On the eve of the 150th anniversary celebrations of the Alpine Club in Zermatt, Keith Hindell remembers his own ascent of the Matterhorn - sixty years ago.
If you’ve ever been to Zermatt in high summer you’ll know that it has a heady atmosphere. The staggering magnificence of the scenery and the barely contained delight of the climbers combine perfectly with the smiles of visitors and villagers under a self-assured sun.
In such an atmosphere your legs feel twice as long and one’s nerve twice as strong. It’s practically impossible for a climber to admit that he is not going to climb the Matterhorn. Just to see it is to feel its challenge, said my father, Eric.
It was 1947 and I was fourteen, and my father and I had headed to Zermatt to climb a few modest peaks. He’d climbed Mont Blanc in 1939 and during the War I’d served a steady apprenticeship on the British mountains.
After a 33-hour train journey we arrived, travel-worn, in Zermatt. Despite pre-booking the hotel, we found it inexplicably closed. For a few minutes we were cast down, but on our way we’d passed another hotel, which I remembered from the brochure. And here, at the Hotel Dom, the manager was very embarrassed - he was amazed that we could have paid and been given a booking receipt for somewhere which had been closed for months. He phoned their head office in Zurich where someone took responsibility for this lapse in Swiss efficiency and made a decision.
We were sent off to five-star accommodation, the Beau Site. There we were greeted with more profuse apologies, but we couldn’t believe our luck - a fortnight in a luxury hotel rather than the modest one star hotel that we’d booked. Coming from a Britain still locked in frugal food rationing we ate our fill in the dining room without reserve.
We had planned on a gentle introduction to the climbing, but when the concierge of this rather fine hotel asked if we’d like a guide for the Matterhorn, my father replied without thinking, “Yes, of course”.
So before we knew it, and before we’d climbed any other peak, we were on our way to the Hornli Hut with our guide, Peter Biner - a sunburnt, leather-skinned giant in a white cloth cap. In those days there were no cable cars to the Schwarzee - you just had to walk the whole way. But as we left the village we were overtaken by a train of mules carrying beer and supplies for the hut. So with a wink and tip to the muleteer, Peter offloaded our rucksacks onto the mules, saving us a lot of hard toil.
At the hut I felt small and inadequate surrounded by men and women who looked like proper climbers. Their equipment was so much more professional than ours, yet it turned out later that most of them went no further than the hut. I drank gallons of hot lemon and sunk deeper and deeper into my first pair of long trousers. After a fitful night we left at four in the morning just as it was getting light. Now, years on I no longer have a step-by-step memory of the ascent. What remains in my consciousness is but a blurred impression.
Soon after we left the hut an absurd incident occurred which didn’t improve my confidence. Climbing a short wall I jammed my boot in a crack, only to find I couldn’t get it out. I struggled with it, my father tried, Peter tried. Another guide leading the next party impatiently gave it an enormous heave, which nearly parted my leg from my foot, but still it did not budge. I felt an utter fool holding up not only our rope but also the party behind. A torrent of advice in unintelligible German merely increased my confusion. Finally the boot seemed to pop out of its own accord, and we were on our way once more.
All the way up I had a bad headache because of the altitude. And half way up at the Solvay Refuge I would gladly have stopped, letting my father complete the climb alone. But Peter was having none of it, so to my everlasting satisfaction I continued.
The upper part of the climb comes out over the north face. As every climber will know, this is where Edward Whymper’s party had their accident after the first ascent in 1865. When you’re on the climb it feels like coming up under the eaves of a house. There’s no actual overhang on the route but it is so steep that you cannot see the summit until you are almost there. The summit snow slope is always described as “the roof”.
On reaching the summit at 14,780 feet we sank into the snow to gaze over the magnificent peaks of the Valais, the most prominent being the Monte Rosa about five miles away to the east. It was a perfect day and other climbers were taking photographs, identifying peaks and eating hard sticks of salami they called ‘gendarmes’. All I could manage beyond some cold tea from the guide was to release the tension of thinking that I might not have been strong enough, or agile enough, to reach the summit.
The descent was notable for tension of another kind. A little above the Solvay hut my father on the rope in front of me slipped and fell. He was soon pulled up by the rope - uninjured but disturbed. It turned out that he was wearing a new type of nail on his boots called BPs or British Pattern nails. Each nail was individually screwed into a metal socket in the boot. They were an interesting experiment intended to replace conventional European nails, but one which had not really taken account of the Vibram rubber sole developed in pre-War Italy.
They seemed to be made of a hard steel which did not always grip the rock as well as the softer continental nails. So my father slipped several times more, evoking some ripe criticism from the guide. I had no such problems, wearing more simple cloverleaf nails.
We reached the hut at 2pm, a reasonable time for such an inexperienced pair. However, it was clear by now that Eric was much more affected by the altitude than me and needed a good rest. The guide left us at the hut to race down to the valley and up to another client at another hut for another peak the next morning. After an hour’s rest Eric and I went on down the path back to Zermatt, but I had to wait for him much of the way. In a short note penned back at home Eric wrote that the climb was “The hardest day’s work I ever did, but well worth it, a great experience and an imperishable memory”.
The rest of the holiday was an anticlimax. We climbed some minor peaks from the valley including the Ober Rothorn at 11,200 feet. As this involved 5,900 feet of climbing in one day we must have been getting fit. But we had to decline Peter Biner’s repeated suggestions that we tackle something more exciting. It was a time of serious currency restrictions and we simply hadn’t enough Swiss francs to pay for another guided climb.
In any case we were quite content to gaze at our conquest and to get one up on the manager of the hotel. With great ceremony he produced what he called “The Golden Book” wherein were inscribed all the hotel’s guests who had climbed the Matterhorn. Thomas Jefferson signing the Declaration of Independence could not have felt more pleased with himself than I did signing this gold silk-covered book. And as far as I can tell I was the youngest boy to have climbed the Matterhorn at that time, a record that the Zermatt Museum has no evidence to counter.
I’m sure my record is long gone, but the memories remain.
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