True Tales of Mountain Adventures

Mountaineering is not merely walking up hill. It is the art of getting safely up and down a peak where there is no path, and where steps may have to be cut in the ice; it is the art of selecting the best line of ascent under conditions which vary from day to day.

Mountaineering as a science took long to perfect. It is more than a century since the first ascent of a big Alpine peak was accomplished, and the early climbers had but little idea of the dangers which they were likely to meet with. They could not tell when the snow was safe, or when it might slip away in an avalanche. They did not know where stones would be likely to fall on them, or when they were walking over one of those huge cracks in the glacier known as crevasses, and lightly bridged over with winter snow, which might break away when they trod on it. However, they soon learnt that it was safer for two or more people to be together in such places than for a man to go alone, and when crossing glaciers they used the long sticks they carried as a sort of hand-rail, a man holding on to each end, so that if one tumbled into a hole the other could pull him out. Of course this was a very clumsy way of doing things, and before long it occurred to them that a much better plan would be to use a rope, and being all tied to it about 20 feet apart, their hands were left free, and the party could go across a snow-field and venture on bridged-over crevasses in safety.

At first both guides and travellers carried long sticks called alpenstocks. If they came to a steep slope of hard snow or ice, they hacked steps up it with small axes which they carried slung on their backs. This was a very inconvenient way of going to work, as it entailed holding the alpenstock in one hand and using the axe with the other. So they thought of a better plan, and had the alpenstock made thicker and shorter, and fastened an axe-head to the top of it. This was gradually improved till it became the ice-axe, as used to-day, and as shown in many of my photographs. This ice-axe is useful for various purposes besides cutting steps. If you dig in the head while crossing a snow-slope, it acts as an anchor, and gives tremendous hold, while to allude to its functions as a tin-opener, a weapon of defence against irate bulls on Alpine pastures, or as a means for rapidly passing through a crowd at a railway station, is but to touch on a very few of its admirable qualities.

Climbers descending a Snow-clad Peak (the Ortler).

When people first climbed they went in droves on the mountains, or I should say rather on the mountain, for during the first half of the nineteenth century Mont Blanc was the object of nearly all the expeditions which set out for the eternal snows. After some years, however, it was found quite unnecessary to have so many guides and porters, and nowadays a party usually numbers four, two travellers and two guides, or three, consisting generally of one traveller and two guides, or occasionally five. Two is a bad number, as should one of them be hurt or taken ill, the other would have to leave him and go for help, though one of the first rules of mountaineering is that a man who is injured or indisposed must never be left alone on a mountain. Again, six is not a good number; it is too many, as the members of the party are sure to get in each other's way, pepper each other with stones, and waste no end of time in wrangling as to when to stop for food, when to proceed, and which way to go up. A good guide will run the concern himself, and turn a deaf ear to all suggestions; but the fact remains that six people had better split up and go on separate ropes. And if they also, in the case of rock peaks, choose different mountains, it is an excellent plan. The best of friends are apt to revile each other when stones, upset from above, come whistling about their ears.

The early mountaineers were horribly afraid of places which were at all difficult to climb. Mere danger, however, had no terrors for them, and they calmly encamped on frail snow-bridges, or had lunch in the path of avalanches. After a time the dangerous was understood and avoided, and the difficult grappled with by increased skill, until about the middle of the nineteenth century there arose a class of experts, little, if at all, inferior to the best guides of the present day.

The most active and intelligent of the natives of Chamonix, Zermatt, and the Bernese Oberland now learnt to find their way even on mountains new to them. Some were chamois hunters, and accustomed to climb in difficult places. Others, perhaps, had when boys minded the goats, and scrambled after them in all sorts of awkward spots. Others, again, had such a taste for mountaineering that they took to it the very first time they tried it. Of these last my own guide, Joseph Imboden, was one, and later on I will tell you of the extraordinary way in which he began his splendid career.

On a Rock Ridge near the top of Monte Rosa.

The Schallihorn may be seen in the top right-hand corner of the picture.

It is from going with and watching how good guides climb that most people learn to become mountaineers themselves. Nearly all take guides whenever they ascend difficult mountains, but some are so skilful and experienced that they go without, though few are ever good enough to do this quite safely.

I am often asked why people climb, and it is a hard question to answer satisfactorily. There is something which makes one long to mountaineer more and more, from the first time one tries it. All climbs are different. All views from mountains are different, and every time one climbs one is uncertain, owing to the weather or the possible state of the peak, if the top can be reached or not. So it is always a struggle between the mountain and the climber, and though perseverance, skill, experience, and pluck must give the victory to the climber in the end, yet the fight may be a long one, and it may be years before a particularly awkward peak allows one to stand on its summit.

