Eiger

The Eiger stands slightly forward of the main ridge of the Bernese Alps, entirely on Bernese territory, on the boundary between the municipalities of Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald. Its summit reaches 3,967 metres. With the Mönch (4,110 m) and the Jungfrau (4,158 m) it forms the trio of peaks that dominates the central Bernese Oberland; their north sides rise some 3,000 metres above the valley. Since the end of 2001 the mountain has lain within the perimeter of the Swiss Alps Jungfrau-Aletsch natural World Heritage site.

The north face — in fact facing north-west — measures some 1,650 metres and can be seen from Grindelwald and from the whole basin rising to the Kleine Scheidegg. It is one of the three great north walls of the Alps, with those of the Matterhorn and the Grandes Jorasses; mountaineering long called them the last unsolved problems of the range, and the Eiger's was the last to fall. Two roped parties had died on it before the wall was climbed, which earned it the name Mordwand, murder wall. In 1936 the failed retreat of Rainer, Angerer, Hinterstoisser and Kurz ended in the death of all four. The first direct ascent was made from 21 to 24 July 1938: the Germans Anderl Heckmair and Ludwig Vörg, the Austrians Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, two parties that had set out separately and joined forces on the wall; the propaganda of the National Socialist regime seized on the feat at once.

The summit itself had been reached far earlier, on 11 August 1858, by the Grindelwald guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren with their Irish client Charles Barrington, by the west flank. The mountain is also pierced: since it opened in 1912, the Jungfrau railway has run inside the Eiger rock, and a halt had been cut as early as 1903 into the north face itself, at Eigerwand. The massif is not fixed for all that. In 2006 a crack about 250 metres long and 7 metres wide opened on the east side, below the Mittellegi ridge, and on 14 July a block 30 metres high, nearly 200,000 cubic metres, collapsed after the retreat of the lower Grindelwald glacier.

Why this place is remarkable

Few walls have counted for as much in the history of mountaineering, and few are as easy to look at: the 1,650 metres of the north face can be taken in at a glance from the meadows of Grindelwald, with no approach walk. That closeness explains the attention the place received — the attempts of 1935 and 1936 were followed through binoculars from the valley, and the point where two climbers were last seen alive is still called the death bivouac. The same mountain has carried a railway tunnel since 1912: the contrast between the wall and the train that crosses inside it fits into a single image.

History and origin

The Eiger belongs to the Helvetic system, those limestone nappes torn from their crystalline base during a late phase of Alpine folding and pushed north-west. The massif consists entirely of limestone of the Helvetic zone — Schrattenkalk of the Cretaceous and Malm limestone of the Upper Jurassic — whose folded beds remain legible to the naked eye in the wall. The mountain appears in written records on 24 July 1252, in a deed of sale between Ita von Wädiswyl and the provostry of Interlaken that bounds a plot of land 'as far as the mountain called Egere': it is the second documented mention of a Swiss mountain, after the Bietschhorn in 1233. The name probably does not come from the ogre it calls to mind; among the explanations put forward is the dialect form dr hej Ger, the high spear, referring to the profile of the summit.