CONTRIBUTIONS > MOUNTAINEERING > CLAUDIO CORTI 1928 – 2010
Claudio Corti Ph. Marco Luzzani
Eiger 1957 Claudio Corti's rescue ph www.beatenbergbilder.ch
Pizzo Badile East North/East Wall ph mario sertori
Cima Scingino South Wall in the big dihedral 1971 Corti'route ph mario sertori
Petit Dru west face ph.mario sertori
CLAUDIO CORTI 1928 – 2010
A great climber passes away
Claudio Corti passed away on 3 February 2010 in Lecco. He was 81 years old. He had become famous for the tragedy on the north face of the Eiger in 1957.
Before this deathly episode, Corti had successfully climbed many hard routes, repeated extreme routes and opened his own difficult routes, still respected today, such as that one the east face of the Pizzo Badile, in the Central Alps. The Eiger’s North face at the time hadn’t had an Italian ascent. Corti had been training all summer and set out on August 3rd with the young and highly-motivated Lecco climber Stefano Longhi.
But what should have been a difficult climb turned into a calvary, full of unforeseen events, and with terrible weather. The two climbers found themselves part of one of the most infamous episodes on this wall so well-known for fatal accidents. They mistook the start of the route, losing a day. Once they’d abseiled back onto the correct line, the Germans Günther Nothdurft and Franz Mayer caught them up.
The Germans were finding things hard, so the four decided to all climb together, led by Corti, but they moved terribly slowly, also due to the bad conditions. On 9 August, after 7 days’ effort, they were at the White Spider, a sheet of steep ice stuck on the dark slopes of the “monster”. They were weak from their efforts and from the cold. Stefano Longhi fell a few metres, and wasn’t able to climb back up the rope or even make a prussik knot, so cold were his hands. His companions belayed him down to a ledge.
At this point only 300 metres separated them from the summit and Corti wanted to climb this stretch as quickly as possible and then re-descend to organise Stefano’s rescue. But it was in this final section that fate held another nasty shock. While he was leading, he was struck on the head by a falling rock, and he fell badly, about 30m. The situation was becoming ever more alarming and the two Germans, who by this stage were the freshest, lashed him to the face and finally climbed to the top.
But their bad luck wasn’t finished, when they died of exhaustion during the descent. Their bodies were only found 4 years later on the west face descent route from the summit. In the meantime one of the most spectacular rescue operations, under the full gaze of the media, was being mounted. Using a complex system, Claudio Corti was reached and winched up to the summit, in a bad way, but alive. Unfortunately for Stefano Longhi, help arrived too late. What happened afterwards, for Claudio Corti, was more like a trial with many prosecutors and no defence, and he, still under shock from his injuries, didn’t respond to the cheap jibes of some the Know Alls.
Straight after the accident, Corti’s reconstruction, when he was still suffering from nightmares of all kinds, was certainly not very clear. And whenever his answers left some slight doubt, a mountain of insinuations and terrible suspicions was heaped on him. The most unjust and wildest was to have caused the death of the Germans by having delayed the ascent. The enormous weight of the loss of 3 lives, with the guilt of being the only survivor that was stopping him eating, became unbearable under this onslaught.
The “He’s guilty” party was headed by Heinrich Harrer, one of the first ascensionists of the North face of the Eiger. With his book “The White Spider”, published in 1959, the Austrian climber spelled out in black and white his accusations about Corti. Only 4 years later, in 1961, with the discovery of Günther Nothdurft and Franz Mayer’s bodies on the west face, Claudio Corti’s words took on a different meaning, and even his critics recognised the logic of his account. In the mean time, though, his life had been ruined. They’d trampled him with crampons, ignoring the wounds caused.
Another book, Jack Olsen’s “The Climb up to Hell”shed a bit more light on what really happened those terrible days. But it was only with the publication of Giorgio Spreafico’s “The prisoner of the Eiger”, in 2008, 50 years after the tragedy, that finally Corti’s version, with its sad dignity, could properly explain things and wipe away the rubbish that for so many years placed him in limbo, between Good and Bad. Claudio Corti was one of the strongest Lecco climbers of his generation, having made the first repeats of the day’s toughest and most difficult routes, as well as making the first ascent of brilliantly-conceived routes in good style with minimal equipment.
His audacity was proverbial, for instance the time on the Pizzi Gemelli (Val Bondasca) when his famous companion, unable to overcome a smooth and unprotected slab, gave him the lead. Corti took off his big boots and climbed in socks on the smooth rock, as if he was weightless, dancing like a mythological hero. Or in 1953 climbing his route on the east face of the Badile. He’d already “stolen” this line from the legendary Carlo Mauri, as Corti himself explains in the moving film interview that follows . The team started up a series of cracks that led to where the wall steepens.
At this point Corti played his trump card: his audacity. He spied another system of cracks, further left, at first sight easier (the cracks where they were would be climbed by the British climbers Kosterlitz and Isherwood in 1968 to produce the “La via degli inglesi”) and they headed for these. But to reach them required a series of very sketchy moves. With the footwear of the time, stiff and not very good for feeling the small holds, Corti forced a traverse on the slab that would repel most of the would-be repeaters.
Unfortunately, this Corti masterpiece was marred by another trick of fate, always cruel with him, when his companion Felice Battaglia was struck by lightning and killed at the top of the route. There’d be other new routes, wild and difficult (Cerro Torre 1974 first ascent west face), in Claudio’s life, but these wounds would contribute greatly to Claudio’s unhappy smile.
mario sertori
transl by Peter Herold
Eiger North Wall ph www.beatenbergbilder.ch
Eiger 1957 Claudio Corti 's rescue ph www.beatenbergbilder.ch
Pizzo Badile North East wall ph mario sertori
Grand Capucin Ph. mario sertori
Grand Capucin ph.mario sertori
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