Fearless on Everest: The Quest for Sandy Irvine (23 page)

Lunn was convinced that Sandy would have made a very great ski racer and even conjectured that he might have been chosen to race for the British ski team against the Swiss universities in the 1924-25 season. ‘I have seen some hundreds of beginners emerging from the rabbit stage, but in the whole of my experience I have never met a more remarkable beginner than “Sandy” Irvine.  He was blessed with complete fearlessness, with great physical strength, and, above all, with a genius for the sport.  In a few years’ Lunn claimed, ‘he would have been in the same class as the very best Swiss performers.’

However skiing is not just about racing and passing tests and Lunn conceded that Sandy was first and foremost a mountaineer.  I find this an interesting observation on Lunn’s part, and I suspect that he, as a very experienced mountaineer, recognized and acknowledged those characteristics he attributed to mountaineers to be burgeoning in Sandy. ‘He would have played an important part in that crusade which we all have at heart, the crusade for transforming ski-runners into mountaineers, and mountaineers into ski-runners.’  Lunn held Sandy in great affection, regarded him almost like a son, and he had very high hopes and beliefs in what his protégé would have achieved had he lived.  Peter told me when we met in the summer of 1999 that he had no recollection of his father writing at such length or in so much detail about anybody else. 

Sandy was staying in a room at the Palace next to Peter.  They met both at dinner and on the slopes and Peter formed a very strong and positive opinion of him.  My cousin Ann always said that Sandy, whom she had known as a child, had a lovely manner with children.  He had the ability to talk to them as if they were as important to him as grown-ups and this always made a very strong and positive impact on them.  Peter well remembered being allowed to join his parents at dinner one evening and sitting next to Sandy whom he quizzed at great length about all the technical equipment that was going to be taken on the Everest expedition.

Arnold Lunn observed the conversations and wrote: ‘I remember the grave courtesy with which he listened to the eager questions of my own small son, who was interested in the Everest expedition and in the scientific aspect of oxygen, etc.  He hurled a succession of questions at Irvine with all the ruthlessness of a small boy who has at last discovered a patient victim.  Irvine replied with as much care as if he had been giving evidence before a committee of oxygen experts.’  Peter followed the events of the Everest expedition with enthusiasm and recalled his surprise and delight when Sandy sent him three long letters from Everest, giving detailed accounts of the progress he was making with the oxygen apparatus.  The letters were taken away from Peter for safekeeping and, tragically, were lost during the Second World War.  I found a letter from Arnold to Willie Irvine written after Sandy’s death in which he said he was enclosing copies of these letters from Sandy to Peter.  For a moment I had real hopes that they would be amongst the papers but sadly they were not.   However, the great generosity and kindness which Sandy showed towards his young friend has never been forgotten and Peter Lunn has hanging in his Buckinghamshire kitchen a large black and white print of himself and Sandy together after the Strang-Watkins Challenge Cup, in which Sandy had taken first prize and Peter third.

One of the plans Sandy had had before arriving in Mürren was to do some climbing in winter conditions.  This, he felt, would give him additional valuable experience for the Everest expedition.  The winter of 1923 experienced exceptionally high snowfall, which made for excellent skiing but thwarted his need to climb.  He made several attempts to mobilize guides and others, but without success: ‘I couldn’t get any actual rock climbing though I tried hard’, he told Odell, ‘nobody would come with me as the weather was so bad … and it was too prohibitive to climb alone with two guides.’  Finally he succeeded in attaching himself to a group of very strong skiers who, in the care of Alpine guide Fritz Fuchs, had planned a descent of the Aletsch glacier, the largest in Europe.  The tour was organized by a man called White from nearby Wengen.  The group consisted of Fritz Fuchs, Sandy, Tony Knebworth, White and two others.  Of them all Sandy was the weakest skier but the strongest climber: it was a companionable party that left Mürren at the end of January.

