Word: matterhorns
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Italy's Walter Bonatti, 34: the first successful direttissima-straight up-ascent of the 14,701-ft. Matterhorn's north wall; in Switzerland. Two days after 60 m.p.h. winds forced Bonatti and two friends to abandon a similar assault, he was back on the mountain, alone, inching up the ice-covered rock that leans slightly from the perpendicular (TIME, Feb. 26). It was four days before he finally staggered onto the summit, briefly embraced a wrought-iron cross, then started the descent to Zermatt and a hero's welcome...
...mountains go, Switzerland's 14,701 -ft. Matterhorn is not much of a challenge any more. Robert McNamara climbed it, after all, and it is the sort of hill that Stewart Udall would probably try to run up. So many people (1,000 a year) have made the trip since Britain's Edward Whymper first succeeded in 1865 that the popular climbing routes are covered with pitons and footholds as easy to negotiate as a flight of steps. So easy, in fact, that a whimsical Englishman once won a bet that he could reach the summit without ever...
Imagine the surprise, then, of villagers in the base town of Zermatt when none other than Italy's Walter Bonatti turned up last week to try a Matterhorn ascent. Bonatti, 34, is one of the best-known mountain climbers in the world -the handsome, brooding hero of a dramatic rescue on France's Mont Blanc, the youngest member of the triumphant Himalayan expedition up K2 in 1954, the fellow who in 1955 spent six days and five nights alone clawing his way up sheer rock and ice to become the only man ever to conquer Mont Blanc...
...Drop of Water. For Bonatti, the trick now is to find new ways to climb the familiar old hills. And he had a really novel idea for the Matterhorn: a "direttissima" assault, straight up the mountain's ice-coated, practically vertical north wall, a climb that had been tried (without success) only once before-in the summer. It was, shuddered a Swiss guide, "the route that a drop of water would follow...
...they reached the base of the vertical wall and collapsed, exhausted, on a narrow ledge-the first horizontal surface they had seen in five days. They had not eaten or drunk in 72 hours, and when they staggered back into Zermatt after seven days on the Matterhorn, they discovered that newspapers had already given them up for dead. Dead? Next day Bonatti went skiing for exercise, and two days later he was back on the mountain, attacking the north wall again-this time by himself. Said Bonatti: "I'm on a war footing...