Ski-runs in the High Alps

by F. F. Roget

Some of my colleagues in the Geneva section, desirous of protecting the good name of their club, and anxious to exonerate one of the older and more respected members from any charge of senile self-complacency, explained gravely that it was a printer’s mistake, and that surely I had written Tête Blanche in my hastily scribbled manuscript note.

The reader must be told at this juncture that the Tête Blanche is an insignificant little bump of snow on the Col d’Hérens, of which those good colleagues of mine, with their knowledge of my climbing powers, could well trust themselves to say that I might have reached its summit, without putting too great a strain on my powers. Even now, another of my young disciples, Marcel Kurz, whose circuits on ski in the Bernina and Mischabel districts may be followed in two of the maps appended to this volume, writes me that he is pleased to hear of its approaching publication, because it may conduce to the enlightenment of disbelievers, across isolated specimens of whom he still occasionally comes.

Arnold Lunn, too, has met with ultra-sceptical folks, and a boastful trait has been read by some into his ardour.

For my part, I am content to look upon our mountaineering fellowship as a pleasant little incident in the history of Anglo-Swiss relations. These I much take to heart. There is every reason in the world wherefore they should be frequent, numerous, and close. Sometimes, in the flush of after-dinner speeches, I have spoken of the Swiss as the navigators of the Alps and of the English as the mountaineers of the sea. There is some similarity in the risks incurred.

It would be a truism—in fact the repetition of a truism—to say how English climbers of the middle of the nineteenth century helped the Swiss in introducing into mountaineering the wholesome element of risk. “On ne fait pas d’omelettes sans casser des œufs.”

It should not be hidden from the present generation of English climbers, however, that the example of their forerunners has perhaps been more thoroughly taken to heart in Switzerland than among themselves. There is hardly a family or friendly circle in Switzerland that does not count one of its members in the ring of those whose life was sacrificed for love of the Alps.

The motives for associating here Swiss and English in my mind are not solely sporting. It has hitherto been little realised how much Swiss neutrality and national integrity are one of the bulwarks of the freedom of Britain’s movements in Europe.

Every effort is being made to join Switzerland more closely to the economic system of central Europe. In a century in which economics are considered to offer a more effective political weapon than the open use of military force, the tightening of the ties of fellowship between two nations, neither of which can possibly aim at political encroachments upon the other, may usefully serve to counteract a less innocent set of tendencies. What with military roads, tunnels, and railways, the Alpine barrier between the Baltic and the Mediterranean is being worn very thin.

It needs, probably, no further insistence to show that sentimental Anglo-Swiss relations may be attended by practical consequences of some immediate utility. In this network of associations an important function devolves upon winter mountaineering. The English have no sporting winter. They have already, in large numbers, adopted the Swiss winter as what they want to supply home deficiencies. May this continue and an ever wider bridge of Swiss and British ski be thrown over the Channel. That this book, among others, might serve this purpose was one of the motives that impelled the writer when he put together, for publication in England, such accounts as that which follows.

At first sight, the title I have given to this chapter may appear exaggerated. But it will not bear out any such unfavourable construction, if the reader will charitably recollect that he has already travelled with me from the western extremity of the Bernese Alps, visiting from end to end the Diablerets, Wildhorn, and Wildstrubel range, as a prelude to this excursion beyond the Gemmi to the east.