The ogre of the north

Skiing in the Swiss resort of Wengen comes a poor second to gazing at the terrifying north face of the Eiger - the most feared peak in the Alps.

Albert von Allmen worked for the Jungfrau railway, which runs from the village of Kleine Scheidegg – in the heart of the ski area at Wengen – up to the highest station in Europe. He was responsible, in 1936, for the section of the track in a tunnel through the mountains. It ends at Jungfraujoch station, which is just a lift-shaft away from the mountain's 3,454m peak.

Quite why the engineers had a passage cut from the railway tunnel to the north face of the Eiger mountain eludes me. Someone suggested in Wengen last weekend that it was done for safety reasons; but the safety value of a passage running out to an almost vertical drop is not obvious. Whatever its purpose, it offered von Allmen a unique vantage point: he could swing open a wooden door and track the progress of climbers attempting to scale the then-unconquered face.

In the Thirties such attempts were something of a spectator sport. The recent exhibition in Austria on the history of Alpine mountaineering showed documentary footage of trippers at Kleine Scheidegg queuing for the coin-operated telescopes to watch those climbing (and not infrequently falling off) the north face. One weekend in July 1936, "North-Face-Fever" – as Heinrich Harrer called it in his account of the first successful ascent – reached... well, a peak. On the Sunday morning there were crowds around the telescopes as a group of four climbers made swift progress up the face, until one of them was apparently injured by a falling rock.

Having scaled two-thirds of the face, the group began to slowly descend. The following day, von Allmen opened his door to look for them. He called out – and got an answer from above. The four climbers were heading down towards him. He went back into the passage to make them a welcoming cup of tea. They never drank it. With the tea stewed for a couple of hours, von Allmen went back to the door, and heard a cry for help. One of the group, Toni Kurz, was trapped, hanging off a rope above. The others were dead: one had fallen, his rope strangling another and pinning the third up against the face where his body froze to the rocks.

Kurz swung on the face for a day and a night as mountain guides tried to lower him down. Rockets were used in an effort to get a rope to him; Kurz himself spliced two ropes together with his teeth and one hand (the other was frozen), and the guides added a further section. But when their join proved too thick to pass through a metal link, Kurz gave up. "I'm finished," he said, and died.

Why all the history? Because for anyone visiting Wengen after reading Heinrich Harrer's account of the incident in The White Spider, seeing von Allmen's window on the north face of the Eiger is greatly more affecting than the resort's village, setting and skiing.

The Jungfrau railway still runs up through the mountain, as it has done since 1912. The journey from Wengen to the peak – with a change at Kleine Scheidegg – must now be one of the most expensive in the world. As the crow flies, the distance between the two points is 8.5km. Obviously, topography demands that the railway take a longer route, but not long enough to justify a return fare (without the many discounts available, notably to skiers) of Sfr138 (£62).

The view out on to the north face of the Eiger, though, is priceless. Seen from below, at Kleine Scheidegg, it looks fearsome enough, shooting up like a wall from the Eiger glacier. But from von Allmen's viewpoint – now expanded into a series of windows in two concrete chambers – the vast, curving face is a truly terrifying prospect. Seemingly unassailable overhangs protrude from it, including the one that hid the doomed Kurz from von Allmen's sight. I could find no mention of the tragedy nearby, despite the plethora of tourist information. But perhaps it doesn't constitute a "visitor attraction", the purpose to which the railway is now dedicated.

At journey's end there is a large souvenir shop, a rather dodgy "Ice Palace", viewing areas and several eating and drinking opportunities including Bollywood, a curry house presumably provided for the Indians who come on pilgrimages to an area where many "Bollywood" films are shot. Still, the Japanese visitors seemed happy enough with the facilities at the "Top of Europe" (as Jungfraujoch styles itself); and they are the customers who matter, turning up en masse for a trip on the railway. Cynics suggest that the cost of a ticket is a "Japanese price", a way of cashing in on visitors who normally stay for hours rather than days at the resort, and rarely ski. The tourist office firmly denies this.

Wengen's mountaineering history pre-dated North-Face-Fever, and continued after the Heinrich Harrer team's successful ascent in 1938: once the impossible became possible it just had to be made harder, with more direct routes, solo climbs and faster ascents. Its skiing history is impressive, too. The so-called "cradles" of British skiing are numerous enough to stock a maternity wing, but so important were Wengen and nearby Mürren that "incubator" might be more appropriate. Henry Lunn, credited with inventing the ski package-holiday, brought his first customers to the area; and pioneering British ski clubs were created in both resorts.

To be honest, Wengen's skiing is not exceptional. Most of its pistes are intermediate, set above the tree line. The black runs and bowls below the Eigergletscher railway station are more testing; but I had most fun on the long intermediate running from Männlichen down to Grindelwald, which, having started as another wide-open piste, then winds a narrow and often confusing path through the trees to the valley bottom. At one stage I headed into a farmyard, figuring that I wasn't supposed to ski on the road. Apparently I was. The showpiece Lauberhorn World Cup piste was also on my agenda; but in very poor visibility last Sunday I couldn't find it.

More exceptional is Wengen's setting, beneath the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau mountains. And the traffic-free village is so quiet that in the Hotel Brunner, a good 10-minutes' walk up the hill, the station announcements were audible. The Brunner – in a great, ski-in ski-out location – is an admirable hotel, pleasant, simple and resolutely unshowy. I told the owner, Margrit Brunner (her great-grandfather built the hotel in 1905), an engaging, strong-willed character who won't have a TV in the place, how much I liked it. She shrugged and replied: "We are what we are." You don't meet hoteliers so devoid of pretension every day of the week.

Thomson (0870 606 1470; www.thomson-ski.co.uk) offers seven-night packages to the Hotel Brunner from £459 half-board (based on two sharing), including return flights from Gatwick and transfers. Flights from other airports are available at a supplement. Heinrich Harrer's 'The White Spider' is published by Flamingo (£12.99)