The Making Of A Mountaineer - free ebook by George Ingle Finch

THE MAKING OF A MOUNTAINEER

BY GEORGE INGLE FINCH WITH SEVENTY-EIGHT PHOTOGRAPHS, ONE DRAWING AND TWO DIAGRAMS ARROWSMITH :: LONDON :: W.C.1 First published in May, 1924 Printed in Great Britain by J. W. ARROWSMITH LTD. 11 Quay St. &amp; 12 Small St., Bristol To MY WIFE...

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PREFACE

Man’s heritage is great. There are the mountains; he may climb them. Mountaineering is a game second only to the greatest and best of all man’s games—life. The War all but dried up the steady stream of youthful and enthusiastic devotees who kept alive and fresh the pursuit of mountain-craft. But fresh blood is as essential to the healthy life of mountaineering as it is to any other game, craft or pursuit, and, fortunately, there are cheerful signs that the after-effects of the War are fast becom

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CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS

Some twenty-two years ago, on a dewy spring morning in October, I urged my panting pony towards a hill-top in the Australian bush, the better to spy out the whereabouts of a mob of wallaby. The last few feet of the ascent being too much for the pony, I dismounted and, leaving him behind, scrambled up a short, rocky chimney to the summit. The wallaby were nowhere to be seen; but my wondering eyes were held spell-bound by such a vision as I had never even dreamed of. Miles and miles away the white

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CHAPTER II CLIMBING IN CORSICA

Comfortably seated in the depths of Bryn’s favourite and most somniferous chair, I browsed idly and half unthinkingly through the pages of a guide book that had found its way, as such things will, to my host’s address. Cynically amused as far as my sleepy condition would permit by the flights of verbal fancy to which compilers of guide books seem addicted, subconsciously certain plain, unbefrilled facts impressed themselves upon my mind and, eventually marshalling themselves, roused me out of my

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CHAPTER III THE WETTERHORN

Grindelwald , the most popular of the climbing centres of the Bernese Oberland, is dominated by the Eiger and the Wetterhorn. The former is so close to the village that, owing to foreshortening, much of the majesty of its huge precipices is lost to the casual observer below. But the Wetterhorn, standing well back at the head of the valley, its great limestone cliffs surmounted by terraced glaciers upon which the snow-capped summit cone is so gracefully poised, has long appealed to the artist—so

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CHAPTER IV THE JUNGFRAU

A glance at the map of the Bernese Oberland will show that a straight line drawn in a north-easterly direction from the Breithorn to the Eiger will pass through, or close to, the Grosshorn, Mittaghorn, Ebnefluh, Jungfrau and Mönch. The ridge connecting these great peaks forms a lofty watershed flanked on the south by gently-rising glacier slopes and on the north by precipitous ice-clad cliffs and icefalls. Almost every route, therefore, leading from the north across this great connecting ridge c

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CHAPTER V THE JUNGFRAU AND THE JUNGFRAUJOCH

On reading the early annals of the Alpine Club, one cannot but be struck by the outstanding popularity of snow and ice-climbs and by the standard of efficiency reached in such climbs by the pioneers. The climber of to-day has added but few to the long list of wonderful ice-climbs that stand to the credit of his forerunner in the sixties. Ice-climbing has fallen into disfavour, but immense progress has been made in rock-climbing—a deplorable but readily explicable state of affairs. Since the earl

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CHAPTER VI ON SKIS IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND

With the coming of the Christmas vacation of 1908, Max and I, in accordance with our well-established custom, returned to Grindelwald. Having in the preceding summer become more intimately acquainted with the towering, snow-bound heights at whose feet nestles the winter sport resort par excellence of the Oberland, short ski-ing expeditions to the Faulhorn, Männlichen and the other lesser satellites of the great Oberland giants no longer satisfied us. We were now eager to penetrate into the winte

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CHAPTER VII ON SKIS IN THE BERNESE OBERLAND (continued)

