The Eiger King

Robert Jasper thinks it was the goat cheese. Vacationing on the Greek island of Kalymnos in June 2017, he woke one morning feeling vaguely off. Then, to his surprise, he failed to on-sight the 5.13b he’d picked out; he thought it should have been straightforward. Even in his late 40s, he found routes of that grade routine. More annoying, he, his wife, Daniela, and their two teenage children were due to fly home the next morning. No time to put it right.

That evening Jasper developed a temperature, and by the next, as the family made it back to southern Germany, he was in the grip of a raging fever.

“The doctors never identified it,” he tells me, “but it was clear I’d picked up some kind of bacterial infection.” Within hours, Jasper was fighting for his life as sepsis took hold, and doctors, including a tropical-medicine specialist, struggled to find the right combination of antibiotics to treat whatever it was. It took five long weeks to control the infection and bring Jasper fully back from the brink of death, and another two before he was allowed home.

By that time, as Jasper puts it, “I’d lost everything.”

Getting taken out by dodgy goat cheese would have been galling for anyone, but especially a man of Jasper’s exceptional physical ability, something he also depends on for his livelihood. His name may not be as recognizable as that of the Huber brothers or Stefan Glowacz, let alone Reinhold Messner, but Robert Jasper is likely the best alpinist you’ve never heard of, and he deserves a place alongside all those names. His resume glitters. No one has spent more time on the North Face of the Eiger than he has or done so many impressive routes there. Since his first time up the 1938 route at age 16, he has climbed 16 lines on the face, with several firsts, including the Eigerwand’s first 8a/5.13b, Symphonie de Liberté. In total Jasper has spent a day or so shy of a year on this most notorious face. He has myriad other achievements in the Alps, both on mixed climbs and hardcore suffer-fests, and continues in later life as a thoughtful and innovative explorer. And yet the most impressive thing about Robert Jasper may be the way he has thought through what he does in the mountains—how and why.

So losing it all to a rogue cheese seemed surreal. Jasper’s route back to the big time, or even normalcy, was a hard one. As soon as he got home from the hospital, though, he was outside walking with sticks. His wife, Daniela, says it was “heart-breaking” to see her once-powerful husband struggle just to move. “He came home walking like an old man of 80,” she says. She confessed to him later that when, before his release, the doctors told him he would likely never climb again, she thought they might be right.

“She did not tell me that at the time,” Jasper says. “For her it was extremely hard to see how hard it was for me to move. Luckily you don’t see yourself like that.” When Jasper was told he wouldn’t climb again: “I said, ‘No, that’s not possible.’ But I had to start from zero.”

Despite her doubts, Daniela joined Robert to work on his recovery, a process in which he applied the same level of dedication that had once taken him to the top to scrape himself off the floor and start again. In a few days, he was walking unassisted. Almost at once, Daniela was driving him to the local climbing wall, and soon after that to a nearby crag to find a short, easy climb close to the road that she could lead and he could drag himself up. As soon as they could, they went back to Kalymnos.

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