2008, Philipp Stölzl) dramatises the 1936 disaster with unusual fidelity, staging the hotel and spectator material at Kleine Scheidegg while doubling most of the climbing in the Dolomites and a studio ice tank. Documentary has been at least as persistent, from newsreel coverage of the 1930s attempts to the IMAX production The Alps (2007), which followed John Harlin III onto the route on which his father had died four decades earlier.

What you actually see today. The face is best seen from Kleine Scheidegg or Alpiglen, and the Eiger Trail runs directly along its base for about six kilometres from Eigergletscher station down to Alpiglen, a two-hour walk with 600 metres of descent that passes beneath the start of the 1938 route and within earshot of rockfall. The Jungfrau Railway tunnel bores through the mountain on its way to the Jungfraujoch; Eigerwand station, with windows cut into the wall at 2,865 metres, no longer takes passengers, but the Stollenloch service door beside it is still the escape hatch used in rescues. On the sunny south-east side, the Eiger's ordinary flanks carry walking routes from the Mönchsjoch and the ski runs above Wengen.

Getting there and timing. Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen are both an hour or so from Interlaken Ost by rail. From Grindelwald Terminal, the Eiger Express tricable gondola, opened in December 2020, reaches Eigergletscher at 2,320 metres in about fifteen minutes; the Wengernalpbahn serves Kleine Scheidegg and Alpiglen year-round. The trail below the face is normally clear of snow from late June to October. Because the wall is in shadow nearly all day, the light on it is at its most revealing early in the morning and again in the final half hour before sunset, when the summit ridge glows and the face itself turns the cold blue that gave the mountain its reputation long before anyone tried to climb it.