Ski-runs in the High Alps

by F. F. Roget

It was about two in the afternoon when our party assembled on the lip of the Grünhornlücke. This substantive, which has before now enjoyed our favour, I do not employ as a mere literary phrase. Let me say why.

High Alpine passes are like funnels up which the wind sweeps the snow. Most passes I describe in this book being parallel to the main range of the Alps, are most susceptible to winds blowing from the south-west and to north-easters. When the wind blows from the south-west the snow driven up the inclined funnel overlaps to the north-east and forms an overhanging lip in that direction. After a time intervenes a gale from the north-east. It drives up snow under the curve of the lip and fills the bend as with plaster. A time comes when, that space being filled up, the new snow is rolled up over the lip and then bulges out in a hanging cornice towards the south-west. That in its turn gets reversed, and so forth throughout the winter. On passes, therefore, cornices are not fixed. They shift from one side to another of the sky-line.

This may constitute a serious danger, either because the lip is curled over above you, and then you may have to break through it or even bore a tunnel, as when a waterpipe, in order to be carried up through the projection of a roof, is led straight up a wall and an opening pierced to take it above the roof. At other times it is easy enough to get on to the lip, because the outside edge of it bends down away from you. But then the difficulty is how to get off the lip on to the chin below. Here again, if you go carelessly forward your weight may break off the edge of the lip. You will fall with it, through the open space underneath, on to the lower level. Or else you may have to jump, or let yourself down by means of a rope if the distance is too great or the landing surface too steep or too slippery or too near an abyss for you to be sure of getting a safe foothold. It is sometimes the wisest course to dig one’s way down, as on other occasions you may have dug your way up. These are the minor incidents that attend every kind of mountaineering. But they are much more frequent, and sometimes a cause of real peril in winter, because overhanging hems of snow may be met with, even in the zone of the grazings, where the snow is usually very deep and much tossed about by the contrary currents of wind resulting from the extremely broken character of the country.

High glacier passes are, on the whole, pretty free from cornices because the wind has free play so near the altitude where all land ceases. Geography is very much simplified from 9,000 feet upwards. You would be easily convinced of it if, on a relief model, you sliced off all the pieces rising above 9,000 feet and separated them from the remainder of the model by slipping in a tray under them at that altitude. That is why the High Alp ski-runner is much less concerned with avalanches than his less ambitious brother who confines himself to lower and more complicated regions. The reader will now understand better why Lunn and myself are so perpetually “lounging, strolling, idling” in this raid.

It was actually only two in the afternoon—let us say it again in the light of these observations—when our party assembled on the lip of the Grünhornlücke. We looked back towards the Loetschenlücke, once more a mere dent against the sky, and contrasted our easy journey with the long, laborious tramp which is there the lot of summer trippers over slushy, soft sticky snow. How often had I worked my way toilsomely, with wet feet and perspiring brow, over these extensive fields when they were mud-coloured and a vast network of puddles! Yet the temperature throughout had been delightfully mild! Our party lay down on the summit of the pass as comfortably as on a hot Sunday afternoon, the members of a boating party on the Upper Thames might choose to land on a dry and elevated part of the bank—but, alas! in our case quite shadeless—to boil the kettle and lay the table for afternoon tea.

At 11,000 feet above sea-level we lay about on the white dry floor and enjoyed a prolonged siesta, and thought how unlikely all this would seem when we should relate it. But when the sun had set behind the Aletschhorn, the change was instantaneous. We had now to go down slopes facing east, whose surface glazed immediately. Our ski seemed alive, and skimmed over the glaze like swallows skimming the surface of a lake. We had plenty of room in which to break our speed by curving in uphill and bending down and round again. I could indulge to my heart’s content in my favourite amusement on such slopes, which, when you present the broadside of your ski somewhat upwards and sideways to the concavity of the surface, let you down at varying rates of speed while you describe a spiral line to the bottom.

In this case the foot of the pass was indeed the bottom, but it was also the top of the Walliser Fiescher Firn. Like arrows from a hidden bow, we shot along the path of the moonbeams and came to a standstill at the foot of a dreadful black rock, on the top of which the rays of the sun, before parting, had lit up as a beacon the windows and chimney-pots of the Finsteraarhorn hut. We left our ski well planted in the snow and scrambled up with our packs. This hut once stood on the Oberaarjoch, till it was removed thence and rebuilt in its present position. The trials of transport may account for its being somewhat loose in the joints. It is not weather-tight, and the snow on the roof—in summer I have known it to be rain—trickles through in large drops, sometimes on the clothes set out to dry on strings all round the stove pipe and sometimes on the noses of the sleepers in their berths. I understand that the trickle of water on one’s cranium is one of the most terrible tortures a man can be subjected to.

Anyhow we had climbed a thousand feet, taken perhaps the wrong way up, the whole in very good time to allow Adolf his usual extra hour for joining us round the flowing bowl of hot soup.

“As we were sitting down to supper,” says Lunn, “a party of some six or seven Swiss came in.” They had just completed the ascent of the Finsteraarhorn, and were not a little pleased to find the stove lit and water on the boil. We had noticed on arrival that the hut had the appearance of being inhabited, and on looking round had soon caught sight of its denizens slipping and stumbling merrily down the shoulder of the Finsteraarhorn. A look at the hut guest-book also told us that it had been lately visited by two Norwegians.

“That night in the hut we were a merry party. The Swiss belonged to the class that in England divide most of their time between watching football matches and playing billiards. They made one realise how much the higher life of a nation was stimulated by a prevailing love of mountains. For mountaineering is essentially the people’s sport. Climbing tends more than any other sport to break down artificial barriers between classes. Snobbery is seen in its true proportion against a background of mountains. The wealth of enthusiasm which mountaineering inspires among the artisan classes of Switzerland is a permanent asset to the nation, lifting all those who come into contact with the hills out of their narrow ambitions. Shelley felt this truth. The great peaks, he writes, have a voice to repeal large codes of fraud and woe. One had only to look at these Swiss to feel how their lives were coloured, their ideals raised, their views broadened, by their love of their native mountains.”