To the ends of the earth: An awfully big adventurer

There is something splendidly barmy about Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham Fiennes, the aristocratic British explorer who can, it is said, trace his lineage back to Charlemagne.

He was, after all, expelled from the SAS, where he had specialised in demolition, for blowing up an ugly concrete dam built by a US film company in what is reputedly the prettiest village in England because it had blocked a rather fine trout stream.

And he is the man who regularly doubled back while running the New York marathon so he could finish at the same time as his slower partner. Yet such exploits are only the icing on this particularly English fruitcake.

Guinness World Records has named him the world's "greatest living explorer". It is a title he has come by the hard way. Over the past 25 years he has led 30 expeditions up the White Nile on a hovercraft, across Norway's Jostedalsbreen glacier, into British Columbia's Headless Valley, to the Lost City of the Sands in Arabia and, in the first circumpolar journey round the earth - a trip that took 10 years from conception to execution - became the first man to have visited both poles by surface transport.

Now, in his seventh decade, he has gone where few men of his age dare venture - he has set up his own website on MySpace. And that is not all. His entry, which tells us he is a Piscean, reads thus: "I'm 62 years old. I'm terrified of heights. I've had a double heart bypass. This March I will be climbing the North Face of the Eiger. Why? Well, I've been an explorer for more than 25 years, but this is my challenge of a lifetime. The North Face is 6,000 feet (1,828m) of vertical rock and ice. It's claimed the lives of 50 climbers since the first ascent in 1938 and is notorious for rockfalls, avalanches and unstable weather. But I'm determined to get to the top - vertigo and all.

"I'm taking on the Eiger Challenge not just 'because it's there' but to raise £1.5m to support the pioneering work of Marie Curie Cancer Care's Delivering Choice Programme ... an initiative that aims to double the number of terminally ill people who can be cared for and die in their own homes.

"I have watched my nearest and dearest die of cancer and I understand the huge difference this choice can make."

It is a challenge which, in part, is simply a recognition that there is not much left to do in the way of polar expeditions. "They've all been done," he has said. "There are only two poles and me and my rivals from Norway and places have been battering away at them for 30 years and the only ones left are gimmicky: you have to go by camel or motorbike or something to be first."

But it is also a further example of how, whatever the ordeals he sets himself, this brave eccentric has only ever had one goal: to conquer his own fear.

Ranulph Fiennes' father died before he was born, killed in action in the Second World War at Monte Cassino in 1943. The young man, who was a baronet on the day of his birth, determined from the outset that his only ambition was one day to command his father's old cavalry regiment, the Royal Scots Greys. "Whenever I've felt wimpish, thinking I should stop due to frostbite or whatever, I would always feel spiritually he was watching over me and I didn't want to let him down."

Not long after his birth his mother moved the family to South Africa where Ranulph lived until he was sent to Eton at the age of 12. There he had a hard time. "I was verbally bullied rather than physically bullied. I had had a cosseted upbringing and I was probably spoilt. I learnt that people can be nasty to one another, which, after my soft childhood in South Africa, was a great shock to the system. English public school is good at giving shocks to the system of wimpish boys." Fiennes has been bullying his body ever since.

He joined the Army but a poor academic record at Eton barred him from becoming a regular officer. He was allowed to serve for just eight years before he was ejected, bewildered at what he might do next. His childhood sweetheart, and later wife, Ginny, suggested he use his Army training to pursue adventures for corporate sponsors, and they soon found themselves travelling up the Nile before launching Westward Ho! Adventure Holidays.

"I used the only thing that the army had taught me, which was teaching soldiers canoeing and climbing and skiing and that sort of stuff. The only way of making a living out of that was basically to do expeditions."

A more glamorous alternative beckoned briefly. Fiennes' chiselled film-star looks got him an invitation to audition for Sean Connery's successor as James Bond, but he was rejected by the film's producer Cubby Broccoli who pronounced that his hands were too big and he had "a face like a farmer's".

Instead the expeditions unfolded year by year. The one of which he is most proud is uncovering in 1992 Ptolemy's long-lost Atlantis of the Sands, the frankincense centre of the world, the lost city of Ubar in Oman after a search which had lasted 26 years, on and off - and about which he suffered considerable consternation when the US space agency Nasa wrongly claimed they had found it for him through satellite scans. "It was a total lie," he said, with uncharacteristic directness. His charm is normally of the strong and silent style.

It has been a tricky lifestyle to finance, though sponsorship of the expeditions by companies such as Shell has come in handy. So, in recent years, has his ability to command as much as £10,000 a go from companies who want him to give talks on personal motivation.

"By drawing the analogy between nature's most dangerous and difficult challenges," says his blurb, "and the very real day-to-day business challenges, Sir Ranulph Fiennes involves each individual in the audience on a very personal level. The elements vital to the success of an expedition include teamwork, determination, patience, high organisational ability, flexibility to meet and beat unexpected obstacles, goal-setting and performing under extreme pressure. The same qualities are all crucial to success in the business world."

He has also written almost 20 books with titles such as Where Soldiers fear to Tread, A Talent for Trouble, Hell on Ice and his autobiography, Living Dangerously. On the way he has raised more than £6m for charity, which has earned him an OBE.

