It’s Crowded in the Clouds on the Matterhorn
As a kid growing up in Laurel, there were no mountains of any real size to climb. There was, of course, the old water tower near the shuttered sanitarium.
We would disobey our parents and regularly ascend the thing, and without belay ropes—exceedingly dangerous. One time the Laurel police spotted us up there and promptly escorted us home.
Then there were the annual camping trips up to New England with my family. On one, my brother Dave and I decided to climb Mt. Washington, the highest mountain in the northeast. When I say highest, I mean only 6,288 feet. But hey, it was a lot higher than Laurel’s water tower.
As I got older, I pushed the climbing bug further, onto bigger peaks including Mt. Kilimanjaro and Mt. Blanc. Eventually the Matterhorn sat squarely in my sights.
Like a giant shard of glass—beautiful but dangerous–-the Matterhorn juts 14,692 feet above the Italian/Swiss border. It is probably the most photographed of the world’s great mountains and attracts so many climbers that it’s even more dangerous than it was before climbing became so trendy.
Rush hour in most places begins at 7 am. On the Matterhorn it starts at 4 am, when the lights come on in the Hornli Hut—at 10,700 feet above sea level, the start for most climbs to the summit.
Crammed into the hot and stuffy Hornli Hut with a pack of smelly climbers, I had slept fitfully for maybe two hours in anticipation of what I thought would be the best summit day of my climbing career.
During an intense week of preparation on smaller peaks in the Zermatt region, my Scottish guide, Kathy Murphy, had cautioned me that the mountain would be crowded and emphasized the importance of an early start on summit day in order to secure a spot near the front of the climbing queue (yes, queue). More than a hundred climbers would ascend the same knife-edged Hornli ridge. There is room on the steep rock for safe passage of only one party at a time.
The Matterhorn can be scaled with intermediate rock-climbing skills, but Kathy warned that if unexpected bad weather blows up, it tends to come from the back, or Italian, side. If that happens when you’re near the top, it’s real trouble because, unlike many peaks, there is no “escape hatch” on the Matterhorn. You must descend the same long, sheer face you just climbed. Even in good weather, the descent takes longer than the ascent: six hours up, nine hours down. Thus, if you leave at 4:30 am and all goes smoothly, you’re back at 7:30 pm, just before dark.
Not much room for error. Which is why, all told, more than 600 people have died there, about twice the fatalities on Mount Everest.
Over dinner of soup and pasta the night before the climb, I chatted with Tony, a British math teacher who had scaled Russia’s Mount Elbrus, Europe’s highest peak (18,510 feet) and one of the Seven Summits. He seemed an interesting character with a good sense of humor. A few hours later he would become a different person.
To climb fast, you must be fit and travel light. After dinner, Kathy emptied my pack on my bunk, discarding what was not absolutely necessary. Camera, gone. Spare water bottle, gone. Kathy told me that for safety reasons we must reach the Solvay Hut (13,133 feet) within three hours of leaving the Hornli or turn around. No arguments, no exceptions.
In the morning, I dressed hastily and made my way downstairs to a breakfast of oatmeal. Some parties had already left the hut, their headlamp beams darting side to side in the eerie blackness outside. With so many people on the mountain, there was an air of urgency, unlike any early morning start I had ever experienced. No sign of Tony, the schoolteacher.
It was a cold but clear morning without a moon. Because of the steepness of the grade, the client/guide ratio on the Matterhorn is 1-to-1, and Kathy and I were to be roped together from start to finish. The theory is that if a client slips, the guide’s belay will save him or her. But Kathy and I knew that if I fell in a precarious spot, her 125-pound frame would have been no match for my 185 pounds.
After an hour of rigorous scrambling, during which several rude parties had elbowed their way past us, I was so winded I told Kathy I had to rest. But she stood firm. The higher we went the steeper—and tougher—it would get, she said. Beginning to think I might not make it, I asked Kathy for an altimeter reading: 12,000 feet. That meant we had ascended nearly 1,300 feet—or a third of the vertical distance to the top—in just over an hour. My spirits brightened.
We arrived at the Solvay Hut in 2 hours and 50 minutes, 10 minutes short of Kathy’s turnaround curfew. We were nearly two-thirds of the way to the top, and there was plenty of light now, as the sun was rising and no clouds were in sight.
Jim Clash with guide Kathy Murphy on the summit of Matterhorn (above) and nearing the summit (below).
After another hour of climbing, we strapped on crampons (metal spikes that attach to boots) for the steepest part—the summit block and its treacherous snowfields. It was there that I saw Tony again. He was descending down one of the fixed ropes and was babbling: “They got me up this thing, now they’ve got to get me down!”
Fear glazed his eyes, and for good reason. The fixed ropes above were an absolute nightmare as climbers jostled each other. Since Kathy and I had gotten a late start, descending climbers were bearing down on top of us. Others below were pressing us to move up. Our belay ropes were getting tangled with the fixed ropes and with other parties’ belay ropes. Snow and ice compounded the mess. Kathy kept screaming at me to ascend. Finally, I muscled my way up the mangled fixed ropes. I was so tired I didn’t care.
At 10 am we arrived at the summit. The pushing and shoving of the crowds was immediately forgotten. The top of the Matterhorn is spectacular. It’s a mile straight down to Italy on one side and the same distance to Switzerland on the other. Massive Mont Blanc, about 30 miles away, sparkled in the morning haze. I remembered the opposite view: seeing the Matterhorn from the top of Mont Blanc a few years earlier.
I rummaged through my pack for my camera. Kathy reminded me that we had left it at the hut. Two Swiss climbers sensed my disappointment and offered to take my photo, which—God bless them—they later sent me.
It was a long, painful descent, but the weather held and we regained the Hornli by 7 pm. Over drinks that night, Kathy confessed that she hated guiding on this crowded mountain. On her last Matterhorn climb, she confided, she had seen one climber actually punch another in an argument over a fixed rope. The story confirmed my own opinion: thrill or no thrill, I’ll never climb that mountain again.
Jim Clash immerses himself in extreme adventures for Forbes magazine. He graduated from Laurel High School in 1973. His latest book, Amplified: Interviews with Icons of Rock ‘n’ Roll, is an Amazon best-seller.
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