I DON'T REMEMBER when exactly I started talking again about climbing the Eiger. I think it was around the time our daughter, Siena, was born, in 1996, when I was 40. Until then I'd done an OK job of sticking to my promise. I'd continued to climb on protectable cliffs and had even worked as a climbing guide in Colorado for a few years. With great effort I'd managed to stay mostly clear of real mountains. The big peaks are where ice, rock, weather, and scale combine into the perils and pleasures of genuine alpine climbing—the kind Dad had loved so much.

But then I climbed a new, very alpine route on Mount Waddington, British Columbia, with my friend Mark Jenkins, Outside's longtime Hard Way columnist. I enjoyed that adventure perhaps as much as anything in my life, and I started to wonder whether I still had the willpower to reject this kind of climbing. Evidently, I didn't. My German friend Nicho Mailänder was with me once when someone asked if I would climb the Eiger. Nicho answered for me: "He has to."

This wasn't a dare or a provocation or anything except a deep understanding of what made me tick. I felt grateful for Nicho's response—it validated my feelings. Mark and I spoke often of the Eiger as well. This climb would be a pilgrimage for me, not simply a route. It felt like an inexorable force, like gravity itself, was pulling me to the Eiger. Like any climber, I'd read plenty of Eiger stories. And in that literature, Dad's name—the same as mine—would come up over and over again. Every climber seemed to know it. On being introduced to me, climbers regularly asked if I was any relation to "the real John Harlin."

In the midst of my angst about the Eiger, I was at a party when a friend—someone who'd been a hero in the 1970s for his extreme climbs—asked point-blank, "What have you ever done besides being born to a famous father?"

I tried to make "Nothing" sound ironic, but in fact it was how I felt inside. My guiding business had failed; Summit, the magazine I'd edited for five years, had failed; my climbing ambitions had never gotten off the ground; and I endlessly pounded the keyboard as the Northwest editor for Backpacker when I wasn't digging ditches to divert water from flooding the basement in our new Hood River, Oregon, home.

I spoke about my Eiger ambitions to almost no one. I didn't want to worry my family, and with others I didn't want to talk about things undone. So Nicho, Mark, and I kept it mostly to ourselves. And I dwelled quietly on whether I could justify the risk.

Every time Mark and I get together, we debate risk. I argue that the only way I can rationalize alpine climbing is by building my skills in relatively safe environments on good rock and solid ice before applying those skills to more dangerous environments. Even more important, I insist, is to enter those dangerous situations only infrequently and to pass through them as quickly as possible. Then chance is in my favor. Mark cries bullshit. He points to coin-flipping, where the odds of the next flip coming up tails are 50-50 no matter how many times you flip. And then I'll retort that the odds of flipping at least one tail in the next ten flips are a lot higher than 50-50.

All of which sidesteps the central problem: When I look down and see bad protection or look up at an avalanche cutting loose, the bottom drops out of my stomach and the whole climbing enterprise looks like the selfish, foolish, absurd, and potentially destructive activity it really is. Condemning Siena to grow up fatherless, Adele to become a widow, and my mother to live through her son's death becomes an unforgivable sin. What can justify this? Nothing. I can only pretend that this pursuit is irresistible.

Dad didn't have such qualms. To him death was "just part of it all," and he wrote once about dying: "I knew how much I yearned for that ultimate experience—and how fear had masked it." That was Dad speaking, not me. To me, death is ugly and hurtful. Even so, the best I could manage was a revised version of my vow: I would climb the Eiger only when conditions were right—on the mountain, in my head, and in my body.