Chapter 7 CAUGHT IN AN AVALANCHE ON THE MATTERHORN

The following exciting account is taken from an article by Herr Lorria, which appeared in The St Moritz Post for 28th January 1888. The injuries received were so terrible that, I believe, Herr Lorria never entirely ceased to feel their effects.

The party consisted of two Austrian gentlemen, Herren Lammer and Lorria, without guides, who, in 1887, had made Zermatt their headquarters for some climbs. They had difficulty in deciding which ascent to begin with, especially as the weather had recently been bad, and the peaks were not in first-class condition. Herr Lorria writes:

"I fancied the Pointe de Zinal as the object of our tour; but Lammer, who had never been on the Matterhorn, wished to climb this mountain by the western flank-a route which had only once before been attacked, namely by Mr Penhall. We had with us the drawing of Penhall's route, published in The Alpine Journal.

"After skirting a jutting cliff, we reached the couloir at its narrowest point. It was clear that we had followed the route laid down in The Alpine Journal; and although Mr Penhall says that the rocks here are very easy, I cannot at all agree with him.

"We could not simply cross over the couloir, for, on the opposite side, the rocks looked horrible: it was only possible to cross it some forty or fifty mètres higher. We climbed down into the couloir: the ice was furrowed by avalanches. We were obliged to cut steps as we mounted upwards in a sloping direction. In a quarter of an hour we were on the other side of the couloir. The impression which the couloir made upon me is best shown by the words which I at the moment addressed to Lammer: 'We are now completely cut off.' We saw clearly that it was only the early hour, before the sun was yet upon the couloir, which protected us from danger. Once more upon the rocks, we kept our course as much as possible parallel to the N.W. arête. We clambered along, first over rocks covered with ice, then over glassy ledges, always sloping downwards. Our progress was slow indeed; the formation of the rock surface was ever becoming more unfavourable, and the covering of ice was a fearful hindrance.

"Such difficult rocks I had rarely seen before; the wrinkled ledges of the Dent Blanche were easy compared to them. At 1 P.M., we were standing on a level with the "Grand Tower"; the summit lay close before us, but as far as we could see, the rocks were completely coated with a treacherous layer of ice. Immediately before us was a precipitous ice couloir. All attempts to advance were fruitless, even our crampons were of no avail. Driven back! If this, in all cases, is a heavy blow for the mountain climber, we had here, in addition, the danger which we knew so well, and which was every moment increasing. It was one o'clock in the afternoon; the rays of the sun already struck the western wall of the mountain; stone after stone, loosened from its icy fetters, whistled past us. Back! As fast as possible back! Lammer pulled off his shoes and I stuffed them into the knapsack, holding also our two ice-axes. As I clambered down the first I was often obliged to trust to the rope. The ledges, which had given us trouble in the ascent, were now fearfully difficult. Across a short ice slope, in which we had cut steps in the ascent, Lammer was obliged, as time pressed, to get along without his shoes. The difficulties increased; every moment the danger became greater; and already whole avalanches of stones rattled down. The situation was indeed critical. At last, after immense difficulty, we reached the edge of the couloir at the place we had left it in the ascent. But we could find no spot protected from the stones; they literally came down upon us like hail. Which was the more serious danger, the threatening avalanches in the couloir or the pelting of the stones which swept down from every side? On the far side of the couloir there was safety, as all the stones must in the end reach the couloir, which divides the whole face of the mountain into two parts. It was now five o'clock in the afternoon; the burning rays of the sun came down upon us, and countless stones whirled through the air. We remembered the saying of Dr Güssfeldt, in his magnificent description of the passage of the Col du Lion, that only at midnight is tranquility restored. We resolved, then, to risk the short stretch across the couloir. Lammer pulled on his shoes; I was the first to leave the rocks. The snow which covered the ice was suspiciously soft, but we had no need to cut steps. In the avalanche track before us on the right a mighty avalanche is thundering down; stones leap into the couloir, and give rise to new avalanches.

