John Harlin III Interview


The Alps movie tralier

My father used to tell Mom that she would make a pretty widow, as she wore black well. It infuriated her, as did his bragging about close calls. He told her that again the winter he died. So she wore to the funeral the very dress that had prompted his comment. It was one she had bought to stuff in a backpack: It didn't take up much space, it could be washed in a stream, and when they went to dinner during expeditions in the Alps, it would not look as if she had come directly from a base camp. I was nine years old and my sister, Andréa, was eight when our father, John Harlin II, died. Three years earlier, in 1963, we'd moved our skis and stuffed animals into a chalet in Leysin, Switzerland. Previously we'd lived in Germany, where Dad flew for the U.S. Air Force—until he told his commander he wouldn't drop a nuclear bomb and was immediately demoted. It was Mom who found them both jobs teaching at the Leysin American School—in her case, biology; in his, sports, which meant mostly climbing and skiing.

My parents chose Switzerland in large part to be near Dad's obsession: the north face of the Eiger. Six thousand feet from base to summit, the wall is by far the tallest in the Alps. Among serious climbers it's the most infamous cliff in the world. Every aspiring alpinist is schooled in Eiger stories. Nicknamed the Mordwand ("Murder Wall" in German), it claimed eight lives before the 1938 first ascent, by a team of Austrians and Germans. In 1962 Dad had become the first American to climb it, following the established—and, at the time, only—route. After his ascent, Dad's obsession switched from merely climbing the wall to putting up its second route. This new route would be a direttissima: straight up the middle.

Between attempts on the Eiger Direttissima, Dad established many new routes in the Alps, including some of the hardest of the era. While his deeds went unheralded in the States, in Europe—where the press made front-page news out of climbing successes and tragedies—his star was bright. One colleague and climbing partner, Ted Wilson, recalls, "It was fun to walk into restaurants or public places with him and watch the eyeballs click in his direction." Dad actually received a postcard once that was addressed simply, EIGER JOHN, SWITZERLAND.

Despite his other successes—like the Hidden Pillar Route, on Mont Blanc—the Eiger Direct loomed unfinished. Dad spent countless days strategizing, waiting, scouting, and then attempting the route, only to be beaten back by storms time after time. By the autumn of 1965, there was real pressure for him to finish this project, and not just because it had already consumed so much of his time: The competition was heating up. It was that era's "last great problem," and everyone was waiting, even the nonclimbing public. Dad couldn't let someone else beat him to it.

Amid rumors of a large team of Germans training for the direttissima, Dad put together his own team for an attempt in February. They would be three. The ice specialist was 25-year-old Dougal Haston, an ambitious and talented Scot. The rock specialist was Layton Kor, 28, an American who was already a legend for putting up groundbreaking new routes in Colorado. Dad, 30, was the alpine generalist with the experience to bring it all together. The plan was for a single ten-day push in classic alpine style—a single, fast push to the top without resupply.

Things didn't go as planned. They arrived at the base of the Eiger in early February, but the storms never stopped. Then Dad dislocated his shoulder skiing, and the rumored German team showed up. The problem with the Germans was the invincibility of their strategy. They had an eight-man team, the largest ever on a climb in the Alps. And they planned to siege the wall with fixed ropes—a Himalayan strategy new to the Alps. The weather didn't much matter to them—they could climb whenever it stopped snowing for two hours, not two weeks.

Dad's team was not about to give up; instead, they decided to blend their alpine tactics with the Germans' Himalayan strategy. The trio would fix ropes and inch up from camp to camp during bad weather. Chris Bonington, 31, photographing the climb for London's Weekend Telegraph, would temporarily join the team, bringing it to four when needed. As soon as the storm cycle broke, the original three would push quickly to the top, with the smaller, faster team flying by the Germans.

The American-British team started up the face on February 20, two days after learning about the Germans. Week after week, Dad's team thought they saw breaks in the weather and prepared for a summit push; week after week they were disappointed and went back to fixing ropes parallel to and sometimes overlapping the Germans'. After several weeks, the two teams had dug separate caves in a steep snow face at Death Bivouac, where the direct line crossed the original route just over halfway up the face. Death Bivouac had been named in honor of two climbers who had frozen there in 1935. But now, nearly a month in, things finally looked good for Dad, Dougal, and Layton. The forecast was so promising that Chris rappelled down the fixed ropes in order to take his side-view photos before shooting the conquering heroes as they neared the summit, three or four days later. Spirits soared: At last they would really move.