With a friend of former years, our first little climb up the Tschingellochtighorn resulted in a ducking, and for myself it must be confessed that the bodily fatigue of the first tug up steep slopes hardly permits of the usual interests and enjoyments of the way. Now it is rather sad to reflect upon those two black sluggish lizards that I was too lazy to collect, and that a fine crop of yellow Gentians were merely noticed without pleasure. Climbing the Tschingellochtigrat—a yellow Gentian it was that: and very little more.
Every struggle makes the next more easy—at first it is a purgatory for the pie-crust of the past year, then the later labour is all delight.
Mr. M., that veteran climber, hailed me on my arrival at Kandersteg with a shout: with him was his son, already at sixteen well experienced in mountain craft, and the well-beloved Melchior Anderegg. Mr. M. says “a man is always at his best on the Alps,” and surely this is true; his body is most freed from disorder, and his mind from cant, as he climbs away from all the worries of life.
We had an expedition together, a pretty climb up the steep south face of the Birrenhorn; on our way up to the rock we killed an adder. Near this spot last year I found a perfect viper’s cast (eye-covers and lips also quite entire). It is now in the Cambridge Museum, and proves that Gilbert White is correct in his statement that the snake’s cast is turned completely inside out. Here too are a great number of large white snails like escargots—“O helix infelix tui quam miseresco sine sheetis aut blankets dormientis al fresco.”
As my friend had made with me this same ascent last year, we were allowed to lead the way up, and had a nice scramble, notes of which are to be found in the Alpine Journal, and seen on a later page. This excursion gives a good view of the forests of the two valleys seen from many points above the Kander stream and Oeschinen See. No one can fail to note, when once attention is aroused to it, how the larch is gaining ground in the struggle for existence, and the pine is rapidly diminishing. Rarely does one see a young Arolla pine, and the old trees are picturesque ruins. In the Arolla valley the same observation may be made, and there are decaying stumps of trees, 200 or 300 years old, remaining high up, near the glaciers, where once a forest stood. A great advantage the larch has in being a deciduous tree, shedding its thin and spiky leaves every winter, and riding out the storm with bare poles, when the pine holds on its evergreen branches a great weight of snow, and presents a large surface for the tempest to burst upon.
When these pine trees stand together collecting snow, more opportunities for avalanches occur, and ruin is scattered on the forest beneath. The lovely green tints of the sprouting larches in Spring will bring us some compensation if the pines are to be lost.
A REGIMENT OF LARCHES ADVANCING ON VETERAN PINES.