"Suddenly my consciousness is extinguished, and I do not recover it till twenty-one days later. I can, therefore, only tell what Lammer saw. Gently from above an avalanche of snow came sliding down upon us; it carried Lammer away in spite of his efforts, and it projected me with my head against a rock. Lammer was blinded by the powdery snow, and thought that his last hour was come. The thunder of the roaring avalanche was fearful; we were dashed over rocks, laid bare in the avalanche track, and leaped over two immense bergschrunds. At every change of the slope we flew into the air, and then were plunged again into the snow, and often dashed against one another. For a long time it seemed to Lammer as if all were over, countless thoughts went thronging through his brain, until at last the avalanche had expended its force, and we were left lying on the Tiefenmatten Glacier. Our fall was estimated at from 550 to 800 English feet.

"I lay unconscious, quite buried in the snow; the rope had gone twice round my neck and bound it fast. Lammer, who quickly recovered consciousness, pulled me out of the snow, cut the rope, and gave me a good shake. I then awoke, but being delirious, I resisted with all my might my friend's endeavours to pull me out of the track of the avalanche. However, he succeeded in getting me on to a stone (I was, of course, unable to walk), and gave me his coat; and having thus done all that was possible for me, he began to creep downwards on hands and knees. He could not stand, having a badly sprained ankle; except for that he escaped with merely a few bruises and scratches. At length Lammer arrived at the Stockje hut, but to his intense disappointment there was nobody there. He did not pause to give vent to his annoyance, however, but continued his way down. Twice he felt nearly unable to proceed, and would have abandoned himself to his fate had not the thought of me kept him up and urged him on. At three o'clock in the morning he reached the Staffel Alp, but none of the people there were willing to venture on the glacier. He now gave up all hope that I could be saved, though he nevertheless sent a messenger to Herr Seiler, who reached Zermatt at about 4.15 A.M.

"In half an hour's time a relief party set out from Zermatt. When the party reached the Staffel Alp, Lammer was unconscious, but most fortunately he had written on a piece of paper the information that I was lying at the foot of Penhall's couloir. They found me about half-past eight o'clock. I had taken off all my clothes in my delirium, and had slipped off the rock on which Lammer had left me. One of my feet was broken and both were frozen into the snow, and had to be cut out with an axe.

"At 8 P.M. I was brought back to Zermatt, and for twenty days I lay unconscious at the Monte Rosa Hotel hovering between life and death."

Herr Lorria pays a warm tribute to the kindness of Seiler and his wife, and the skill of Dr de Courten, who saved his limbs when other doctors wished to amputate them. He ends his graphic account as follows: "The lesson to be learnt from our accident is not 'Always take guides,' but rather 'Never try the Penhall route on the Matterhorn, except after a long series of fine, hot days, for otherwise the western wall of the mountain is the most fearful mouse-trap in the Alps.'"

THE ICE AVALANCHE OF THE ALTELS.

Those who climbed in the Alps during the summer of 1895 will recollect how wonderfully dry and warm the weather was, denuding the mountains of snow and causing a number of rock-falls, so that many ascents became very dangerous, and, in my own case, after one or two risky encounters with falling stones, we decided to let the rock peaks alone for the rest of that campaign.

In the centre of the picture may be seen an Avalanche, which a non-climber might mistake for a Waterfall, dropping down the Rocks of the Wetterhorn.

In The Alpine Journal of August 1897, Mr Charles Slater gives an admirable description of a great ice-avalanche which overwhelmed one of the fertile pastures near the well-known Gemmi route. From this account I make some extracts, which will give an idea of the magnitude of the disaster and its unusual character, as the ice from a falling glacier rarely ever approaches cultivated land and dwellings.

The scene of the catastrophe was at Spitalmatten, a pasturage with chalets used in summer by the shepherds, in a basin at the beginning of the valley which extends to the pass. Steep slopes bound it on the east, and above them rises the glacier-capped peak of the Altels. The glacier was well seen from the Gemmi path, and all tourists who passed that way must have noticed and admired it. It is believed that a big crevasse, running right across the glacier, was noticed during the month of August, and the lower part of the glacier seemed to be completely cut off from the upper portion by it.