They skied down from Mürren to Lauterbrunnen and caught a train to Wengen from where they took another train up to Kleine Scheidegg, the middle station below the awe inspiring Eiger North Face.  There they had lunch, staring up at the great face which, in 1924 was still unclimbed.  From there they boarded the Jungfraubahn, an electrically as opposed to steam-operated railway, in its time a pioneering engineering feat of staggering advance.  When it was first approved in 1891 a funicular railway to the top of the Eiger was proposed but plans were rethought and the railway, which was commenced and built by Adolf Guyer-Zeller in 1894 went only as far as the Jungfrau Joch.  The looping tunnel through the Eiger and Mönch mountains has a gradual gradient of maximum 25centimetres per metre which allows for progressive adjustment of the human body to high altitude.  Coming out of the top station at the Jungfrau Joch at 3454 metres (11,333 feet), the top of Europe as it is often described, is still one of the greatest wonders in the Alps.  There you are confronted by a scene of near perfect beauty, a world of snow and rock peaks with the great Aletsch glacier sloping gently away like an enormous tongue of ice licking the sides of the mountains.  Tributary glaciers feed into the Aletsch, folding into the great frozen river.  In 1924 this perfect world was barely disturbed by man, the snow still virgin, many of the peaks yet unclimbed.  Little wonder Sandy was filled with a sense of awe and wonder.  Fifteen years earlier George Mallory had sat in the Concordia hut overlooking the glacier, lying in the August sun, sleeping and dreaming.  A very different but equally wonderful prospect from the mid-winter impressions Sandy formed.

The route from the top station to the Egon von Steiger Hütte is via a run called Concordia, a gentle slope, and then a climb on skis of some three hours, for which they would have required skins on the bottoms of their skis.  At the bottom of the Concordia Sandy took over the lead from Fuchs, setting a formidable pace.  Going uphill on skis is tiring work but Sandy was more experienced at this than the others.  It was the downhill which stretched his abilities.  Fritz Fuchs took over the lead as they reached the field of crevasses that criss-cross the slopes beneath the hut.  There was a certain amount of hilarity amongst the party as they tried to avoid falling into oblivion and struggled to master the uphill kick turn, a fiendishly difficult manoeuvre to the unpractised.  It involves changing direction by 180 degrees, often on a steep slope, crossing one ski above the other.  Perfectly executed it is an elegant turn, but for those less practised a cat’s-cradle of skis, sticks and knees is more often the result. The views from the climb are breathtaking and they were all impressed by the isolation of the glacier.  They arrived at the hut in the late afternoon, elated but exhausted. Sandy, being the physically the strongest and the most used to skiing up rather than down, found the uphill section exhilarating: Tony Knebworth described it as ‘an awful sweat’.

During the course of my research into the Aletsch glacier trip I contacted a close friend, Fiona Morrison, who is an experienced ski tourer, and asked her whether she had any information on the Egon von Steiger Hütte.  She emailed me back to say that she and her husband were just off to Switzerland to do a ski tour but she would have a look in her books and, failing that, would ask their guide.  They had planned to make a tour from the Jungfrau Joch and had booked to stay in a Dutch-owned hut called the Hollandiahütte in the mountains above Wengen. 

A few days later I had an excited phone call from Fiona.  She, her husband Eivind and their Scottish guide, Willie Todd, with whom we have skied several times in Chamonix, arrived at the hut only to discover a plaque mounted above the door identifying it as the Egon von Steige Hütte.  In a year when coincidences cropped up in the most extraordinary places this was without doubt the most out of the way of all!  They had made exactly the same tour as Sandy and his companions, starting at the Jungfrau Joch, skiing down to Concordia and then ‘skinning’ up to the hut.  Fiona and Eivind made the climb on skis up to the Ebenfluh which Sandy had hoped to take but was stopped by the blizzard. I was particularly pleased to have this piece of news as it helped me to piece together, with the aid of Fiona’s photographs, a whole picture of the glacier outing in January 1924.

The Egon von Steiger hut is no different from other huts which can be found in the High Alp.  The
raison d’être
of the huts is to provide basic shelter for mountaineers who are attempting a climb or ski tour that takes longer than a day.  It obviates the necessity for camping or bivouacking in the mountains.  The huts are generally basic, providing sleeping accommodation on bunks, a central space for eating and sitting in the evening.  The general rule of thumb for these huts is that they are supplied with firewood stacked outside, a stove and a few pots.  Hut etiquette dictates that you leave the hut in the state you found it, clean, tidy and with a pot of melted snow ready for the next lot of incoming climbers or skiers who will be thirsty and in need of liquid before almost anything else.  That hasn’t changed for over a hundred years.

