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WE'D HEARD RUMORS that the Alps were decomposing, but we ignored them. Europeans can be so querulous, so theatrical, waving their arms as if the sky were falling. John Harlin III and I had been planning this trip for half a dozen years, and we weren't about to change our minds. And, for John, this particular late-summer journey was considerably more than the usual climber's hajj—a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the sport.
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After many other trips together, we'd finally come to climb the macabre Mordwand, or "Death Cliff" (a play on Nordwand, as the Eiger's north face is called). It would be a first for both of us. But we were too late.
"The Eiger has changed completely," Nicho Mailänder told us upon our arrival in Geneva. A peerless climbing historian, Mailänder is one of the authors of The Tyrol Declaration, a pioneering manifesto on mountaineering ethics and environmental responsibility that was adopted by the Union Internationale des Associations d'Alpinisme in 2002. "It is not the mountain it used to be. To climb it this summer, particularly, would be very, very dangerous."
"The Eiger per se no longer exists," he continued. "There used to be three main icefields on the Eiger. Over the last five years, they have all but vanished. In their place are slick, 50-degree limestone slopes covered in rubble. Rubble which tends to slide off. Who wants to climb rubble? No. I'm sorry, but nowadays, the Eiger can only be safely climbed in winter."
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