Their Red Bull sponsors are happily spreading the news via social media that the Swiss alpinist Nicolas Hojac (32) and Austria’s Philipp Brigger (33) have set a record for climbing the Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau in just 15 hours and 30 minutes – almost 10 hours faster than the previous record.
At the top of the Eiger they had a pal waiting for them with food and water and at the base of the Jungfrau, they scoffed a feed of French fries before completing their remarkable trilogy of iconic North Faces in the Bernese Oberland.
Compare it, though, with the nonchalant approach of a 24-year-old Wicklow man on a short holiday in the Swiss alps in August 1858. Crampons had not been invented. Tweed or suede was the Gore-Tex of its day. And in the absence of flashlights, starlight would have to do.
With no mountaineering experience, Charles Barrington decided to climb one of Europe’s highest mountains, the Jungfrau, and duly did so after spending the previous night in a cave with two mountain guides.
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At 4,158m it was a long way from the 552m Sugar Loaf, the main peak he could see from the family home in Fassaroe, Bray, Co Wicklow.
He found it all too easy and expressed disappointment with the experience when he found himself back in the nearby Swiss village of Grindelwald. In jest, it was suggested to the novice that he should have a go at either the Matterhorn or the Eiger, both of which had yet to be conquered.
That night he slept with a beefsteak on his face to soothe the glacial sunburn from his day’s exertions before setting out to tackle the Eiger, which translates from German as ogre.
A mile long at its base, the north face of the Eiger – the so-called “murder wall” on which 64 climbers have lost their lives – towers over Grindelwald like a great pyramid of ice, snow and crumbling limestone.
Years later he recalled in a letter to his half-brother Richard Manliffe Barrington how, before setting off, he was berated by the families of his guides Christian Almer and Peter Bohren for taking them on such a perilous adventure.
[ It was just a perfect day... until we got to the Dursey Island cable carOpens in new window ]
At midnight on August 10th they reached a hotel in the Wengen Alp below the Eiger where he slept on a sofa before leaving at 3.30am.
His guides were reluctant to follow his chosen route, so he set out on his own for the western flank and ridge on the right-hand side of the north face and persuaded them to join him as he climbed a perpendicular rock face.
He has described how he “scrambled up, sticking like a cat to the rocks which cut my fingers and at last got up say 50-60ft. I then lowered the rope, and the guides followed with its assistance”.
He had the presence of mind to take a flag that he planted on the summit at noon on August 11th, 1858. This was confirmed by a telescope in the hotel on the Kleine Scheidegg, the pass between the Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen valleys and a key location in Clint Eastwood’s film The Eiger Sanction.
Barrington received a gun salute and a hero’s welcome after his four-hour descent to Kleine Scheidegg, just before an avalanche might have swept him away. And that was how Charles Barrington’s only visit to the Swiss Alps finished. “Not having enough money with me to try the Matterhorn, I went home,” he wrote to Richard.
Twelve years later he would win the first Irish Grand National on his horse Sir Robert Peel and reflected that he had needed to be as fit as that horse to climb the Eiger.
During his lifetime, the valleys and glaciers that form the majestic setting for the Eiger, the Monch and the Jungfrau were already changing in dramatic ways.
In 1896 work began on the railway line that would tunnel through the Eiger and the Monch mountains to take tourists like me to the Jungfraujoch, Europe’s highest railway station completed in 1912.
Today, on one side of the Jungfraujoch complex is a man-made snowy plateau with a small hut. There I enjoyed a paper cup of tepid tea for €5 while sitting in a deckchair and contemplating the majesty of the Aletsch glacier as it sets out on its 23km journey through the Alps and onward to the Rhone valley.
Barrington trudged across this Alpine highway in his hobnail boots on his way up to the summit of the Jungfrau but the glistening vista which greeted the Wicklow man and contributed to his sunburn, has altered greatly.
The ice sheet under his feet was already changing, thanks to the pollutants seeping into the glacier from the industrial revolution gripping Europe. Rising global temperatures have seen the glacier retreat by more than 3km since 1870 and lose over 200m in ice height.
Nothing will bring it back to its pristine state and it is just one more striking piece of evidence that the planet is warming at an alarming rate. We need something like the single-minded determination of Charles Barrington to address the climate crisis.
