Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Thanks to my bread-shopping adventure in Poznan, I arrived at Liverpool Street
Station a day after the rest of the team. Jean and Alex retrieved me and I stayed for
dinner. Jean laughed at some of our stories from Afghanistan but others had her
shaking her head and asking: 'Why do you do it?' Next morning I caught the train
north to the Lake District. Alex told me he was going straight to the Alps. Some
climbers might have relaxed after Bandaka but for Alex it was just a platform from
which to complete unfinished business on the Eiger. He was fit and unwilling to
fall into lethargy as the autumn rain clouds gathered over London.
Alex rang round on his first day back in the UK. He heard reports from
Chamonix of great deeds, including Gordon Smith and Tobin Sorensen's second
ascent of the
Desmaison Route
on the Grandes Jorasses only two weeks before. At
more or less the same time, Roger Baxter-Jones and Nick Colton made a free as-
cent of the
Whymper Spur
. That meant two of the three routes on Alex's tick list
were now done while he was being dragged off to Afghanistan. That left only the
Harlin Direct
on the Eiger.
Colton and Smith weren't available - Gordon had suffered frostbite on the
Grandes Jorasses - but the bold young American Tobin Sorenson was still around
in Chamonix and keen for more climbing. Alex went straight to Chamonix and
they travelled to Grindelwald at the beginning of October. Sorenson wrote: 'It is
difficult to look to the Swiss for encouragement for they frown on kids trying their
mountain.' For ten days, they sat around waiting for good weather and then on 12
October they woke to find the weather clearing and the face plastered in ice.
The
Harlin Direct
had only been climbed three times before and always using
siege tactics - fixed ropes and so forth. The near-perfect ice conditions meant
much of the climbing would be fast, regardless of how sustained and difficult. The
pair was well-matched in terms of skill and training. Sorenson had had a busy
summer. Apart from the epic on the
Desmaison Route
he had climbed several ma-
jor new ice routes, each with different partners, including the
Direct
on the Dru
Couloir. (This takes the difficult central line into the upper couloir rather than de-
touring left.)
Sorenson's report in the
American Alpine Journal
gives a flavour of the climb.
He reflected: 'It seemed a strange thing to take only five days of food and a handful
of pitons on something that had previously taken three to four weeks. But we,
more than anyone, knew there was no other way.' Alex and his like-minded friends
were forcing the pace of change. For the Eiger, he borrowed from Gordon Smith a
single rope whose diameter was just eight millimetres, unusually thin and, at sixty-
five metres, unusually long, for that era at least. But then he had just come from a
climb using equally thin and long Polish ropes.