When Sandy and party arrived at the hut they found it extremely cold - 10° F or –21.5° C inside.  But they soon got a good ‘blizzard fug’ going in there from the fire and pipe smoke and one of them, Mac, made a heart-warming cheese soup which they devoured with relish.  Unfortunately Fritz Fuchs had consumed half the brandy they had brought with them on the ascent, so they were a little short of alcohol, but good spirits prevailed and there was a great deal of joking and laughter that evening.  Sandy’s plan was to rise at 3 a.m. and climb up to the Ebenfluh on ski the next morning before setting off down the glacier.  I get the impression that the others thought he was being somewhat overzealous and, according to Tony Knebworth, they were relieved to discover that at the appointed time it was snowing and blowing a blizzard.  Fuchs decreed it would be insane to attempt to climb in such conditions so they returned to their blankets and slept on until 7.30 a.m.  Tony Knebworth records: ‘We ate a huge breakfast and tidied up the hut, and eventually got started down at 9.05 a.m.’

The blizzard had ceased, the wind abated and the weather was beginning to clear as they left the hut but it was bitterly cold in the shadow of the peak.  Typically the mountaineer elects to climb or ski in the early morning when the snow conditions are stable and before the sun has warmed the slopes and increased the risk of avalanches.  The state of the snowslab can vary in very short distances and it was important to the inexperienced party with Fuchs that he took control of where they skied.

Skiing on a glacier is a very different experience from skiing on piste, and neither Tony Knebworth nor Sandy had ever done it before.  The first and most important requirement for the safety of the skiers is a detailed local knowledge of the glacier.  For the recreational skier this is best found in a local guide who knows intimately the mountain, the glacier, the snow conditions and the route to the valley. Fuchs explained to the group that they would have to follow his tracks exactly, stop above him and obey his instructions.  Only thus could he guarantee that none of them would fall into a crevasse.  This type of skiing was not entirely to Tony Knebworth’s taste.  He wrote to his father, Viscount Lytton, on his return to England:

I will give you my views on glacier skiing.  In the first place, the snow is probably bad because it is either crusty from the sun or wind-swept, and even if it’s powder it’s very slow because it’s so cold.  With us it was a bit of everything, but mostly wind-swept crusty stuff, which we didn’t go wild about.  Fritz said it might have been much worse.  In the second place you don’t know where you are, or what you might fall into.  You’ve got to follow the guide and not deviate from his line, or you may hit a 60ft. drop, which is an infernal bore.  You can’t just run down doing telemarks, because you catch the guide up at once, even if you wait until he’s out of sight before starting.  So that I feel there is no dash about glacier running – it’s all kick turns and ‘daren’t fall down’ sort of running. 

If Knebworth was frustrated by the skiing, Sandy was in his element in the mountains.  This had been the aim of the skiing trip for him and he wrote to Odell enthusiastically about his experience, concluding: ‘I had a hell of a good time on the glacier and climbed the snow peaks with maximum rapidity.’

They made the run in two hours and arrived in a village called Blatte (but which they nicknamed Blotto) where they found an excellent pub.  Here they celebrated their descent with a large quantity of vin de pays and a home-brewed brandy, all for two Swiss francs.  One of the locals in the pub refused to believe they could have made the descent in two hours when his own personal best time had been two and a half hours.  More brandy, more celebrations!  Fuchs told them later that the man was no great skier, but that served only to make them more cheerful.  Knebworth recalled: ‘We entertained the village, and sang songs to them for about an hour – in fact had a real good orgy, and then went on and tried to ski.’

The run down to the Goppenstein from the village of Blatten is, fortunately, not a difficult one, a gentle run down a snow-covered track.  I say ‘fortunately’ because they were all, by the time they left the pub, blind drunk.  ‘It’s the funniest feeling in the world trying to ski when you’re blind [drunk].  The snow comes up and hits you in the face!  Old Fritz went off first, waving one ski round his head, and sitting down every few yards.  One had no idea of the contours or the bumps or anything, and it felt too queer for words.  I got down to Goppenstein at about 1.30.  Mac and John Carlton at 1, Fritz about 1.15 and the other two at about 2.0 or 1.45.’