On the evening of 10th September, the Vice-President of the commune of Leuk (to which commune the Alp belonged) arrived at the chalets to settle the accounts of the past summer. Several of the women had already gone down, taking some of the calves with them, and the rest of the inhabitants of the little settlement were to follow next day. The weather was warm but cloudy, with a strong f?hn wind.[2]

On the morning of 11th September, about 5 A.M., the few people who lived at or near the Schwarenbach Inn heard a roar like an earthquake, and felt a violent blast of wind. A servant, rushing out of the inn, saw "what appeared to be a white mist streaming down the Altel's slope. The huge mass of ice forming the lower end of the glacier had broken away, rushed down the mountain side, leapt from the Tateleu plateau into the valley, and, like an immense wave, had swept over the Alp, up the Uschinen Grat, as if up a 1500 sea-wall, and even sent its ice-foam over this into the distant Uschinen Thal."

The only other eye-witness of this appalling catastrophe was a traveller who was walking up the Kanderthal from Frutigen in the early morning. "He saw in the Gemmi direction a fearful whirlwind, with dust and snow-clouds, and experienced later a cold rain falling from a clear sky, the rain being probably due to the melting of the ice-cloud."

The scene after the disaster must have been a terrible one. "Winter had apparently come in the midst of summer"; the whole pasture was covered with masses of ice. "The body of the Vice-President was found lying 180 yards away from the hut. Another body had been flung into the branches of an uprooted tree, while a third was found still holding a stocking in one hand, having been killed in the act of dressing."

There was no chance of escape for the people, as only a minute or little more elapsed from the time the avalanche started till it reached the settlement. The cows were nearly all killed, "they seem to have been blown like leaves before a storm to enormous distances."

A year later, much of the avalanche was still unmelted.

The thickness of the slice of glacier which broke away is believed to have been about 25 feet, and it fell through a vertical height of 4700 feet. It moved at about the average rate of two miles a minute.

"It is difficult to realise these vast figures, and a few comparisons have been suggested which may help to give some idea of the forces which were called into play. The material which fell would have sufficed to bury the City of London to the depth of six feet, and Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens would have disappeared beneath a layer six-and-a-half feet deep. The enormous energy of the moving mass may be dimly pictured when we think that a weight of ice and stones ten times greater than the tonnage of the whole of England's battle-ships plunged on to the Alp at a speed of nearly 300 miles an hour."

An almost exactly similar accident had occurred in 1782.

AN AVALANCHE WHICH ROBBED A LADY OF A GARMENT

One of the greatest advantages in mountaineering as a sport is the amount of enjoyment it gives even when climbing-days are past. While actually engaged in the ascent of difficult peaks our minds are apt to be entirely engrossed with the problem of getting up and down them, but afterwards we delight in recalling every interesting passage, every glorious view, every successful climb; and perhaps this gives us even more pleasure than the experiences themselves.

If we happen to have combined photography with mountaineering we are particularly to be envied, for an hour in the company of one of our old albums will recall with wonderful vividness many an incident which we should have otherwise forgotten.

Turning over some prints which long have lain on one side, a wave of recollection brings before me some especially happy days on snowy peaks, and makes me long to bring a breath of Alpine air to the cities, where for so much of the year dwell many of my brother and sister climbers.

With the help of the accompanying photographs, which will serve to generally illustrate my remarks, let me relate what befell me during an ascent of the Schallihorn-a peak some twelve thousand and odd feet high, in the neighbourhood of Zermatt.

