\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\n\u00a0
\nClaudio 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.
\n\u00a0
\nBefore 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\u2019s North face at the time hadn\u2019t 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.
\n\u00a0
\nBut 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\u2019d abseiled back onto the correct line, the Germans G\u00fcnther Nothdurft and Franz Mayer caught them up.
\n\u00a0
\nThe 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\u2019 effort, they were at the White Spider, a sheet of steep ice stuck on the dark slopes of the \u201cmonster\u201d. They were weak from their efforts and from the cold. Stefano Longhi fell a few metres, and wasn\u2019t 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.
\n\u00a0
\nAt 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\u2019s 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.
\n\u00a0
\nBut their bad luck wasn\u2019t 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, \u00a0didn\u2019t respond to the cheap jibes of some the Know Alls.
\n\u00a0
\nStraight after the accident, Corti\u2019s 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.
\n\u00a0
\nThe \u201cHe\u2019s guilty\u201d party was headed by Heinrich Harrer, one of the first ascensionists of the North face of the Eiger. With his book \u201cThe White Spider\u201d, 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 G\u00fcnther Nothdurft and Franz Mayer\u2019s bodies on the west face, Claudio Corti\u2019s 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\u2019d trampled him with crampons, ignoring the wounds caused.
\n\u00a0
\nAnother book, Jack Olsen\u2019s \u201cThe Climb up to Hell\u201dshed a bit more light on what really happened those terrible days. But it was only with the publication of Giorgio Spreafico\u2019s \u201cThe prisoner of the Eiger\u201d, in 2008, 50 years after the tragedy, that finally Corti\u2019s 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\u2019s toughest and most difficult routes, as well as making the first ascent of brilliantly-conceived routes in good style with minimal equipment.
\n\u00a0
\nHis 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\u2019d already \u201cstolen\u201d this line from the legendary Carlo Mauri, as Corti himself explains in the moving film interview that follows\u00a0. The team started up a series of cracks that led to where the wall steepens.
\n\u00a0
\nAt 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 \u201cLa via degli inglesi\u201d) 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.
\n\u00a0
\nUnfortunately, 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\u2019d be other new routes, wild and difficult (Cerro Torre 1974 first ascent\u00a0west face),\u00a0in Claudio\u2019s life, but these wounds would contribute greatly to Claudio\u2019s unhappy smile.
\n\u00a0
\nmario sertori
\n\u00a0
\ntransl by Peter Herold
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n
\n\u00a0
\n
\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8066],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-boulder"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n