Perhaps, if you have patience to read what follows, you may better understand what mountaineering is, and why most of those who have once tried it become so fond of it.

The Aletsch Glacier from Bel Alp.

The medial moraine is very conspicuous. This glacier is about a mile in width.

Of all the beautiful and interesting things mountain districts have to show, none surpass the glaciers.

Now a glacier is simply a river of ice, which never melts away even during the hottest summer. Glaciers form high up on mountains, where there is a great deal of snow in winter, and where it is never very hot even in summer. They are also found in northern lands, such as Greenland, and there, owing to the long cold winter and short summer, they come down to the very level of the sea.

A glacier is formed in this way: There is a heavy fall of snow which lies in basins and little valleys high up on the mountain side. The air is too cold for it to melt, and as more falls on the top of it the mass gets pressed down. Now, if you take a lump of snow in your hand and press it, you get an icy snow-ball. If you squeeze anything you make it warmer. The pressing down of the great mass of snow is like the squeezing of the ball in your hand. It makes it warmer, so that the snow first half melts and then gradually becomes ice. You bring about this change in your snow-ball in a moment. Nature, in making a glacier, takes much longer, so that what was snow one year is only partly ice the next-it is known as nevé-and it is not until after several seasons that it becomes the pure ice we see in the lower part of a glacier.

One would fancy that if a quantity of snow falls every winter and does not all melt, the mountains must grow higher. But though only a little of the snow melts, it disappears in other ways. Some is evaporated into the atmosphere; some falls off in avalanches. Most of it slowly flows down after forming itself into glaciers. For glaciers are always moving. The force of gravity makes them slide down over their rocky beds. They flow so slowly that we cannot see them move, in fact most of them advance only a few inches a day. But if a line of stakes is driven into the ice straight across a glacier, we shall notice in a few weeks that they have moved down. And the most interesting part of it is that they will not have moved evenly, but those nearest the centre will have advanced further than those at the side. In short, a glacier flows like a river, the banks keeping back the ice at the side, as the banks of a river prevent it from running so fast at the edge as in the middle.

General View on the Lower Part of a Large Glacier.

The surface is ice, not snow. The snow-line may be seen further up.

A large glacier is fed by such a gigantic mass of snow that it is in its upper part hundreds of feet thick. Of course when it reaches warmer places it begins to melt. But the quantity of ice composing it is so great that it takes a long time before it disappears, and a big glacier sometimes flows down far below the wild and rocky parts of mountains and reaches the neighbourhood of forests and corn-fields. It is very beautiful at Chamonix to see the white, glittering ice of the Glacier des Bossons flowing in a silent stream through green meadows.

The reason that mountaineers have to be careful in crossing glaciers is on account of the holes, cracks, or, to call them by their proper name, crevasses, which are met with on them. Ice, unlike water, is brittle, so it splits up into crevasses whenever the glacier flows over a steep or uneven rocky bed. High up, where snow still lies, these chasms in the ice are often bridged over, and if a person ventures on one of these snow bridges it may break, and he may fall down the crevasse, which may be so deep that no bottom can be found to it. He is then either killed by the fall or frozen to death. If, as I have explained before, several climbers are roped together, they form a long string, like the tail of a kite, and not more than one is likely to break through at a time. As the rope is-or ought to be-kept tightly stretched, he cannot fall far, and is easily pulled out again.

The snow melts away off the surface of the glacier further down in summer. It is on this bare, icy stream, scarred all over with little channels full of water running merrily down the melting rough surface, that the ordinary tourist is taken when he visits a glacier during his summer trip to Switzerland.

A Glacier Table (page 11).

Taken in Mid-Winter on reaching the Lower Slopes of a Mountain after a terrific Storm of Snow and Wind. The local Swiss snow-shoes were used during part of the ascent.

You will notice in most of the photographs of glaciers black streaks along them, sometimes only near the sides, sometimes also in the centre. These are heaps of stones and earth which have fallen from the mountains bordering the glacier, and have been carried along by the slowly moving ice. The bands in the centre have come there, owing to the meeting higher up of two glaciers, which have joined their side heaps of rubbish, and have henceforward flowed on as one glacier. The bands of piled up stones are called moraines, those at the edge being known as lateral moraines, in the centre as medial moraines, and the stones which drop off the end (or snout) of a glacier, as terminal moraines.

