Murder Wall

Your hands begin to slip...

Your chalk has run out...

The Abyss is waiting...


Welcome to...

THE NO FALL ZONE!!!!!!

A cool place to hang out, when you're not hanging on the end of the rope!!!! The basic website to learn all of the climbing essentials.
Brought to you by Isabella and Oscar. 2 regular climbing addicts, who happen to be kids.
Recently we have been hiking up mountains in the Brenta Dolomites, in Italy. Yesterday we went on the hardest graded walk (without guides) in this area. With over 800 m of ascent it is a very physically demanding walk, the 5 laghi (five lakes) walk, over 13 kilometers in 6 and a half hours (approx) 4 weeks ago we went to Grindelwald under the infamous Eiger north face in Switzerland. On day 2 of our adventure we went up the Jungfraujoch, going from the classic starting place of the north face, Kleine Scheidegg to more than halfway up Jungfrau, the mountain next to the Eiger) the train ride starts at little above 2000m and finishes above 3600 m. The journey up the Eiger and Jungfraujoch was awesome. The views from the famous gallery window were incredible.

The Eiger north face is infamous for a large number of reasons, commonly known as Murder Wall. Some of the first people to try the north face became dog meat (or ice lollies) on the notorious Death Bivouac, they froze to death overnight. The next team to try included Tony Kurz and Andreas Hinterstoisser. It is suspected that one of the team members got hit by a rock or other item that injured him. His progress was seriously affected and the tourists down in the valley spotted them going down. A storm hit and coated the face in ice. The group reached the traverse Hinterstoiser had planned on the way up as a way of avoiding a near impossible part of the climb. They couldn't get back as Hinterstoisser had used a tension traverse to get across, and this was impossible in reverse. Most likely an avalanche hit. Hinterstoisser had unclipped and fell to his death. Tony Kurz and 1 of his teammates were flung off the mountain connected to another teammate. The person who was flung off with Tony Kurz hit the rock hard and died. The next teammate was on the other end of the rope was asphyxiated, as harnesses had not yet been invented and he simply had the rope tied around his waist. Tony Kurz endured a long and painful night before the guides attempted to rescue him. They got out of the Gallery window, one of the guides had the right length of rope to rescue Tony Kurz, but he dropped it down the face.  They arrived to find Kurz in a less than healthy state. Kurz climbed up the rope to he ledge above, and cut both of his teammates free. he unravelled the frozen rope in a backbreaking 5 hours and lowered it down to retrieve the 2 ropes the guides had knotted together. He clipped onto the rope and started lowering down, soon enough he came to the knot, it would not go through his carabiner, he persevered for ages before giving up and saying 'its finished.' That was the end of Tony Kurz.

To be continued...

by Isabella and Oscar Dodd