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Fay Manners opened the 'Solar Eclipse' on the North Face of the Eiger

A woman from Bedfordshire has made climbing history after she opened a new route on one of the world's most infamous mountains.

Fay Manners and her climbing partner Roger Schaeli opened the new "Solar Eclipse" route on the Eiger's legendary North Face after a gruelling 13 nights on the mountain.

The 39-year-old from Bedfordshire even fell 10 metres into open air after a collection of rocks came loose before the rope and her protection caught her.

Now, she has spoken to GB News about her incredible achievement, saying she intends to keep climbing.

She told The People's Channel: "It kind of feels really unbelievable.

"Actually, I guess I'm really grateful with how far I've come in the last three years with my progression as a professional alpinist.

"This feels like a bit of a pinnacle for me just to have opened a new route on such a prestigious mountain with so much rich history.

"So I'm just really grateful to be able to have experienced this and to be able to write my my name in a bit of a chapter of the history of the Eiger North Face."

Ms Manners took interest in sport from an early age, taking part in tennis, badminton, hockey and netball growing up, however took a career in data science after studying at Loughborough University.

She said: "I was told from a very young age that this wasn't really possible for a female to build a full-time career in sports because there was no money in it.

"I moved into a career of data science for many, many years. So I was doing that for around 10 years before I switched my career and completely transformed my life into being a professional alpinist.

"It was quite a fast progression into mountaineering, I essentially had got to a point where I'd been working too hard. I really had missed all the sports that I'd been doing, and I just decided to start mountaineering sports."

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After taking up snowboarding in her late 20s, Ms Manners got into climbing, eventually relocating to the Chamonix area in the French Alps.

In 2022, she had her first experience with the North Face of the Eiger, climbing the oldest and most well known route, the Heckmair, over two days with a friend.

Ms Manners said: "Since then, I've always been thinking that I would love to go back and I would love to climb more routes, but I had never thought that I would open a new route on the Eiger.

"That for me just seemed like something that wasn't even a dream because I just didn't believe that it was something that I could do."

The idea for opening the new route came from her partner, Mr Schaeli, who suggested the two look to avoid the blistering summer sun.

Ms Manners said: "We were planning to do a route together, and I wanted to do one where I would be on the North Face and would be able to escape all of the sun we've been getting in the summers, as it's kind of overbearing and it makes it impossible to climb when it's just so hot.

"I was saying to him 'It'd be really cool to open a new route on the North Face that's safe, but also it's really good rock, and also it's just much cooler because I can't take climbing in the valleys anymore.

"He had said 'Okay, well, do you want to try to open a new route on the Eiger?' When he first suggested it to me, I just thought, 'What?' Like I didn't, I didn't even consider that. I didn't know whether I would be capable of that."

The vertical North Face, which rises 5,900ft over the Alps, became a legendary alpine challenge due to extreme weather, falling rocks, and a history of tragic climbing fatalities before it was first conquered in 1938.

Ms Manners had a terrifying moment when she fell after one of the holds broke off on my hand, falling 10m down the face before being caught by her support.

Recalling the experience, she said: "[Roger] caught me, and he was he looked really terrified, and he was like, 'Are you okay?' It gave me you know a couple of seconds to think about it, and I was like, 'No, actually, I'm I'm absolutely fine, no injuries or anything.'

"But it was just kind of like an intimidating experience to fall that far, and then obviously I needed to go back up again to continue to open the route.

"It was good to have had a fall for it to be safe, and then to kind of build my confidence up again to get back on the wall and continue climbing."

The two climbers managed to watch the recent solar eclipse from the side of the mountain, a moment they said was so spectacular they decided to name the new route after the phenomenon.

Ms Manners said: "It started to happen, and we had these really beautiful colors in the sky. I don't know how to describe it, all the colours were a bit kind of cloudy, everything became a bit darker, a bit softer.

"I was just thinking, 'Wow, there's probably so many people that have been planning for this to happen, and they were planning beautiful places that they watch it, and we just happened to be in the prime seats of watching like this natural thing happen like right in front of our eyes'

"We were sleeping there anyway. So it just felt so we didn't need to rush anything. We just could sit there and enjoy it, and it was a pure and warming experience."

Even when the two completed their route, they didn't stop with the pair entering "work mode" to ensure the legitimacy of the route.

Ms Manners continued: "I'm a bit of a perfectionist. So when I got to the top, I wasn't thinking, ,'I've got to the top, we've finished.'

"I was thinking, 'Okay, we've still got a lot of work to do' because when you open a route, youcan't open a route that only you climb, and you don't intend for others to repeat it.

"Then, obviously, you don't care about how it's left, and if you write a description of the route, and if there's some loose rock on there because you've just opened it for yourself.

"But the idea for me is to open the route for myself, but also for others to go and repeat it, and to climb it, and so really, what was going through my mind is 'Okay. Which of the pitches that we need to go back and clean? Which pitches do we need to like take the loose rocks from?

"I'm like still going through how can we make the route repeatable so that others can go and climb it. So honestly, I was still in like work mode."

Reflecting on her future plans, Ms Manners told GB News she wants to be able to make her new route "repeatable", to ensure other climbers can follow her new path.

She added: "I really want to make a really good description of the route and all the pitches and all the grades, so that others can go and repeat it. So that's the big focus.

"It's such a huge point in my career and such an amazing route that I want to give it the time that it deserves to make sure that it is a route that goes down in the like history of the North Face of the Eiger, and it isn't just a route that I've done and then it becomes forgotten.

"I want to share it with others, and so that's my like priority at the moment.

"But I'm just someone who's come from Bedfordshire, and I've learned the sport myself, and I've just tried really, really hard and thrown myself into it. Anything is possible.”