The White Spider. The History of the Eiger's North Face. by Heinrich Harrer.
The White Spider. The History of the Eiger's North Face. by Heinrich Harrer.
Publisher: Rupert Hart-Davis London 1965 Revised & Enlarged Edition.
Good hardback with jacket. Blue boards are rubbed and bumped with some fading to spine ends. Name details to ffep, light scattered foxing, binding firm. Price-clipped jacket is rubbed, creased, and chipped with some fading. 310 pages, illustrated.
The White Spider tells the stories of the first attempts to ascend the Eiger's North Face, a nearly vertical wall of rock, snow, and ice almost 1,828 metres tall from its base to the mountain's 3,967-metre summit, making it the tallest north face in the Alps. Well known for both its technical difficulty and its extreme hazards from avalanches, falling rock, and severe weather, the North Face is also notorious for the many accidents and tragedies that have befallen its climbers, for which it has been given the colloquial epithet Mordwand ("murder wall"), a play on Nordwand ("north wall"). Harrer recounts in detail all of the first attempts and successes on the Face through the first 25 years of its climbing history, beginning with Max Sedlmayr's and Karl Mehringer's disastrous try in 1935, through the first successful ascent by a German-Austrian party in 1938, of which Harrer himself was a member, and continuing to the successful ascent by Kurt Diemberger and Wolfgang Stefan in July 1958. Harrer describes in particular the tragedy of the 1936 attempt by Edi Rainer, Willy Angerer, Andreas Hinterstoisser, and Toni Kurz, all of whom died during the climb; Harrer's own climb, which was the first successful ascent of the North Face; the strenuous but successful climb of Hermann Buhl, Gaston Rébuffat, and their seven companions in 1952; and the catastrophe of 1957, when two Italians, Stefano Longhi and Claudio Corti, joined two Germans, Günther Nothdurft and Franz Mayer which resulted in eight bivouac nights on the wall of the mountain for the Italians and the death of all but Corti.
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