Now, although Zermatt is a very familiar playground for mountaineers, yet even as late as ten years ago one or two virgin peaks and a fair number of new and undesirable routes up others were still to be found. I had had my share of success on the former, and was at the time of which I write looking about for an interesting and moderately safe way, hitherto untrodden, up one of the lesser-known mountains in the district. My guide and my friend of many years, Joseph Imboden, racked his brains for a suitable novelty, and at length suggested that as no one had hitherto attacked the south-east face of the Schallihorn we might as well see if it could be ascended. He added that he was not at all sure if it was possible-a remark I have known him to make on more than one peak in far away Arctic Norway, when the obvious facility of an ascent had robbed it of half its interest. However, in those days I still rose satisfactorily to observations of that sort, and was at once all eagerness to set out. We were fortunate in securing as our second guide Imboden's brilliant son Roman, who happened to be disengaged just then. A further and little dreamed-of honour was in store for us, as on our endeavouring to hire a porter to take our things to the bivouac from the tiny village of Taesch no less a person than the mayor volunteered to accompany us in that capacity.

Mr Whymper. Zermatt, 1896.

Mrs Aubrey Le Blond on a Mountain Top.

Photographed by her Guide, Joseph Imboden

A Hot Day in Mid-Winter on the Summit of a Peak 13,000 feet high.

So we started upwards one hot afternoon, bound for some overhanging rocks, which, we were assured by those who had never visited the spot, we should find. For the regulation routes up the chief peaks the climber can generally count on a hut, where, packed in close proximity to his neighbours, he lies awake till it is time to get up, and sets forth on his ascent benefited only in imagination by his night's repose. Within certain limits the less a man is catered for the more comfortable he is, and the more he has to count on himself the better are the arrangements for his comfort. Thus I have found a well-planned bivouac under a great rock infinitely preferable to a night in a hut, and a summer's campaign in tents amongst unexplored mountains more really luxurious than a season in an over-thronged Alpine hotel.

Two or three hours' walking took us far above the trees and into the region of short grass and stony slopes. Eventually we reached a hollow at the very foot of our mountain, and here we began to look about for suitable shelter and a flat surface on which to lay the sleeping-bags. The pictured rocks of inviting appearance were nowhere to be found, and what there were offered very inferior accommodation. But the weather was perfect, and we had an ample supply of wraps, so we contented ourselves with what protection was given by a steep, rocky wall, and turned our attention to the Schallihorn. The proposed route could be well seen. Imboden traced out the way he intended taking for a long distance up the mighty precipice in front of us. There were tracks of avalanches at more than one spot, and signs of falling stones were not infrequent. My guide thought he could avoid all danger by persistently keeping to the projecting ridges, and his idea was to descend by whatever way we went up, as the ordinary route is merely a long, uninteresting grind.

We now lit a fire, made soup and coffee, and soon after got into our sleeping-bags. The night passed peacefully, save for the rumble of an occasional avalanche, when great masses of ice broke loose on the glacier hard by. Before dawn we were stirring, and by the weird light of a huge fire were making our preparations for departure. It gradually grew light as our little party moved in single file towards the rocky ramparts which threatened to bar the way to the upper world. As we ascended a stony slope, Imboden remarked, "Why, ma'am, you still have on that long skirt! Let us leave it here; we can pick it up on our return." Now, in order not to be conspicuous when starting for a climbing expedition, I always wore an ordinary walking-skirt over my mountaineering costume. It was of the lightest possible material, so that, if returning by a different route, it could be rolled up and carried in a knapsack. I generally started from the bivouac without it; but the presence on this occasion of the Mayor of T?sch had quite overawed me; hence the unusual elegance of my get-up. Lest I be thought to dwell at undue length on so trifling a matter, I may add that the skirt had adventures that day of so remarkable a nature that the disappearance of Elijah in his chariot can alone be compared to them.

