Rock-climbing in the English Lake District / Third Edition

by Owen Glynne Jones

The autumn holidays of this year were again very busy ones. Jones spent them in the Alps, and, as his list shows, his climbs included the traverse of the Aletschhorn, Aiguille du Moine, and Pic du Tacul. He did the Portiengrat and Weissmies in one day, and the Fletschhorn and Laquinhorn in another. Young Emil Imseng was his guide, and he found Jones rather too hungry for peaks to be the easiest sort of patron to travel with. When they had done the Portiengrat he had had enough for one day, so he suggested that Jones should rest. But he did not know his ‘Herr;’ the Weissmies was taken that day likewise.

In 1898 Jones again paid a winter visit to the Alps. Grindelwald was a second time his centre. He crossed from there to Rosenlaui by the Wetterhorn-Sattel, and crossed the Finsteraarjoch and the Strahlegg.

In the Summer of 1898 he went first to Chamounix, and afterwards to Zermatt, and got through a portentous amount of work. He began by attempting the traverse of the two Drus, but failed owing to bad weather. However, he climbed the Grand Dru, and then in rapid succession the Grépon, Dent du Requin, Aiguille du Chardonnet, Aiguille du Midi, Mont Maudit, traversed Mont Blanc, climbed the Aiguille du Géant, and finished up in that district by accomplishing his formerly thwarted purpose, and traversing both the Grand and the Petit Dru.

Then he came on to Zermatt. He climbed the Riffelhorn again (by the Matterhorn Couloir), did the two peaks of the Lyskamm (in conversation with me the last time I met him he seemed to think this the most difficult thing he had ever done) and Castor, Strahlhorn and Rimpfischhorn, Wellen Kuppe and Gabelhorn, Allalinhorn and Alphubel, Dent Blanche (by the south arête), the Täschhorn by the Teufelsgrat, and the traverse of the Dom, Täschhorn and Kienhorn.

I was standing outside the Monte Rosa Hotel, in the main street of Zermatt, one bright sunny day, that summer, when early in the afternoon Jones, with his two guides, came in from one of these climbs. He had been frequently doing two peaks in one day (I believe he had once done three). All the party showed signs of wear and tear, but Jones was the freshest of the three. His face and hands were as brown as berries, covered with dust and sweat; his clothes were literally in rags, torn to pieces on the rocks. Yet in a few minutes he had washed, changed into the garb of civilization, and reappeared as fresh in body and as vigorous and vivacious intellectually as if he had undergone no fatigue at all. Twenty hours’ physical work did not appear to take as much out of him as five hours does out of humbler mortals.

It was just about this time that his friends the Hopkinsons were killed in the Arolla Valley. Jones was a good deal upset by the news, and knocked off climbing for a couple of days, a wonderful thing for him; but then he resumed as busily as ever. Of the climbing skill both of Dr. Hopkinson and of his young son, who was killed with him, he spoke in the highest terms. He had frequently climbed with both.

I have said little of Jones’s British climbs, for the simple reason that the fullest and best record of his work in Lakeland is contained in the book to which this brief memoir is prefixed, and his work in Wales (which he also intended to describe in a volume) is not so easily accessible or so fully recorded in any published documents as is his work in the Alps. Apparently there does not exist among his papers any list of his Welsh climbs, though he kept voluminous shorthand notes of almost everything he did in the climbing world; but it is not possible, in the short space and time at my disposal, to attempt to give from them any complete picture of the work he did in Wales. The Messrs. Abraham, however, have kindly placed in my hands the following brief notes of some of the most remarkable experiences they have had in company with Jones, both in Wales and in the Lake District:

‘Two climbs with Mr. Jones are most strongly impressed on our memories, and these two would probably rank as the two finest rock climbs made in our district.

‘These are Scawfell Pinnacle from the second pitch in Deep Ghyll in 1896, and the conquest of the well-known Walker’s Gully on the Pillar Rock in January, 1899.

‘Both of these were generally considered impossible, and it is probably no exaggeration to say that no leader excepting Mr. Jones would have had confidence to advance beyond the ledge where the last arête commenced on the Scawfell Pinnacle climb.