Ski-runs in the High Alps

by F. F. Roget

Our three Bernese guides could barely trust the testimony of their own eyes. They expected to see a Jungfrau embedded in snow from head to foot, stuffed out to a shapeless mass, bolstered out as with the seven petticoats of a Dutch belle. On the contrary, the Bernese Maid was more slim than they had ever seen her in summer. Almost entirely free from snow, she turned towards us a shoulder as smooth, bright, and pure as that of a Greek goddess that might have been clad in a close-fitting suit of silver armour. One of my men who saw her again last summer (1911), one of the two hottest recorded since 1830, found her less free from snow than she appeared on that January day, when she was actually melting away under the perfect downpour of solar rays towards which her face was turned.

Thus was an important doubt set at rest by the testimony of practical men. It would have taken us half the day to cut steps in the sheer ice that stretched from the Roththal Sattel to the very top. The near completion of the railway from Grindelwald to Jungfraujoch will make it quite easy to institute a series of regular scientific observations on this interesting subject.

So far as we were concerned, after five days of sun and inverted temperature it was out of the question for us to attempt the top slopes of the Jungfrau at that hour of the day. It was tacitly agreed to abandon it for the Finsteraarhorn. The same causes which turned the snow slopes of the Jungfrau to ice and rendered them impracticable would dry the rocks of the Finsteraarhorn, clearing them from the excess of snow which the winter winds might have piled up there. So we pressed on towards the Grünhornlücke, past the Concordia huts, ski-ing leisurely downwards on the Aletsch glacier.

The reader may easily picture to himself how much our ski were in tune with the wonderful surface over which we were passing.

“These rollings of névé,” relates Lunn, “are almost unique in the Alps. On other glaciers one’s attention is diverted to the surrounding peaks. But, as some one says, on the Aletsch the boundary mountains form an insignificant cup-lip to the glacier itself, which, to my knowledge, may be compared to the same on the Plaine-Morte only. The Oberland peaks, which from Grindelwald or Lauterbrunnen exhibit such a wonderful wealth of design, are comparatively tame from the basin of the Aletsch. When we think of the Jungfrau we always think of her as seen from the pastures of the Wengern Alp. Seen from the Aletsch she is not particularly striking. One’s whole attention is focussed on the broad, silent reaches of snow. From the Loetschenlücke, from the Jungfraujoch, from the Grünhornlücke, three vast ice streams flow down towards the Concordia, rightly so named, for, there, irresistible forces blend silently in perfect harmony and move downwards without a break.”

By three o’clock in the afternoon we passed by the huts which now form quite a township on the rocky spur which supports them. There is the Cathrein Pavilion, a regular little mountain hostelry, the new Swiss Alpine Club hut, and the old hut. Stowed away under the rock the ancestral hut of all might betray its site to curious Alpine antiquaries.

We could have walked straight into the township on that day, the rocks being dry and swept clean of snow, the effect of the sun only, as I can easily prove by the testimony of Mr. Schloss who, with his party, had to take refuge in the Swiss Club hut during the storm that had raged in the last days of December. He says: “We rammed the ski into the snow at the foot of these rocks, expecting to reach the hut, some 50 metres above us, in a few minutes. But the storm made the passage up the narrow path hewn out of the rock wall very unpleasant. It was covered with ice and snow, and the wind, blowing in furious gusts from the Jungfrau snow-fields, threatened every moment to hurl one or the other of us down on to the glacier below.” Let the reader take warning.

From the Concordia Platz we started up steep slopes to our next pass. But were they so steep? and did we climb at all? There is in words a forceful though conventional mendacity. In language the most honest catch themselves playing the part of gay deceivers. Did we have any occasion during that week to draw one laboured breath from our tranquil breasts? Restful and vigorous, we led the æsthetic life.

As on the previous evening, there was a tantalising interest, the same eagerness to look beyond the sky-line into the new world of snow. This time the pass revealed the Fiesch glacier and the great pyramid of the Finsteraarhorn. “Professor Roget,” writes my young friend, whose fancy I like to tickle by appearing before him in the rôle of an old cynic, “having been here before, exhibited no indecent haste, and so I had some time to myself in the pass. The guides—to them also the country was new—were moved to unwonted enthusiasm on seeing the Finsteraarhorn. They said, ‘Eine schöne Spitze, die müssen wir morgen machen.’”

Indeed they might on the morrow. There it stood before us such as three times already I had climbed it in summer. A photograph would hardly show the difference in the seasons. The Finsteraarhorn could be ranked in the same category as the Combin de Valsorey and many others 12,000 feet high and upwards with rocky sides falling away to the south and west. Whenever they had a northern slope whereby they were accessible in summer, I had found that by that flank their top could be reached in winter with the help of ski and ice-axe judiciously blended, and that, on the other side, they would regale the tourist with the gymnastics of a scramble as diverting as in summer.