He then had a massive heart attack which, bizarrely for a veteran of the most difficult conditions in the most remote places, he had while boarding an easyJet flight to Edinburgh at Bristol airport. Yet even this, and that double bypass, have not stopped him. When his doctors told him to not train for two months - he does a two-and-a-half hour run from his Exmoor home every day - he ignored them. A week after being discharged from the coronary care unit he was doing 30-minute runs. Within four months he was running seven marathons on six continents in seven days. The medics told him he would be fine so long as his heart rate did not exceed 130 beats per minute. Sir Ran - "people only call me Ranulph when I'm in disgrace" - said OK, and forgot to pack his heart monitor.

Not long after - driven into more frantic activity by the sudden death of his wife Ginny at just 56 - he climbed to within 300m (984 feet) of the Everest summit. Now he is off up the Eiger, a mountain whose name means "ogre" in German. And he is going without the top half of the fingers on his left hand.

He cut them off in his garden shed with a saw when his surgeon refused to amputate them after he suffered frostbite in 2000 when Fiennes set out to become the first person to reach the true North Pole solo - and didn't make it because his sleds fell through ice and he was forced to pull them out with his bare hands.

The psychiatrist Anthony Clare once spent 45 minutes trying to get to the bottom of Fiennes for a radio programme and concluded that probing the explorer's psyche was "like stirring a void with a teaspoon". But Fiennes has offered his own clue. When putting together a team, he says, take people who have the right character even if they don't have the skills you need. Indeed.

The struggle to defeat the 'killer wall'

The North Face of the Eiger ranks alongside Mt Everest as one of the two big ticks in mountaineering, at least in the eyes of the public. Among climbers, however, an ascent of this 6,000ft face of rock and dwindling ice in the Swiss Alps commands the greater respect. For despite advances in climbing standards and better equipment, the gut-churningly risky and unpredictable nature of the Eigerwand ensures that even today, almost 70 years after the first ascent, it remains one of the great test pieces of extreme alpinism. Not out of mere hyperbole did the German media of the 1930s turn the name of the face, the Nordwand, into Mordwand - the killer wall. When the young Bavarian Anderl Heckmair arrived in July 1938 to lead what would be the first successful ascent, it had already claimed the lives of eight of the previous 10 so-called Eiger candidates. The Eiger (13,041ft) is the grim member of a trio of much-photographed peaks that rise above the meadows of Grindelwald and Wengen in the Bernese Oberland. Its companions, the Munch and Jungfrau, are higher but positively benign by comparison. The Ogre's louring face is best seen from the hotel balconies of Kleine Scheidegg, where "Eigerwatchers" can follow the climbing drama through telescopes while enjoying cocktails, a voyeuristic experience splendidly portrayed in the 1975 movie The Eiger Sanction.

In the 1930s young European climbers were engaged in a race to climb the north faces of the Alps, with the Eiger the most coveted of all. The first casualties were Max Sedlmayer and Karl Mehringer, from Munich, who froze to death in 1935 at a point still known as "Death Bivouac" - one of a string of evocative names that chart the history of the Eigerwand. A year later came the heartbreaking death of Toni Kurz who hung in mid-air exhausted and frostbitten, suspended on a jammed rope only feet from his would-be rescuers. Kurz was one of a team of four, all of whom perished.

The story of the first ascent by two Germans, Heckmair and Ludwig Vorg, and two Austrians, Fritz Kasparek and Heinrich Harrer, was told by Harrer in his classic account, The White Spider (1959), which takes its name from the Eiger's most infamous feature, an icefield scoured by stones and avalanches that hurtle down the spider's limbs. Battered by avalanches on the Spider, Harrer thought they were about to be swept from the face by "this crushing, sliding Hell". But Heckmair clung on, one hand gripping his ice pick, the other tight on Vorg's coat collar. The ascent had taken four days and was seized on by the Nazi propaganda machine as embodying Germany and Austria united in struggle and conquest. The British had stayed aloof from the Eiger race, regarding the climb as a stunt with unpleasant nationalistic overtones. But in 1962 Chris (now Sir Chris) Bonington and Ian Clough (who later died on Annapurna) made the first British ascent of the North Face. It remains etched in his mind. "I was pretty damn impressed by its danger," he told me four decades later.

It was an appreciation borne of experience. Only three weeks earlier Sir Chris and Don Whillans had shepherded another British climber, Brian Nally, off the face after Nally's partner had fallen to his death. Four years later Sir Chris knew tragedy again on the Eiger when John Harlin, the American leader of a US-British party, fell 3,000ft when a rope broke. The team was attempting a new, more direct, line up the face.

Degradation of the Eiger's icefields by global warming has increased the risk of cascading rocks. Seven years ago, as Joe Simpson, author of Touching the Void, was attempting the face, two climbers fell to their deaths, unseen by him or his partner but captured on film by a camera that had been left running. But the lure of the Eiger is undimmed; 30 different routes have been essayed on the face and there remains no shortage of suitors.

Stephen Goodwin