Besides these compact bands, we sometimes find here and there a big stone or boulder by itself, which has rolled on to the ice. Often these stones are raised on a pedestal of ice, and then they are called "glacier-tables." They have covered the bit of ice they lie upon, and prevented it from melting, while the glacier all round has gradually sunk. After a time the leg of the table begins to feel the sun strike it also. It melts away on the south side and the stone slips off. A party of climbers, wandering about on a glacier at night or in a fog, and having no compass, can roughly take their bearings by noticing in what position these broken-down glacier-tables lie.

Occasionally sand has been washed down over the surface of the ice, and a patch of it has collected in one place. This shields the glacier from the sun, the surrounding ice sinks, and eventually we find cones which are lightly covered with sand, the smooth ice beneath being reached directly we scratch the surface with the point of a stick.

It is difficult to realise the enormous size of a large glacier. The Aletsch Glacier, the most extensive in the Alps, would, it has been said, if turned to stone, supply building material for a city the size of London.

With regard to the movement of glaciers, the entertaining author of "A Tramp Abroad" mildly chaffs his readers by telling them that he once tried to turn a glacier to account as a means of transport. Accordingly, he took up his position in the middle, where the ice moves quickest, leaving his luggage at the edge, where it goes slowest. Thus he intended to travel by express, leaving his things to follow by goods train! However, after some time, he appeared to make no progress, so he got out a book on glaciers to try and find out the reason for the delay. He was much surprised when he read that a glacier moves at about the same pace as the hour hand of a watch!

A Distorted and Crevassed Glacier.

Showing the rough texture of the surface of a Glacier below the Snow-line.

Many thousands of years ago there were glaciers in Scotland and England. We are certain of this, as glaciers scratch and polish the rocks they pass over as does nothing else. Stones are frozen into the ice, and it holds them and uses them as we might hold and use a sharply-pointed instrument, scratching the rock over which the mighty mass is slowly passing. In addition to the scratches, the ice polishes the rock till it is quite smooth, writing upon it in characters never to be effaced the history of past events. Another thing which proves to us that these icy rivers were in many places where there are no glaciers now, is the boulders we find scattered about. These boulders are sometimes of a kind of rock not found anywhere near, and so we know that they must have been carried along on that wonderful natural luggage-train, and dropped off it as it melted. We find big stones in North Wales which must have come on a glacier beginning in Scotland! Glacier-polished rocks are found along the whole of the west coast of Norway, and there are boulders near Geneva, in Switzerland, which have come from the chain of Mount Blanc, 60 miles away.

So you see that the glaciers of the Alps are far smaller than they were at one time, and that in many places where formerly there were huge glaciers, there are to-day none. The Ice Age was the time when these great glaciers existed, but the subject of the Ice Age is a difficult and thorny one, which is outside the scope of my information and of this book.

Many of the most terrible accidents in the Alps have been due to avalanches, and perhaps, as avalanches take place from different causes and have various characteristics, according to whether they are of ice, snow, or débris, some account of them may not be out of place.

We may briefly classify them as follows:-

1. Ice avalanches, only met with on or near glaciers.

2. Dust avalanches, composed of very light, powdery snow.

3. Compact avalanches (Grund or ground avalanches, as the Germans call them), consisting of snow, earth, stones, trees, and anything which the avalanche finds in its path. These take place only in winter and spring, while the two other kinds happen on the mountains at any season.

An ice avalanche is easily understood when it is borne in mind that a glacier is always moving. When this river of ice comes to the edge of a precipice, or tries to crawl down a very steep cliff, it splits across and forms tottering crags of ice, which lean over more and more till they lose their balance and go crashing down the slope. Some of the ice is crushed to powder by its fall, yet many blocks generally survive, and are occasionally heaped up in such huge masses below that they form another glacier on a small scale. If a party of mountaineers passes under a place overhung by threatening ice, they are in great danger, though at early morning, before the sun has loosened the frozen masses, the peril is less. Sometimes, too, if the distance to be traversed is very short and the going quite easy, it is safe enough to dash quickly across.

A Tunnel 300 feet long through an Avalanche.

Tree trunks, etc., can be seen embedded in it.

An Avalanche near Bouveret, Lake of Geneva.

