Mountaineering Ventures
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70fcvSs )UNTAINEERING Presented to the UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY by the ONTARIO LEGISLATIVE LIBRARY 1980 v Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2010 with funding from University of Toronto http://www.archive.org/details/mountaineeringveOObens 1 £1. =3 ^ '3 Kg V- * g-a 1 O o « IV* ^ MOUNTAINEERING VENTURES BY CLAUDE E. BENSON Ltd. LONDON : T. C. & E. C. JACK, 35 & 36 PATERNOSTER ROW, E.C. AND EDINBURGH PREFATORY NOTE This book of Mountaineering Ventures is written primarily not for the man of the peaks, but for the man of the level pavement. Certain technicalities and commonplaces of the sport have therefore been explained not once, but once and again as they occur in the various chapters. The intent is that any reader who may elect to cull the chapters as he lists may not find himself unpleasantly confronted with unfamiliar phraseology whereof there is no elucidation save through the exasperating medium of a glossary or a cross-reference. It must be noted that the percentage of fatal accidents recorded in the following pages far exceeds the actual average in proportion to ascents made, which indeed can only be reckoned in many places of decimals. The explanation is that this volume treats not of regular routes, tariffed and catalogued, but of Ventures—an entirely different matter. Were it within his powers, the compiler would wish ade- quately to express his thanks to the many kind friends who have assisted him with loans of books, photographs, good advice, and, more than all, by encouraging countenance. Failing this, he must resort to the miserably insufficient re- source of cataloguing their names alphabetically. " Beggar that I am, I am even poor in thanks." Messrs. Bentley Beetham, M. Botterill, Mrs. Florence Buck- ley, Messrs. J. F. Burton, H. R. C. Carr, R. S. T. Chorley, iv PREFATORY NOTE F. M. Coventry, J. K. Crawford, Pierre Dalloz, S. B. Donkin, Captain J. P. Farrar, D.S.O., R. B. Goodfellow, Tom Gray, R. 0. Griffith, W. P. Haskett-Smith, A. Holmes, Sir Seymour King, K.C.S.I., W. N. Ling, A. H. M. Lunn, M. A. Pallis, H. E. L. Porter, E. E. Roberts, H. E. Scott, F. S. Smythe, Sydney Spencer, G. A. Solly, L. R. Wager, Mrs. Harold Woolley, Mrs. James Woolley. CONTENTS Introductory 9 The Caucasus 19 The Matterhorn 33 The Col du Lion 57 The Mischabelhorner 62 Corsica 81 The Brouillard Eidge 90 The Conquest of the Aiguilles 110 The Silberhorn 124 SkagastOlstind 130 The Grandes Jorasses 141 The Meije 151 Aorangi 162 The Dent Blanche 178 Everest 193 LIST OF PLATES Mont Blanc from the Aiguille d'Argentiere . Frontispiece The Peteret Ridge, Mont Blanc 16 Ushba, the South Peak 32 The Matterhorn, East Face 48 The Taschhorn and Teufelsgrat 64 Prospecting 72 A Stiff Crack 88 Paglia Orba 88 The Brouillard Ridge and Pic Luigi Amadeo .... 96 The Grepon from the Aiguille de Tacul 112 Crossing a Snow-slope 120 Skagastolstinder 136 The Grandes Jorasses from the Italian side 144 The Meije from the Rateau 152 Aorangi, North Face, showing N.E. Arete and " The Terrible Couloirs" 176 The Dent Blanche 184 Mount Everest 200 Yii MOUNTAINEERING VENTURES INTRODUCTORY Atlantic to New IN the present year of grace, crossing the York or the West Indies is an undertaking almost as commonplace as crossing the road at Hyde Park Corner, and not one-tenth part as dangerous ; nevertheless it would be foolish and ungenerous on that account to disparage the enter- prise and heroism of Lief, son of Eric the Red, who won his perilous way to the mouth of the Hudson, or of Columbus. In like manner the phrases " treadmill grind," or " fit only for novices "—frequently applied nowadays to the easier Chamonix routes to the summit of Mont Blanc—must not mislead us into underrating the courage and determination of the pioneers who made the first ascent. As very few people who are not mountaineers have any conception of the bulk of a mountain, the following digression is not only pardonable but essential. To take a homely illustration ! Snowdon is one of the best known of our British mountains, and has the advantage of standing in recognizable isolation. It is cut off from the Glyder range, which confronts it on the north-east, by the Pass of Llanberis, and a broad strath separates it from the Beddgelert hills on the south-west. Roughly speaking, the length of the group 9 10 MOUNTAINEERING VENTURES on these sides is about eight miles, the breadth at the Nant Gwynnant end about six, and the south-west extremity a mile. Its height is of no great importance. Actually it runs from 1,000 to 3,500 feet. What is of importance is the acreage. Dropped down on London along the northern bank of the Thames, with its narrow