On July 24, Max and I once again made ourselves at home in the Dossen hut. A school friend of Max, Will Sturgess, aged seventeen, accompanied us, keen as mustard and looking forward to his first mountain climb. That evening the weather broke and remained bad until the following afternoon, when a fierce westerly wind set in which swept away the clouds and lashed up from the ridges the newly-fallen snow. Towards sunset the gale dropped, and numerous parties arrived from Rosenlaui and Meiringen. We prepared our simple evening meal—pea soup, tea and plenty of bread and jam—and before nightfall were already seeking sleep on the straw of the bunks. But the ceaseless chatter, the noise of other people’s cooking operations, and last but not least the insistence of the preponderating Teuton element on closed windows, despite the fact that the little hut harboured some thirty individuals, made rest impossible. Soon after midnight, no longer able to bear the stifling atmosphere, we jumped down from our beds and gathered round in front of the door to drink in the sweet, cool night air. A full moon shone from a cloudless sky, streaking the quiet snows with bands of silver.
We began to prepare breakfast, an example which was too soon followed by the other inmates, and so once more the little hut was filled with noise and bustle. Shortly after half-past one on the morning of July 26, we escaped into the peace of the night. In our rucksacks we carried only the essential needs for the day, it being our intention to return to the hut. Over the splendid, hard-frozen snow we mounted up to the Dossensattel—the little snow depression on the rock ridge at the lower end of which stands the hut—and within an hour had crossed it and were making our way horizontally over a fairly steep snow slope towards the Wetterkessel. Sturgess, who was in the middle of the rope, slipped twice, but as we always kept the rope taut from man to man he was easily held, while on both occasions he retained his grip upon his ice-axe—a promising sign on the part of a beginner. We walked quickly across the Wetterkessel, for the wind was bitingly cold, and about an hour below the Wettersattel halted for a second breakfast, finding shelter in a shallow crevasse. The first red flush of dawn was creeping down the Hasle Jungfrau as we set off once more. In the snow at the foot of a great rock pinnacle in the Wettersattel we deposited our knapsacks. Sturgess, wishing to reserve his strength for later in the day, elected to remain here and await our return from the Hasle Jungfrau. In a wind-sheltered hollow he got the little aluminium cooking apparatus into action, and promised that we should have hot drinks when we came back.
We found the remains of good steps leading up the final snow slope and, at 6 a.m., within twenty minutes after leaving the Wettersattel, stepped out on to the summit. Not a single step had we had to cut. The wind had died down, and the sky was cloudless. Again we gazed into the snow and ice-clad recesses of the Oberland, no longer land of mystery, for in the summer of 1908 we had successfully invaded its fastnesses. Far below in the Wettersattel, numerous climbers were coming up from the Grindelwald side—little black spots upon the white purity of the snows. Sturgess was evidently feeling the cold, for we could see him occasionally forsake the cooking-pot and indulge in short runs; altogether he seemed to be exerting himself much more than we two. After spending half an hour on the summit, we cut steps along the snow ridge in the direction of the Great Scheidegg, until we could look down on to the little Hühnergutz Glacier on the cliffs of the Wetterhorn overlooking the Scheidegg. On our return we found several parties in possession of the summit, so, carrying straight on and plunging down the good snow, we soon rejoined our companion who was waiting to welcome us with a cup of hot tea—veritable nectar to the climber on the heights. Max and his friend being inclined to dally over this, their third breakfast, I unroped and, leaving them to follow at their leisure, proceeded alone up the snow slopes leading to the Mittelhorn. There were no difficulties to be overcome, and presently I had gained the summit where I stretched myself out in the warm sun on some near by rocks and went to sleep.
At 9 a.m. Max, with Sturgess in tow, rudely awakened me, and we made ready for the serious part of the day’s work. Hitherto, though we had omitted none of the precautions so necessary for the safe carrying out of even the simplest of mountaineering excursions, the climb had seemed little more than a pleasant morning’s walk. Now, however, we were confronted by the long, be-pinnacled ridge connecting the Mittelhorn and the Rosenhorn, and unless appearance and rumour belied it, we were not likely to have too little to do. We roped together. For the first half-hour along the snow-crest everything was straightforward, until we arrived on a rocky platform from which the ridge suddenly fell away in an almost vertical cliff. About thirty feet lower down was a ledge, narrow and sloping, but roomy enough to provide standing ground for all three. Max lowered himself over, while I, well-braced, held his rope and paid him out foot by foot until he reached the ledge. Then came Sturgess’ turn. He advanced boldly, but lacking my brother’s rock-climbing prowess, he completed the descent by a free use of the rope. Now it was my turn. Max warned me that the pitch was too difficult to descend without help from above; so I cut a short length off the end of our rope, tied the ends securely together to form a loop and hung it over a jutting out spike of firm rock. Meanwhile the others had untied themselves, thus giving me sufficient rope for subsequent manœuvres. Drawing up Max’s end of the rope, I passed it through the loop and back to him, so that as I descended he could hold me from below like a weight on a rope passing through a pulley—the loop in this case performing the functions of the pulley—and check any disposition on my part to fall. Safe on the ledge, I recovered the rope by simply pulling on my end until the other passed through the noose. This and similar methods of descending difficult pitches of rock or ice are known to the mountaineer as “roping down.”
A brief scramble over easy rocks led to the upper edge of another vertical step in the ridge, where we again roped down. This pitch, however, was much longer than the last and, in addition, it partially overhung. Here and there, also, it was plastered up with ice that was softening in the warm rays of the sun. It was practically impossible to climb, and for most of the way down I hung with my full weight on the rope while Max paid it out. The ledge on which we now stood was on the south side of the ridge, the backbone of which we soon regained by an easy traverse over good broken up rock to the left. Here we made the aggravating discovery that, by previously adhering to the crest, we had missed a perfectly simple line of descent on the other side.
Climbing down a steep ridge.