Dust avalanches occur when a heavy fall of light, powdery snow takes place on frozen hillsides or ice-slopes, and so long as there is no wind or disturbance, all remains quiet, and inexperienced people would think there was no danger. But in reality dust avalanches are the most to be feared of any, for they fall irregularly in unexpected places, and their power is tremendous. While all seems calm and peaceful, suddenly a puff of wind or the passage of an animal disturbs the delicately-balanced masses, and then woe betide whoever is within reach of this frightful engine of destruction. First, the snow begins to slide gently down, then it gathers pace and volume, and even miles away the thunder of its fall can be heard as it leaps from ledge to ledge. Covered with a cloud of smoking, powdery dust, it is a veritable Niagara of giant height, and as it descends towards the forests, it carries with it whatever it finds in its path. Trees are mown down with as much ease as the tender grass of spring. Houses are lifted from the ground and tossed far away.

An avalanche is preceded by a blast even more destructive than the masses of snow which it hurls along. As it advances with ever-increasing rapidity the air in front is more and more compressed as the avalanche rushes on with lightning-like speed behind it. The wind sweeps everything before it, and many are the tales related by those who have survived or witnessed a display of its power. On one occasion more than a hundred houses were overwhelmed by a huge avalanche at Saas (Pr?ttigau, near Davos), and during the search afterwards the rescue party found amidst the ruins a child lying asleep and uninjured in his cradle, which had been blown to some distance from his home, while close by stood a basket containing six eggs, none of which were broken. I have myself seen a row of telegraph posts in an Alpine valley in winter thrown flat on the ground by the air preceding an enormous avalanche, which itself did not come within 300 yards of them. It is a very wonderful thing that persons buried beneath an avalanche can sometimes hear every word spoken by a search party, and yet not a sound that they utter reaches the ears of those outside. A great deal of air is imprisoned between the particles of snow, and so it is possible for those overwhelmed by an avalanche to live inside it for hours. Cases have been known where a man, buried not far below the surface, has been able to melt a hole to the outer air with his breath, and eventually free himself from his icy prison. On 18th January, 1885, enormous avalanches fell in some of the mountainous districts of northern Italy, houses, cattle, crops, and granaries being carried away, and many victims buried beneath the ruins. Some touching episodes of wonderful escapes were related. "For instance, at Riva, in the valley of Susa, a whole family, consisting of an old woman of seventy, her two daughters, her four nieces, and a child four months old, were buried with their house in the snow, exposed apparently to certain death from cold and hunger. But the soldiers of the Compagnie Alpine, hearing of the sad case, worked with all their might and main to save them, and at last they were found and brought out alive, the brave old grandmother insisting that the children should be saved first, and then her daughters, saying that their lives were more precious than her own." The soldiers, who worked with a will above all praise, were obliged in several cases to construct long galleries in the snow in order to reach the villages, which were sometimes buried beneath 40 feet of snow.

Compact avalanches, though very terrible on account of their frequently great size, can be more easily guarded against than dust avalanches, because they always fall in well-defined channels. A compact avalanche consists of snow, earth, stones, and trees, and comes down in times of thaw. Many fall in early spring in Alpine valleys, and though it is not unusual for them to come right across high roads, the fatal accidents are comparatively few. The inhabitants know that wherever, high up on the hills, there is a hollow which may serve as a reservoir or collecting-basin for the snow, and below this a funnel or shoot, there an avalanche may be expected. Often they take means to prevent one starting, for an avalanche, whose power is irresistible when once it has begun to move quickly, is very easily kept from mischief if it is not allowed a running start. The best of all ways for preventing avalanches is to plant the gullies with trees, but where this cannot be done, rows of stakes driven into the ground will serve to hold up the snow, and where the hillside is extremely steep, and much damage would be caused if an avalanche fell, stone walls are built one above another to keep the soil and the snow together, very much as we see on precipitous banks overlooking English railways.

The driving roads over Alpine passes are in places exposed to avalanches in winter. At the worst spots galleries of stone are built, through which the sleighs can pass in perfect safety, and if an avalanche fell while they were inside it would pass harmlessly over their heads. On the Albula Pass, in Switzerland, as soon as the avalanches come down, tunnels are cut in the snow through them, and are in constant use till early summer.

Occasionally houses or churches are built in the very path of an avalanche. A V-shaped wall, called an avalanche-breaker, is put behind, and this cuts the snowy stream in two parts, which passes on harmlessly on either side of the building. Sometimes avalanche-breakers of snow, hardened into ice by throwing water over them, are constructed behind barns which have been put in exposed places.

In order that an avalanche may get up speed enough to commence its swift career, the slope the snow rests on where it starts must be at an angle of from 30° to 35° at least.