Ups & Downs

Chapter 17: Death Pass – Part 1

Don, July 6^th

The next morning dawned overcast and drizzling, but the forecast was for better weather and you should always listen to your weather forecaster.  Besides, we had been lounging around in Lauterbrunnen for 36 hours and were starting to get antsy.

The Lauterbrunnen Valley is bordered on its east and west sides by steep mountains; the head of the valley, to the south, is sealed by a massive ridge of mountains including the Jungfrau and the Eiger.  Every year hundreds of thousands of tourists come to Lauterbrunnen and Grindelwald to ride the Jungfraubahn, a railway that enters the base and ascends through tunnels inside the two mountains to Jungfraujoch, the highest railway stop in Europe at over 11,300 feet.  The Eiger is also famous for its notorious North Face.  A nearly vertical 6,000-foot wall, it has claimed the lives of 50 climbers since 1935.

Other than heading north down the valley to Interlaken, the only ways out if you aren’t a mountain climber are the way we had come in over the pass from Grosse Scheidegg, or to the southwest over the Sefinenfurgge Pass.  Since it would be a long, hard 2-day walk, we decided to make use of the 4-mile, 1,100-yard head-start that the local ski facilities offered by taking the cable car up the side of the mountain and the train along the ridge to Mürren.  Mürren is a car-free ski resort situated on a flat spot above Lauterbrunnen.  It has world-renowned views of the Jungfrau and the Eiger above, the valley and the White Lütschinen River below, and Wengen, another car-free resort, in a bowl-shaped depression above Lauterbrunnen on the other side of the valley.  From Mürren, another cable car goes up to the rotating Piz Gloria Restaurant at the top of Schilthorn.  The restaurant featured prominently in the 1969 James Bond movie, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

From Mürren we walked for 3 hours along the side of the ridge toward the massifs to the south, before heading steeply up and over a cliff and into a side canyon to the southwest.  We reached the Poggangen mountain hut shortly after a group of Swiss hikers who had passed us a while before.  They went into the hut to eat a prepared lunch, while we sat outside in the freezing wind to eat our crackers and peanut butter and jelly and to survey the terrain.  The valley floor, which had started out 3,000 feet below, had come up to meet us.  And the river, which had been a cascading torrent most of the day, had dwindled into a tiny stream that we could step across with ease.  Ahead of us and on both sides, snow-covered mountain walls rose sharply.  To get out of that valley, barring some magical twist of the laws of physics, we were going to have to climb over one of those mountain walls.  The good news was that it wasn’t raining at the moment.  At that altitude and temperature, any precipitation probably would have come down as snow anyway.

We’ve all heard the old adage about the only things certain in life being death and taxes.  I’d like to suggest another one.  And that is that it takes a lot less time to prepare and eat peanut butter and jelly on crackers when you are freezing your ass off on a windy rock than it does to sit in front of a roaring fire in a mountain hut and eat wienerschnitzel and french fries prepared by a chef.  Mind you, I haven’t done a rigorous statistical analysis, but the anecdotal evidence is pretty strong.  In any case, we finished our meal and headed on up the mountain well in advance of the group of Swiss hikers.

Once more, as had become habit by this time, I would start out walking with David and Angela and some time later realized that I was alone.  Then I’d stop anywhere from 5 to 15 minutes until they caught up, and we’d start the process again.  One of the times I was waiting, the Swiss hikers came past again.

Trailing in the distance, but closing gradually, was a lone hiker.   As the figure got closer, I could see that it was a small woman, probably not much more than 5 feet tall.  She was wearing a big floppy hat and an open trench coat that billowed out behind her in the wind.  Suspended from a string around her neck was a plastic map case.  Over the next hour, each time I stopped to wait for David and Angela, I’d see her approaching and wonder what the hell she was doing up there.  Hiking alone at that altitude and that far from the nearest town is never a great idea.  You see people doing it occasionally, but not that often.  From the way she was walking, taking short, rapid steps and stumbling frequently, I could tell that she was not an experienced mountain hiker.  And with her small day pack, she was clearly not equipped to spend the night alone on the mountain if something should go wrong.

But she continued closing the distance between us, hopping along with quick, determined little steps.  Suddenly I realized who she must be:  a tiny figure in a bizarre costume; hurrying unprepared through the mountains as though on an important mission.  She’s a hobbit!  She’s got to get to the Crack of Doom to destroy the Map Case of Power before the Swiss Rule-Masters catch her. (Note from David: And as Gollum Dad has to stop her.)[1]

Of course the reality turned out to be a lot less dramatic.  An hour later, as I was waiting in the snow underneath the final 1,000-foot cliff leading to the top of the pass, my diminutive pursuer came up and turned out to be a young oriental woman.  She stopped briefly to speak with me and it became quickly apparent that if my identification of her as a hobbit was not accurate, at least my assessment of her lack of preparedness for the mountains was.  Her name was Wei Wei, and she was a student from China finishing up her BA in economics at Lancaster University in England.  (That explained the map case, which is a piece of equipment which is available worldwide, but which I’ve seen being used almost exclusively in Great Britain.  Hers was the only one other than mine that I saw in 9 weeks on the trail.)  She was on summer break and had bought a book on hiking in Switzerland.  Now, with little preparation and less equipment, she was walking hut to hut and town to town for 10 days.

We looked up at the cliff above us where several groups of hikers were inching their way up and down the snow-covered trail.  She said she was concerned, and I admitted that I was as well.  But since there was no meaningful assistance or advice I could give her, after a few minutes she left me to head on toward the summit while I continued to wait for David and Angela.

When they arrived, we set off in our “high-mountain danger formation” – David leading, Angela in the middle, and me at the back.  That way, if Angela slipped, she wouldn’t have to die alone; she would fall back into me and we would both plummet over the cliff to our deaths.  The trail was now mostly covered with snow and slush; if Angela and I hadn’t had our trekking poles, our feet would have slipped out from under us on nearly every step.

David, meanwhile, was doing his Tigger imitation, bounding up the trail assisted only by a broken tree branch he had picked up a few days earlier and had become strangely emotionally attached to.  More about that stick later.

The footing on the portions of the trail that weren’t covered with snow was made up of tiny pieces of black slate, which crumbled into little avalanches beneath our feet with every step we took.  If we had lost our footing, we would have tumbled down the 45+° slope for hundreds of yards.  In front of me, Angela was absolutely petrified, sometimes frozen in fear, and sometimes sobbing quietly.  That kind of fear is contagious, and while I put on a brave face, I was seriously wondering if we were going to make it alive over the top of that pass.

There were three things that convinced me to keep going, though.  First was the fact that we could see several groups of hikers moving up ahead of us and disappearing over the top.  Still others were heading in the other direction and making their way down towards us.  If they had survived it, then so could we!  Probably.  Maybe?  Second was the fact that we had been walking up for nearly 5 hours and were now only a few hundred yards from the top.  And third, two of us were men.  And real men never turn around, no matter how stupid continuing appears to be.

As it turned out, it took us another hour to make it those last few hundred yards.