To give satisfaction to so many kind inquiries, I gave two days later my first lecture before a more than crowded audience, and Arnold Lunn supplemented it. The joint address is the common foundation of anything we have since written on the subject.
Let me now wind up with a few final remarks.
1. Winter mountaineering may be more difficult and more dangerous than summer climbing. One often has to face the most intense cold; but with first-class conditions such as we enjoyed, it is scarcely more arduous, and certainly much more enjoyable, than summer work. Our journey in summer would have involved hours of walking through damp, slushy snow. There would have been wearisome tramps up and down moraines, tedious stretches of mule paths, dull grinds over grass slopes, and I shudder to think—consider the mileage!—what the last day would have meant in July. As it was, we at no time suffered from the cold, and, strangely enough, though our days were long and mostly uphill, in point of time at least, we neither of us ever felt tired. This was, to be sure, owing to good ski technique. “The professor would never allow us to raise our ski off the surface of the snow. In that way they were absolutely no weight, and even the raising of the foot and leg was replaced by the glide upwards of the ski blade which provided a resting-point and support, reducing the muscular action to the same amount of forward movement as is necessary on level ground, without any additional force being employed in vertical action.”
Given good weather and normal conditions, a six-day traverse can be accomplished with very little fatigue and still less privation. I have done four such and have never been any the worse. One may weary somewhat of soup, bread and cheese, but barring these and similar drawbacks, there is no reason why any one of moderate physique and fair ski-ing powers should not follow in our steps.
Somehow the memories of those six days have the power to impart something of the magical colourings of a winter sunset to the drab dullness of lowland evenings. On the mountains we all have moments when life assumes unsuspected values, helping us to realise on our return to civilisation, that the things that are seen are temporal, whereas the things which for the time are not seen are for all practical purposes eternal. “The winter Alps are but a vision, a faint memory intruding itself at intervals when the roar of the commonplace is for a moment hushed in silence. If visions were not at times the most solid of realities this world would be intolerable.”
“Just for a moment I have had a fleeting vision,” wrote Lunn, when he had once more settled down to the round of daily life, “of the silent snows of the Aletsch, as you and I saw them that glad evening on the Loetschenlücke, lit in all the splendour of the January moon. It faded all too soon, and the winter Alps again seem very far away.”
2. I append a table of levels, in feet, similar to the table of my vertical displacements, in metres, which the reader has found at the end of the Diablerets to Kandersteg chapter:—
January 2nd.—Kandersteg to Mutthorn hut: 5,700 feet (Tschingel pass).
January 3rd.—Mutthorn hut to Petersgrat (our second pass): 1,000 feet.