The "unclimbable" mountain — what the Matterhorn was
The Matterhorn (4,478 m) is the most famous mountain in the Alps. Standing on the Swiss–Italian border in an almost geometric pyramid that looks like it has been pushed up into the sky on purpose, it has drawn climbers from all over the world. The town of Zermatt sits below it on the Swiss side, Breuil-Cervinia on the Italian side. In Italian it is the Cervino; in French, the Cervin.
Through the first half of the 19th century, as Mont Blanc (climbed 1786), the Jungfrau (1811), and the other great Alpine summits fell one by one, the Matterhorn alone resisted every attempt. From the Swiss side it looks almost vertical; on the Italian side, the rotten rock of the ridge keeps stopping people. Locals seriously believed demons lived on the summit. The peak had earned a name: the unclimbable mountain.
But when the Golden Age of Alpinism really opened in the 1850s, the Matterhorn — the last big prize left — became the single biggest target for every ambitious climber alive. And one young Englishman, in particular, was about to become obsessed with it.
Whymper's obsession — seven attempts
Edward Whymper was born in London in 1840. His father was a painter; Whymper himself made his living as a wood engraver. In 1860, at just 20, he came to Switzerland on assignment from a London publisher to draw the landscapes of the Alps. That trip rewrote his life.
Once Whymper had actually seen the Alps, alpinism took him almost immediately. And his attention went straight to the one peak nobody had ever stood on: the Matterhorn.
August 1861 — his first attempt, from the Italian side — was beaten back by rotten rock and bad weather. From there, attempt after attempt was repelled. In 1862 alone he failed three times. He tried again in 1863, and again in 1864. He did not stop. Seven times in total this mountain threw him off, and he refused to let go of it.
What Whymper contributed to climbing technique
Whymper was not just a climber. He worked on the equipment too. For his 1865 Matterhorn expedition he brought a tent he had helped design — a square floor, two crossed poles, sides shaped into equilateral triangles. That is the ancestor of what we now call the A-frame tent, and the design left a deep mark on later tent-making.
Whymper versus Carrel — a race for national prestige
The other central figure in the story of the Matterhorn's first ascent is an Italian guide named Jean-Antoine Carrel. Born in the Aosta Valley, Carrel regarded the Matterhorn as his mountain, and his life's ambition was the first ascent — from the Italian side.
Through the early 1860s, Whymper and Carrel partnered, fell out, partnered again, and went after the mountain on attempts both joint and separate. They climbed together repeatedly, but the relationship slowly turned from partnership to rivalry. National prestige was now in the mix: the newly unified Kingdom of Italy wanted Carrel to make the climb up the Italian ridge as a symbol of the new country.
Carrel's betrayal — July 1865
In July 1865, Whymper and Carrel had agreed to make a joint attempt from the Italian side. Carrel then cancelled the plan, citing weather. A few days later, Whymper found out the truth: Carrel had quietly assembled a separate Italian party and set off for the summit by the Italian route, without him.
Furious at being outmanoeuvred, Whymper crossed the Theodul Pass back to Zermatt on the Swiss side, and there — by chance — ran into Charles Hudson and Lord Francis Douglas, who were also planning a Matterhorn attempt. The three of them agreed on the spot to combine into one party.
So the race began: Carrel's Italian party climbing the Italian ridge, Whymper's British party climbing the Swiss ridge, both pointed at the same summit on the same day.
14 July 1865 — a hastily assembled team of seven on the summit
Whymper's party numbered seven. The four English climbers — Edward Whymper, Charles Hudson, Lord Francis Douglas, and Douglas Hadow — plus three guides: the Frenchman Michel Croz, and the Swiss father-and-son pair Peter Taugwalder senior and junior. A rope put together in a hurry from whoever was available in town.
There were warning signs. Douglas Hadow was a young, keen climber but a relatively inexperienced one. On Hudson's recommendation, Whymper agreed to include him anyway. That decision was the seed of what was about to happen.
Up the Hörnli Ridge
The party left Zermatt on 13 July and started up the Swiss side via the Hörnli Ridge. Conventional wisdom of the time said the Swiss side was the harder one. In practice, once they were on it, the difficulties were less than on the Italian side, and they gained altitude at a steady pace.