In later years we visited many other parts of the Alps on skis; but it was not until the Easter of 1914 that we returned to the great glaciers of the Oberland. On April 9, I boarded the continental train at Charing Cross and, on the following day, joined my brother in Zürich, where he was completing his studies. My arrival being totally unexpected, I was indeed fortunate in finding him free from climbing plans and obligations. Next evening at eight o’clock we were in Wengen. After dinner, and ha

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CHAPTER VIII A WINTER’S NIGHT ON THE TÖDI

By Maxwell B. I. Finch Bad weather and unfavourable conditions had too often caused the postponement of several winter climbs, among them a long-planned ascent of the Tödi on skis. At length, towards the end of the winter term of 1911, a week-end arrived, sunny and bright, heralding the approach of spring. On the fourth eager inquiry the Meteorological Office gave a not too dismal reply, with the result that the laboratories and drawing-boards of Zürich’s Polytechnic suddenly seemed very unattra

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CHAPTER IX THE BIFERTENSTOCK

Far to the north of the main chain of the Alps there lies a range of mountains crowned by the two outstanding summits of the Tödi and the Bifertenstock. The former, rising from the lowlands of the Linth Valley to an altitude of 11,887 feet, is the loftier of the two and justly gives its name to the group; but the latter far excels it in beauty and impressiveness, and gives its name to the greatest glacier of the group, which flows down the deep cleft valley between the “King of the Little Mounta

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CHAPTER X MONTE ROSA

Upon a bright summer’s morning in 1911, we [6] lay on the warm rocks of the Monte Moro, gazing spell-bound at the avalanche-swept slopes of the greatest precipice in the Alps—the east face of Monte Rosa. Max saw chances of a grand climb and thought some of the bergschrunds looked bad; then, turning his attention to more personal matters, proceeded to indulge in a rigid foot inspection. Obexer could not contain his enthusiasm and greeted each avalanche, as it swept down the Marinelli Couloir, wit

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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 p

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Pollux.

Liniger, one of the ablest of the younger members of the A.A.C.Z. , and I went up to the Bétemps hut on August 17, 1919, with the intention of climbing the north ridge of Pollux. Heavy snow had fallen, and the possibility of carrying out a big climb was out of the question. Not seeing, however, why this should materially affect our prospects of being able to get in somewhere or other a good day’s ice work, we had consulted Dübi’s guide book to the Pennine Alps, to find therein no recorded ascent

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CHAPTER XII THE MATTERHORN—A BEGINNER’S IMPRESSIONS

By Agnes Isobel Ingle Finch The throngs who swarm on the Matterhorn day after day in the summer, the airy contempt with which some climbers dismiss it as a climbing proposition, the fact that a clumsy novice like myself has actually passed over it—these things do nothing to detract from the wonderment with which I shall always regard the ascent of the most famous mountain in Europe. I have watched it in its moods of calm and storm, sunshine and cloud, and, with eyes glued to the telescope, have

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CHAPTER XIII THE MATTERHORN

Perhaps no other mountain in the Alps, or for that matter in the whole world, can make such an appeal to the eye as the Matterhorn. This appeal is not merely one of beauty and boldness of form, but also one of position. The Matterhorn has no neighbours in close proximity to invite comparison; it stands utterly alone—a great, dark, rocky pyramid with sides of tremendous steepness, and towering up towards the heavens from out a girdle of glistening séracs and snowfields. It was one of the last of

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CHAPTER XIV THE DENT D’HÉRENS

One of the younger generation of mountain climbers once complained bitterly to me that there were no new climbs to be done in the Alps, the pioneers having, in his opinion, with extraordinary thoroughness and selfish disregard for their posterity, climbed every virgin pinnacle and explored all climbable ridges and faces. To his surprise, I replied that our thanks were due to the pioneers, for though some had no doubt digested much of the grain, the fattest and best grains remained for the man of

