| OCR Text |
Show Russell Jacobs 2 December 2009 MD: King Arthur. RJ: Yep. And it's a very comprehensive, uh, documentary on the history of the Eiger. MD: Um-hum. RJ: And all the failed attempts prior to it's being accomplished during, uh, Hitler's reign. They were both Germans, and they managed to make it to the top. Uh, it's called the Heckmair route. And, uh, I read every single book that our library offered on climbing. And then I went down to the Alps, and I took a hike .. .it was a four-day hike, and I've done it subsequently. I did it, oh, ten years ago again. That takes you through the ... through, uh, Switz ... the Swiss Alps. It's a four-day hike, and you stay in, uh, the village of Kleine Scheidegg, where, I mean, where they have the train that everyone if they've ever seen, um, Clint Eastwood's Eiger Sanction movie, they have footage of that train going through the Eiger, which they built, oh I don't know, at the tum of the century. Took many, many years to complete, but ultimately reaches the saddle between the Jungfrau and the Monch, which are, uh, mountains that are contiguous to the Eiger. Uh, their elevation's slightly higher than the Eiger, but nowhere near the danger that the Eiger presents to all climbers. Um. It's done many times, you know, since. And one day, uh, I believe that shortly after or at the time that The Eiger Sanction was being filmed, um, Reinhold Messner and his partner, I can't recall his name offhand [Peter Habeler], uh, did the climb in ten hours. And it's a six thousand-foot wall. It's not terribly difficult, uh, technical. But the subjective danger is horrendous in that it, uh, because it's a north face, the freeze-thaw, uh, feel of the rock breaks loose rock throughout the day and if you're in some areas on the wall during that time you're gonna get. .. you're gonna get hit. So you have to skirt through those early, early, early in the |