extremity on Tower Hill, Snowdon would extinguish every being and every building to as far west as Hammersmith and as far north as Wembley, the line of destruction tailing away as it slanted eastward again. Now the Mont Blanc range is about twice as broad as Snowdon, four times as long, and nearly four times as high. It is enormously higher over all, but, taking its base as Cha- monix, it works out as just a trifle under four times. It is, in fact, a small, snow-clad county, lifted to great altitudes, rifted into deep valleys inwalled by tremendous precipices and ice-slopes, many of extreme steepness, armoured with fissured glaciers wherever ice can find creeping-ground. Into this wilderness of peril on August 8, 1786, ventured two brave men, Jacques Balmat and Doctor Michel Gabriel Paccard, and won through—won through without all, or almost all, " the appliances and means " which experience estimates as essential in making the simplest expedition above the snow-line. They had no rope, no ice-axe, no compass, and, of course, no map, for .the most excellent reason that there was not one in existence. There were sundry caricatures with dragons featuring as glaciers, etc., or glaciers featuring as dragons, but these were, just possibly, inadequate, pos- sibly even misleading. Certainly they were not sufficiently comprehensive. Certainly they were also not dotted about with that very comfortable word " cabane," which adorns, at convenient intervals, the map in the pocket of the modern mountaineer. Also there was no Montanvert Hotel. INTRODUCTORY 11 Quite apart from attendant perils, it was a fine feat of endurance. Attendant perils there were. There were naked glaciers with the crevasses visible, which ought not to be dangerous, but can be so to the inexpert. There were snow- covered glaciers, always dangerous to an unroped individual, and so unsafe for two that the authorities have decreed that whatever number is right on a rope, two is unquestionably wrong. There were ice-falls, which is the glacier equivalent of a waterfall, or, rather, cataract, the spurts of foam of which are represented by splinters of ice (seracs), some of them the size of a steeple, which detach themselves quite inconsequently and delete everything in the way of their descent. There were falling stones and other incidental dangers, of which more anon. Also, although the boots were probably adequate, the adventurers had no goggles to protect their eyes, and no veils, or no modern substitute, like lanoline, to save their skin. They might both quite easily have gone snow-blind, in which case the moving finger would have writ its last word about them. If we are to believe Balmat, Paccard actually did go blind, and Balmat himself half-blind. Also there is no doubt that their faces suffered terribly, although it is not necessary to accept absolutely Balmat's description of him- self—that his eyes were red, his face black, his lips blue, and that every time he laughed or yawned the blood spurted from his lips and cheeks. Possibly the best way of gauging the intrepidity of the exploit and the danger thereon attendant is that to-day no two mountaineering experts would essay Balmat and Paccard's route up Mont Blanc similarly equipped. If two were so lunatic as to do so and succeeded, it is not credit that would be their meed. If they came to grief, the pronouncement of the authorities would be that the expedition was thoroughly 12 MOUNTAINEERING VENTURES discreditable, and that they had courted disaster. Seen in this perspective, the first ascent of Mont Blanc realizes more nearly its correct proportion. That there was actual danger attendant on the venture is established by the accident on the " ancien passage " (a discovery by Jacques Balmat which enabled him to attain the summit), resulting in the death of three guides. The whole party, numbering eleven, started an avalanche, and were carried down the slope. Three of the guides were swept into a crevasse and lost. This happened in 1820. Portions of the remains of the victims were recovered at the foot of the glacier, 1861-65. Then, in 1870, came the terrible catastrophe in which an entire party, eleven in number, perished a short distance below the summit. This they had actually attained, but early in the descent were caught by a tourmente and wiped out, literally by inches, by cold and exhaustion. The diary of Mr. Bean, one of the victims, is most pathetic reading as it trembles away into silence. Happily such incidents are rare. If death must come to a man on a mountain, " sudden death " has no place in that man's Litany. He simply does not know what hurts him. This has been established in the case of individuals who have been rendered unconscious by relatively short falls.