The Matterhorn First Ascent — A broken rope killed four on the way down

On 14 July 1865 a party of seven led by the English illustrator Edward Whymper made the first ascent of the Matterhorn, the 4,478-metre Alpine peak straddling the Swiss–Italian border above Zermatt — and then, on the descent, four of them fell to their deaths when the rope linking the party snapped. The victims were the French guide Michel Croz, the young and inexperienced Englishman Douglas Hadow, the experienced clergyman-climber Charles Hudson, and Lord Francis Douglas. Whymper and the two Zermatt guides, Peter Taugwalder the elder and Peter Taugwalder the younger, survived because the rope broke between them and the falling men. The accident closed what later chroniclers called the “golden age of alpinism.”

The Matterhorn had been the last great unclimbed summit of the Alps, and the 1865 contest for it was a race. Whymper had failed on it repeatedly from the Italian side, partnered with the local guide Jean-Antoine Carrel; when Carrel committed to a rival Italian team, Whymper hurried around to the Swiss side and assembled a scratch party for an attempt up the Hörnli ridge. They reached the top on the afternoon of 14 July, with Carrel’s party still several hundred metres below on the Italian flank, and beat them to the summit.

The descent was the killing ground. About an hour below the top, on steep rock made treacherous by the order of the rope, Hadow slipped and knocked Croz off his stance; the shock pulled Hudson and Douglas after them, and the four fell roughly 1,200 metres down the north face to the glacier below. The connecting rope — later established to be the oldest and weakest length the party carried — parted under the jerk. Three bodies were recovered; Lord Francis Douglas was never found. Throughout, the Zermatt guides Peter Taugwalder father and son carried the local knowledge and labour that made the Swiss-side route possible, and the elder Taugwalder would spend the rest of his life under an unproven suspicion of having cut the rope to save himself.