The Eiger Obsession: John Harlin III
May 2007John Harlin III at the base of the Eiger Nordwand.
American Alpine Journal Editor John Harlin III has hit the really big screen as star of The Alps: Giants of Nature, the new IMAX film centered on Harlin’s climb of the north face of the Eiger, the mountain on which his father died in 1966. The Eiger Obsession, Harlin’s book about his father, his climbing, and the mountain that haunts him, has just been published. Harlin climbed the face with Robert and Daniela Jasper in September 2005. Dougald MacDonald interviewed Harlin this spring:
1. In your book, you describe a very private obsession with climbing the Eiger, yet your best opportunity to climb it comes through a very public event—the making of a major movie. How did you resolve this dilemma?
That is certainly the great irony this climb, that what felt so private and personal ended up being so public—completely against my plans or expectations. Other than satisfying my raw ego, what won me over was the fact that it would honor my father in a way that he would have been extremely proud of, and it will provide a legacy for my family, current and future. Dad filmed his final attempt on the Eiger Direct with a Super-8 camera, and he intended to make a movie of it. The Alps is a kind of completion of Dad’s project from 40 years ago. For those reasons, making the film made sense to me. But there still remained the conflict between my privacy on the climb and shooting a film. My condition there was that the film could not interfere with the actual climb, which had to be absolutely real—I had to have the full experience of climbing that legendary wall just as any other climber would.
2. Was the process of doing the book, the film, and the climb cathartic for you?
The climb itself was cathartic, though it wasn’t as unblemished by the filming experience as I would have liked. Still, coming off that mountain I felt like I was on cloud nine, like I really had fulfilled a dream. But writing the book was the most cathartic of all, as I discovered considerably more than I’d known about my mother and father, and I processed it through writing much deeper than I ever would have otherwise. A number of times I found myself crying while writing—mostly while describing Dad’s death and the family’s recovery.
3. In the book, your description of passing the point where your father died on the Eiger boils down to a couple of short paragraphs. Was it somehow anticlimactic to reach that spot on the face?
I figured that the Third Icefield was the likely spot of Dad’s first impact after his rope broke a few hundred feet above, though I don’t know this for a fact. As I was leading across the traverse on the icefield I kept looking up to try to spot the overhang on which the rope cut. But I had to concentrate on the climbing, not on Dad’s dying. We all know and love how climbing focuses the mind on the here and now, and that was the case for me on most of the ascent. Once I finally started up the wall, I was fully absorbed by the joys and challenges of climbing and didn’t have much headspace left for wallowing in emotional baggage.
4. Why didn’t you climb the John Harlin Route, the Eiger Direct?
Even my daughter, Siena, asked me why I wasn’t climbing the John Harlin Route. I told her that my goal was to climb the Eiger’s north face, and that doing so by a much harder route than classic 1938 route would decrease my chances of success. Dad actually made the first American ascent of the Heckmair Route, in 1962—at the time it was the only route on the face—and he wrote a long article about it. So I knew Dad’s experiences and emotions on that route quite intimately. On the face and during the months immediately following I strongly considered returning to climb Dad’s route, but Mom made it quite clear that I’d put the family through enough stress. If I’ve actually learned anything from my ascent, I’ve learned that I should be done with the Eiger and do my future climbing elsewhere, even if the climber in me is still drawn to the wall.
5. Will sharp-eyed climbers find anything inaccurate or somehow “off” in the movie?
Those who know the face well will realize that some of the close-ups were not actually filmed on the route. Some climbing scenes were filmed on the west flank in a couple of locations, including a cliff and some snowfields at the edge of the north face. We had to work where we could get the cameras, but we matched the actual situations as best we could. We filmed a lot from the train tunnel’s window about a third of the way up the face. And the camera was helicoptered to a platform at the Hinterstoisser Traverse. Scenes from the real Traverse of the Gods, the Summit Icefield, and the summit ridge were filmed with a special “Spacecam”—a gyroscopically stabilized camera mounted to the nose of a helicopter. People also may recognize that some of the re-creations of Dad’s last climb don’t have precise period clothing. Otherwise, I think the film feels remarkably “on.” I wouldn’t have participated in the film if I didn’t think it would be well-received by climbers.
6. What’s the strangest or funniest thing you were asked to do for the film?
They hired a German guide to play my father, and a Swiss boy to play the 9-year-old me. I spent a day riding the train up and down to Interlaken looking pensive while seeing them in my “memory.” I haven’t seen the final cut of the film yet, so I don’t know if those scenes survived. The frustrating part for me was that while I was riding the train a double had to stand in for me (in my Eiger clothes) while Robert and Daniela Jasper were filmed on the Hinterstoisser Traverse, a scene I really wanted to participate in.
7. What do you hope that non-climbers will take away from the film?
I hope they get a sense of why we love the mountains so much, and what the sport of climbing means to us—how it’s more than mere sport. I think the scale of the IMAX theater screens is the only thing that can come close to presenting the scale of the Alps themselves. Heck, the 80-foot screen is bigger than a lot of modern sport routes! These huge images will scare off those who don’t like heights, but at least they’ll get a sense of what heights really are.
Learn more about The Alps at www.alpsfilm.com. You can see wonderful photos of the Harlin family from the 1960s at www.johnharlin.net.