At 1:40 p.m. on 14 July, Michel Croz and Whymper popped onto the summit almost simultaneously. Looking down, they could see Carrel's party about 1,200 feet (around 360 m) below them on the Italian face. Whymper's group kicked rocks loose to attract attention. Carrel saw them, understood, and began the descent.
The first ascent of the Matterhorn was Whymper's. Carrel did reach the summit from the Italian side three days later, on 17 July, but the title of first ascent was no longer his to claim. Whymper later wrote that Carrel had really been the climber most deserving of that first ascent — but had been so set on doing it from the Italian side that he had let the prize slip.
Tragedy on the descent — the riddle of the broken rope
The triumph did not last. Only a few hours after standing on the summit, the most shocking accident in the history of climbing to that point was about to happen.
The seven climbers were roped together in a single line. From the front: Michel Croz, then Douglas Hadow, Charles Hudson, Lord Douglas, Peter Taugwalder the elder, Peter Taugwalder the younger, and Edward Whymper at the back.
Hadow slips
Roughly an hour below the summit, on a steep rock section, Hadow's boots — worn smooth — slipped. Croz, leading the descent, had been spotting Hadow's footholds for him one step at a time and had set his own ice axe aside to do it. He had no time to react. Hadow fell into Croz's back; the two of them went over toward the north face, and the impact pulled Hudson and Lord Douglas off after them.
Whymper and the two Taugwalders threw themselves against the rock and held. Then the rope between them and the falling four parted. Those four climbers fell roughly 1,400 m down the north face and were killed.
Suspicion about the rope
Right after the accident, Whymper examined the rope and froze. Of all the ropes the party had carried, the oldest and weakest one had been tied in exactly the place that mattered — between the survivors and the men who died. The rope that was supposed to be in reserve had somehow been put in the fatal position.
A worse suspicion followed. A rumour spread that Whymper and the Taugwalders had cut the rope themselves to save their own lives. Later investigation rejected that claim, but the Taugwalder family carried the accusation for a long time afterward.
Of the four who died, the bodies of Croz, Hadow, and Hudson were found on the Matterhorn Glacier and buried in the Zermatt cemetery. Lord Douglas's body was never recovered.
The end of the Golden Age of Alpinism — what the triumph left behind
The Matterhorn disaster ran in newspapers worldwide and was the biggest headline that any Alpine accident had produced up to that point. In Britain, grief turned quickly to anger; even Queen Victoria reportedly raised the question of whether the sport of mountaineering should be banned outright.
With the first ascent of the Matterhorn, almost every major 4,000 m peak in the Alps had now been climbed. The roughly ten years from 1854 to 1865 are remembered as the Golden Age of Alpinism, and the first ascent of the Matterhorn — and the disaster on the descent — was the curtain coming down on that era. What followed is sometimes called the Silver Age: the stage shifted from unclimbed summits to unclimbed routes, and to higher mountains farther away.
Scrambles Amongst the Alps — a classic of mountain literature
After the accident, Whymper was hammered with criticism and suspicion. His response — part defence, part answer — was the 1871 book Scrambles Amongst the Alps. Filled with his own finely worked wood engravings, written in characteristically dry English prose with bursts of understated humour, it has remained a classic of mountain literature ever since.
More recently, testimony from the descendants of the Taugwalder family has drawn renewed attention. Whymper's book has been treated for over a century as the de facto official record, but over time, parts of it have stopped quite adding up. History, as ever, gets written by the side that survived — and there may still be parts of the Matterhorn story that have not been fully said.
Whymper's later years, and how Carrel died
Whymper died in Chamonix in 1911, at 71. He kept his fame to the end, but he never quite got out from under that day. His later life was reportedly marked by heavy drinking.
Carrel, meanwhile, spent the rest of his life as a Matterhorn guide. In 1890, on a descent of the Italian side, he was caught by bad weather. He got his clients safely down — and then ran out of strength on the mountain himself. A man who lived with the Matterhorn, and died with it.
The Matterhorn today
More than 160 years after the first ascent, several thousand climbers attempt the Matterhorn each year. Between 6 and 12 of them die on the mountain annually, and the total death toll since the first ascent has passed 500 — said to exceed the combined totals of Everest, Denali, and Rainier. The Matterhorn is still one of the most dangerous mountains in the world.
In the Matterhorn Museum in Zermatt, the broken rope from that day is still on display. It sits there quietly, still telling the story of the triumph and the disaster of 160 years ago.