The skirt was now duly removed, rolled up and placed under a heavy stone, which we marked with a small cairn, so as to find it the more easily on our return. Shortly after, the real climb began, and, putting on the rope, we commenced the varied series of gymnastics which make life worth living to the mountaineer. We had several particularly unpleasant gullies to cross, up which Imboden glanced hastily and suspiciously, and hurried us over, fearing the fall of stones. At length we came for a little time to easier ground, and as the day was now intensely hot the men took off their waistcoats, leaving them and their watches in a hole in the rock. Above this gentler slope the mountain steepened again, and a ridge in the centre, running directly upwards, alone gave a possible route to the summit. This ridge, at first broad and simple, before long narrowed to a knife-edge. There was always enough to hold; but the rocks were so loose and rotten that we hardly dared to touch them. Spread out over those treacherous rocks, adhering by every finger in our endeavour to distribute our weight, we slowly wormed ourselves upwards. Such situations are always trying. The most brilliant cragsman finds his skill of little avail. Unceasing care and patience alone can help him here. Throwing down the most insecure of the blocks, which fell sometimes on one side, sometimes on the other of the ridge, we gradually advanced. The conversation ran rather in a groove: "Not that one, ma'am, or the big fellow on the top will come down!" "Don't touch the red one or the little white one!" "Now come up to where I am without stepping on any of them!" "Roman! look out! I'm letting this one go!" Then bang! bang! bang! and a disgusting smell as of gunpowder, while a great boulder dashed in leaps towards the glacier below, grinding and smashing itself to atoms before it reached the bottom.

Joseph Imboden. Mrs Aubrey Le Blond.

Zermatt, September, 1896.

Crossing a Snow Couloir (page 73).

Thus with untiring thoroughness Imboden led his little band higher and higher, till at last the summit came in sight and our muscles and overstrained nerves saw rest ahead.

I readily agreed to Imboden's decision that we should go down the ordinary way.

After descending for a considerable distance we stopped, and the guides held a short consultation. It seemed that Roman was anxious to try and fetch the waistcoats and watches and my skirt, and his father did not object.

Wishing him the best of good-luck, we parted by the rocks and trudged on over the snow towards Zermatt. We moved leisurely, as people who climb for pleasure, with no thought of record-breaking; and as it was late in September it was dusk as we neared the village.

Later in the evening I saw Imboden, and asked for news of Roman. He had not arrived, and as time passed we grew uneasy, knowing the speed at which, if alone, he would descend. By 10 P.M. we were really anxious, and great was our relief when a figure with knapsack and ice-axe came swinging up the narrow, cobbled street.

It was an exciting tale he had to tell, though it took a good deal of danger to impress Roman with the notion that there was any at all. Soon after leaving us he came to the first gully. Just as he was about to step into it he heard a rumble. Springing back, he squeezed himself under an overhanging piece of rock, while a huge mass of stones and snow dashed down the mountain, some of the fragments passing right over him-though, thanks to his position, none actually touched him. When tranquility was restored he dashed across to the other side, and immediately after a fresh fall commenced, which lasted for a considerable time. At length he approached without injury the spot he was looking for, far down on the lower slopes, where my skirt had been left, and here he felt that all danger was past. But the extraordinarily dry season had thrown out most people's calculations, and at that very moment he was really in the direst peril. As he ran gaily down the slope of earth and stones a tremendous crash brought him to a standstill, and looking back he saw the smoke of a mighty avalanche of ice coming in a huge wave over the cliffs above. He rushed for shelter, which was near at hand, and from beneath the protection of a great rock he saw the avalanche come on and on with the roar of artillery, and he gazed, fascinated, as it swept majestically past his place of refuge. He could see the mound where lay my skirt with its heap of stones. And now a striking sight met his eyes, for before ever the seething mass could touch it the whole heap rose from the ground and was carried far out of the path of the avalanche, borne along by the violence of the wind which preceded it.

The late John Addington Symonds has related in one of his charming accounts of winter in the Alps that an old woman, sitting peaceably before her chalet door in the sun, was transported by the wind of an avalanche to the top of a lofty pine-tree, where, quite uninjured, she calmly awaited assistance; but that my skirt should have such an adventure brought very strongly home to me the dangers Roman had passed through that afternoon and the escape we had had ourselves.