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CHAPTER XV MONT BLANC

Mont Blanc , 15,781 feet in height, the highest mountain in Europe, was almost the first of the great Alpine peaks to be climbed. On August 8, 1786, two Chamoniards, Dr. Paccard and Jacques Balmat, starting from Chamonix, made the first ascent. Forty-six years later Balmat was interviewed by Alexandre Dumas, who shortly afterwards incorporated the Chamoniard’s tale of the conquest of the great mountain in his Impressions de Voyage . And so the name of Jacques Balmat has come down to fame. To-day

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CHAPTER XVI MONT BLANC FROM THE SOUTH

It is a curious fact that, to this day, the southern slopes of Mont Blanc rank amongst the least frequented districts of the Alps. Mr. James Eccles who, with Michel and Alphonse Payot, first climbed Mont Blanc from the south, over forty-four years ago, remarked in a paper read before the Alpine Club, “It is singular that, notwithstanding their close proximity to a good mountaineering centre, the glaciers of the south-western end of Mont Blanc have been, compared with other parts of the chain, so

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The Requin

The Dent du Requin, one of the more popular of the Chamonix Aiguilles, is a bold, rocky tower rising to a height of over 11,200 feet from one end of the long ridge which falls away from the Aiguille du Plan towards the east. Early on the morning of August 29, we left the Montanvert in two parties, the first consisting of Mr. Lugard and his guide, Joseph Knubel, a rock-climber of great distinction hailing from St. Nicholas in the Zermatt Valley, and the second of Visser and myself. Following the

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The Grépon

A gigantic saw set up on edge and crowned by an array of irregular teeth—such, as seen broadside on from either the Mer de Glace or the Nantillons Glacier, is the great serrated ridge formed by the Charmoz and the Grépon. The deep col, or depression, which divides the ridge approximately in half, bears the composite name of the Col Charmoz-Grépon. Both of these peaks were climbed for the first time by a party consisting of Mummery, Alexander Burgener, that Viking of guides, and B. Venetz, a youn

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CHAPTER XVIII THE AIGUILLE DU DRU

After our border-line crossing of Mont Blanc, Max and I arrived at the Col du Géant on the evening of August 31, 1911. There we met a German climber armed with a letter of introduction from Martini, who had climbed the Zmutt ridge with us earlier in the season. As our new acquaintance considered ice-climbing to be a vicious and unpleasant way of indulging in the delights of the mountains, a traverse of the Dru was decided upon, in preference to the joys of step-cutting on the slippery slopes of

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CHAPTER XIX TOWARDS MOUNT EVEREST

“To make a determined effort, with every available resource, to reach the summit” were the instructions with which the 1922 Mount Everest expedition left England. The personnel was as follows:— Mr. Crawford, I.C.S., and Captain Morris, The climbing party consisted of Mr. G. H. Leigh-Mallory, Major H. Morshead, Major E. F. Norton, who was also artist and naturalist, Mr. T. H. Somervell, also artist and medical officer, and myself, also in charge of the oxygen equipment and responsible for its use

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CHAPTER XX MOUNT EVEREST

During my stay at the Base Camp my time was not really wasted. A study of Everest and of its meteorological conditions, photography, overhauling of equipment and experiments with oxygen kept me fully occupied. I wonder why it is that so many mountain travellers seem to lose all sense of proportion when they behold for the first time hitherto unknown ranges and peaks. Perhaps it is that they do not happen to possess the critical faculty of abiding by facts, and tend to describe what they expect r

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CHAPTER XXI MOUNTAINEERING PHOTOGRAPHY

Not the least of the rewards of mountaineering are the memories of mountain comrades and adventures which cheer those of the true faith through the humdrum existence of ordinary life. The camera enables us to retain a faithful picture of the many striking incidents, the wonderful surroundings and the fellow-actors who have played with us in the great game; so that photography, like a keen and accurately observant sixth sense, helps to keep our mountain memories fresh and true for all time. Given

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