True Tales of Mountain Adventures: For Non-Climbers Young and Old

by Mrs. Aubrey Le Blond

Hans and Christian Grass.

The following account of a narrow escape from the result of a cornice breaking has an especially sad interest, for it was found amongst the papers of Lord Francis Douglas after his tragic death on the Matterhorn, and was addressed to the Editor of the Alpine Journal. The ascent described was made on 7th July 1865, and the poor young man was killed on the 14th of the same month.

The Gabelhorn is a fine peak, 13,365 feet high, in the Zermatt district.

Lord Francis Douglas writes:—"We arrived at the summit at 12.30. There we found that some one had been the day before, at least to a point very little below it, where they had built a cairn; but they had not gone to the actual summit, as it was a peak of snow, and there were no marks of footsteps. On this peak we sat down to dine, when, all of a sudden, I felt myself go, and the whole top fell with a crash thousands of feet below, and I with it, as far as the rope allowed (some 12 feet). Here, like a flash of lightning, Taugwald came right by me some 12 feet more; but the other guide, who had only the minute before walked a few feet from the summit to pick up something, did not go down with the mass, and thus held us both. The weight on the rope must have been about 23 stone, and it is wonderful that, falling straight down without anything to break one's fall, it did not break too. Joseph Viennin then pulled us up, and we began the descent to Zermatt."

Here, again, one of the guides saved the party from certain destruction.

It is in time of emergency that a really first-rate guide is so far ahead of an inferior man. In many cases when fatal results have followed unexpected bad weather or exceptionally difficult conditions of a mountain, bad guiding is to blame, while the cases when able guides have brought down themselves and their employers from very tight places indeed, are far more frequent than have ever been related.

A really wonderful example of a party brought safely home after terrible exposure is related in The Pioneers of the Alps. The well-known guides, Andreas Maurer and Emile Rey, with an English climber, had tried to reach the summit of the Aiguille du Plan by the steep ice slopes above the Chamonix Valley. "After step-cutting all day, they reached a point when to proceed was impossible, and retreat looked hopeless. To add to their difficulties, bad weather came on, with snow and intense cold. There was nothing to be done but to remain where they were for the night, and, if they survived it, to attempt the descent of the almost precipitous ice-slopes they had with such difficulty ascended. They stood through the long hours of that bitter night, roped together, without daring to move, on a narrow ridge, hacked level with their ice-axes. I know from each member of the party that they looked upon their case as hopeless, but Maurer not only never repined, but affected rather to like the whole thing, and though his own back was frozen hard to the ice-wall against which he leaned, and in spite of driving snow and numbing cold, he opened coat, waistcoat and shirt, and through the long hours of the night he held, pressed against his bare chest, the half-frozen body of the traveller who had urged him to undertake the expedition.

"The morning broke, still and clear, and at six o'clock, having thawed their stiffened limbs in the warm sun, they commenced the descent. Probably no finer feat in ice-work has ever been performed than that accomplished by Maurer and Rey on the 10th August 1880. It took them ten hours of continuous work to reach the rocks and safety, and their work was done without a scrap of food, after eighteen hours of incessant toil on the previous day, followed by a night of horrors such as few can realize." Had the bad weather continued, the party could not possibly have descended alive, "and this act of unselfish devotion would have remained unrecorded!"

Perhaps the most remarkable instance of endurance took place on the Croda Grande. The party consisted of Mr Oscar Schuster and the Primiero guide, Giuseppe Zecchini. They set out on 17th March 1900, from Gosaldo at 5.10 A.M., the weather becoming unsettled as they went along. After they had been seven hours on the march a storm arose, yet, as they were within three-quarters of an hour of the top of their peak, they did not like to turn back. They duly gained the summit, the storm momentarily increasing in violence, and then they descended on the other side of the mountain till they came to an overhanging rock giving a certain amount of shelter. The guide had torn his gloves to pieces during the ascent, and his fingers were raw and sore from the difficult icy rocks he had climbed. As the cold was intense, they now began to be very painful. The weather grew worse and worse, and the two unfortunate climbers were obliged to remain in a hole scooped out of the snow, not only during the night of the 17th, but also during the whole day and night of the 18th. On the 19th, at 8 A.M., they made a start, not having tasted food for forty-eight hours. Five feet of snow had fallen, and the weather was still unsettled, but go they had to. First they tried to return as they came, but the masses of snow barred the way. They were delayed so long by the terrible state of the mountain that they had to spend another night out, and it was not till 6 P.M. on the 20th, after great danger that they reached Gosaldo. The guide, from whose account in The Alpine Journal I have borrowed, lost three fingers of his right hand and one of the left from frost-bite; the traveller appears to have come off scot free.