An Oberland Châlet

by Edith Elmer Wood

We missed him very much. The “tropical bird,” as we had occasionally called him, had certainly brought an element of color and brilliancy into our gray Anglo-Saxon lives.

The next day we had a diversion in the shape of an entirely unexpected call from an American friend, who stayed to dinner and spent the evening with us, but flitted away by an early train the following morning.

It was a very blue and brilliant morning (the rainclouds all dissolved and scattered), and we set forth on the Elder Babe’s real birthday party, which the weather and Antonio’s departure had made impossible on the day itself. It was to be a glacier party and involve a guide and roping!

We picked out the guide haphazard from the little group we passed just before reaching the Upper Glacier. He was a heavily-bearded, short, but powerfully built man of between forty-five and fifty, and his name was Fritz Biner. We were destined to know him much better a little later.

The Mother started out with us, but decided she was not equal to the trip, so we left her with her share of the lunch at the Châlet Milchbach on the lateral moraine, from the veranda of which she could watch our progress.

We turned over the small boy to the special care of the guide, who fastened their two waists together with his rope. Then, for nearly a thousand feet, we scrambled up the right bank of the glacier, with the occasional aid of ladders fastened to the rock, till we reached the level part above the ice-fall, where the trail crosses to the Gleckstein Club hut and the summit of the Wetterhorn. Here, on the edge of the glacier, we sat down and ate our luncheon.

Then we were all roped together and proceeded to the opposite side of the hummocky, but not perilous, glacier, whence, leaving the trail to the summit, we followed a narrow goat path on a horizontal ledge of the Wetterhorn cliff known as the Enge. It was nothing that presented any terrors to the older members of the party, who by this time had their heads pretty well seasoned against dizziness, but it would have made the writer extremely nervous to conduct her small son along such a ledge, in view of the (probably) thousand-foot drop at our left, had he not been securely roped fore and aft.

The young person in question, though enjoying himself greatly, was clearly troubled by a little doubt whether this highly delectable roping had not been gotten up as part of the stage-setting to amuse him and not because it was necessary. He had imbibed a fine scorn for the tourists who rope themselves to a guide while ascending the pleasant path to the Châlet Milchbach, just so as to say they have done it, and he clearly did not wish to belong to any such tribe himself. However, when we had gotten almost to the end of the ledge and were just about to unfasten the ropes, the sheer drop beneath us having decreased to perhaps fifty feet, the Babe, growing careless, twisted his feet somehow, slipped and slid straight out in the air and was brought up sharply by the rope. This happy incident removed all doubt from his mind and persuaded him, as nothing else could have done, that the roping had been a genuine mountaineering necessity!

Down among the grassy pastures at the end of the Enge we found the Mother waiting for us (who fortunately for her peace of mind had not seen the falling incident), and the united family tramped home together in great content.

Not, however, till we had made a partial engagement with Fritz Biner. We asked him whether the end of the following week would be too late in the season to go over the Strahlegg; for we had developed an ambition to wind up our last long pedestrian trip, which we were about to start on, with a bit of genuine mountaineering. He assured us it would not be and expressed a desire to act as our guide. We politely voiced the pleasure it would give us to have him, but indicated that it would seem simpler to take a guide from the Grimsel than to have him come over to meet us there. He replied justly that if a Grimsel guide should accompany us to Grindelwald, he would have to go back again, which would be just as far as for him to go over after us. He further suggested that at the Grimsel they would decline to take us over without two guides, or at all events a guide and a porter, whereas he, having seen what expert climbers we were (!), would gladly undertake to bring us over single-handed. This argument appealed to us, though we left the matter open that day in order to make inquiries concerning Biner’s reputation. The result being favorable, we arranged to telegraph him from Andermatt what day he was to meet us at the Grimsel.