[6] J. C. Case, F. Obexer, M. B. I. Finch and G. I. Finch.
CHAPTER XI
THE TWINS
When mountains reach an altitude of over 13,000 feet, one does not usually call them little. But the Twins, Castor and Pollux, are so overshadowed by their massive neighbours, the Lyskamm and the Breithorn, that one quite naturally refers to them in terms of the diminutive. Dwarfed though they be by their mighty surroundings, they are, nevertheless, every inch great mountains.
Castor
On August 15, 1909, H. A. Mantel, a fellow member of the Academic Alpine Club of Zürich, and I were sunning ourselves on the rocks in front of the Bétemps hut. Mantel, who had heard much of the joys of ice-climbing during the last two weeks we had climbed together, was filled with a keen desire to see for himself if it were really as superior to rock work as I had made it out to be.
The north face of the Lyskamm was ruled out as being too big an effort for the initiation of even such a willing proselyte as my companion. Within easy reach of the Bétemps hut, however, is Castor, the higher of the two twins and one of the most striking forms of Alpine beauty. Seen from the north, it is a wonderfully proportioned dome of pure snow and ice, almost wholly unflecked by rock. The north face of this mountain had never, as far as I knew, been ascended. Beyond the fact that Miss K. Richardson with Émile Rey and Bich had descended its upper third or half in 1890, I had not been able to trace the records of any other explorers having visited Castor on this side. Long before the chill of sunset drove us inside the hut, we had decided upon this climb for the morrow.
Soon after midnight, snow ploughing parties for Monte Rosa began their usual noisy preparations. We wallowed on in the luxury of superfluous blankets and straw until 2 a.m., by which time the last party had left the hut. At four o’clock, our fragile, early morning tempers were being severely tried by the moraine leading down to the Grenz Glacier. Once on the glacier, however, the stability of things under foot reasserted itself, and a brisk, pleasant walk brought us to the foot of the formidable icefall which separates the Grenz and Zwillings Glaciers. We attacked the icefall in about the centre of its front and working steadily upwards and to the right, in a westerly direction, fought step by step for a way through the intricate mass of crevasses and séracs which sought to impede our progress. Frequently we were unable to find snow bridges and had to cross crevasses by descending into them and then cutting up the other side. At the top of the icefall we were pulled up short by a final crevasse which appeared to stretch without a break from one side of the glacier to the other. A little searching, however, revealed the presence of an extremely unpleasant-looking bridge which seemed far too heavy for the slender supports by which it was attached to the two sides of the crevasse. The sun, however, had just risen, and everything was still well-frozen; so with due precautions the rickety structure was called upon to lend us all the assistance in its power. Beyond shedding a few icicles, which went clinking down into the soul-shattering depths below, the bridge stood up nobly. We now struck out in the direction of the Zwillingsjoch, as the gap between Castor and Pollux is called. Gentle, undulating snow slopes, broken here and there by enormous, but mostly well-bridged, crevasses, provided easy going. Some of the crevasses in this part of the glacier were so wide that we had to rope together at a distance of rather over eighty feet in order to avoid the possibility of both standing on the same bridge at the same time. A second icefall, tame in comparison with the first, was passed through without difficulty, and at 7.45 a.m. we stood at the foot of the north face of our mountain, at a point due north of the summit.
A crevasse on the Zwillings Glacier.