Quote:
Ulrich Inderbinen
(Filed: 16/06/2004)
Ulrich Inderbinen, who died yesterday at Zermatt aged 103, was almost certainly the oldest active mountain guide in the world.
He climbed the Matterhorn for the 370th and last time in the summer before his 90th birthday, on the 125th anniversary of the first climb by Victorian mountaineer Edward Whymper. Inderbinen took just four hours to reach the summit, leaving men of less than half his age trailing in his wake.
He reluctantly gave up ski guiding at 95, but he continued mountain guiding in summer until he was 97. Then, after taking 10 minutes longer than he had set himself for the descent of the 4,164 m Breithorn, he decided the moment had come to hang up his ice-axe.
Ulrich Inderbinen was born on December 3 1900 at Zermatt, then a village of 750 residents. At the age of five he was put to work looking after cows on his parents' isolated smallholding and selling edelweiss to tourists. School was an hour's walk away; he left aged 16 after walking 11 miles down the valley to sit his final exams.
Before the First World War, Zermatt was already attracting 51,000 visitors each summer to climb or gaze at the Matterhorn, providing work for 170 mountain guides. But the absence of tourists during the war was a commercial disaster, with most hotels remaining shuttered and guides forced to seek work elsewhere. Inderbinen remained on his father's farm throughout this period, leaving only briefly aged 18 to work on building sites in the valley, but walking the 17 miles back to Zermatt whenever he could.
When, aged 20, he went on his first train journey to nearby Visp to sign up for basic military training, he and his fellow Zermatters felt so sick as the train swayed at 9 mph that they had to stand on the carriage running board. That winter Ulrich bought his first skis, carved from local larch and 2.2 m long. He used them for the downhill journey home each day after tending sheep at the hamlet of Zmutt. It was only when the tourists returned in force in 1921 that he decided on his future career.
His uncle Moritz was already a well-known mountain guide and Ulrich was determined to follow in his footsteps. The problem was, he had never climbed a mountain in his life. But in September 1921 he put this to rights by climbing the Matterhorn, with his 19-year-old sister, Martha, and two friends.
"None of us knew what we were doing," he recalled. "The girls wore ground-length skirts and their everyday shoes. But myself and my friend Alfred had fine army boots and woollen jackets." They spent the night in the Hornli Hut at the base of the mountain which, late in the season, had already been deserted by climbers who would otherwise have prevented them from continuing.
They started out at 2 am by lantern light, roped together in pairs. Their candles kept blowing out in the wind and they looked for scratchmarks from hobnail boots on the rockface to give an indication of which route they should take. Four-and-a-half hours later, they reached the top.
Ulrich finally qualified as a guide in 1925, and that July he was engaged by a German doctor to climb the Matterhorn. "Mr Inderbinen showed himself thoroughly safe and reliable, so I hope to climb with him more frequently," was the treasured first entry in his guide's book.
He soon found a cunning, if exhausting, way of avoiding the stiff competition among guides in the village. Each morning he and his brother would walk for four hours to the top of the Gornergrat Railway above Zermatt to await visitors arriving off the first train. As the only official guides available, the brothers were quickly hired.
In 1931 Inderbinen got his first job as a ski guide, taking a Swedish visitor up the Breithorn. He had no climbing skins, so he wrapped rope around both sets of skis for the ascent.
On the descent, he fell and broke his leg on the glacier. After he managed to hobble down the mountain on his ski sticks for four hours, the village doctor would only believe he was seriously injured when an X-ray some days later confirmed a fractured tibia.
During the Second World War, Inderbinen was conscripted as a sergeant based at Zermatt, and was required to patrol the Theodul Glacier by night, armed with a rifle and bayonet, but forbidden to use a torch.
For the rest of his life, he lived in the simple house behind the church which he built with his own hands in 1933. He had no telephone, no central heating, and until the last two years of his life he insisted on chopping his own firewood. He rarely left Zermatt and the Visp valley, except for a couple of short holidays in Germany and for a personal audience with the Pope in 1996. But one of his few regrets was being stopped by his family from climbing Mt Kilimanjaro at the age of 92.
Never one to miss an opportunity, Inderbinen took up ski-racing for the first time at the age of 82 when he discovered that he was the only competitor in his age group for the local annual ski guides' race.
He was a familiar figure in Zermatt, his body bent almost double from 75 years of carrying a heavy rucksack and ropes. A devout Roman Catholic, he never missed the morning church service and was always on time for meetings with his enormous band of admirers from around the world.
At the age of 95 he was spotted carrying two enormous pairs of skis as he walked slowly down the main street. "The second pair?" he said with a twinkle in his eye. "They're for my father, he's coming on behind me."
He married Anna Aufdenblatten in 1933, who died in 1984.
He is survived by his daughter Maria, who kept house for him in his later years, and by his son German-Ulrich, who lived next door.
