A Fortnight In The Eastern Alps

By Wm. Anderton Brigg.

The Editor has ordered me to furnish an account of how four of us – I mean Eric Greenwood, Wm. Douglas of the S.M.C., my brother J.J. Brigg and myself – spent our summer holiday in 1904, and I readily obey.

We reached Pontresina by way of Zurich, Chur and the new railway, only just opened from Thusis to St. Moritz, and stayed the night at the fashionable Kronenhof Hotel.

Pontresina, once a climbing centre, has now become a fashionable resort for holiday makers of all kinds and countries, who, walk, drive, fish, golf, and do everything but climb, and we were not sorry to find ourselves next day at the little Morteratsch Hotel at the foot of the glacier of that name, en route for the Bernina. Greenwood, a true Yorkshireman, likes his first bite to be a big one – two years ago it was Mont Blanc and now it was this, the highest peak in the district, that he had chosen for our ‘training walk.’ Being always in good condition himself – thanks to Lakeland and Wharfedale – he expects others to be the same. We took old Christian Grass as guide and a porter, and if all flesh had been “as grass” we should have reached the summit – but I anticipate.

Two hours up a cleverly constructed path, high above the glacier, took us to the Boval Hut, where we spent the night on straw, singing ourselves to sleep with hymns, and left next morning at 2.20 a.m. in moonlight.

The summit of the Bernina lies at the back of the Hut, but hidden from it by huge rocks, and as the old and more direct way through the icefall of the glacier below the summit is now closed we had to make a long détour to the left in order to reach the vast plateau of snow, the Bella Vista, which closes in the head of the valley^[1]. Three weary hours took us across the glacier and up a steep snow slope to the Bella Vista, and already the ‘weaker vessels’ of the party began to find the distant views very interesting; but we held on across the snowfield as far as the imposing rock precipices of the Crast’ Agüzza on our left. And here a curious – and, in my experience, un-precedented – thing happened. We were watching a party making a new climb on the steep rocks just above us, when we saw, or rather heard, a cart-load of big stones, set loose by the climbers, come rattling down the rocks on to the snow slope below. Here they stuck, for the snow, fortunately, was soft; but they had knocked off, in their fall, the upper lip of the bergschrund, and one huge piece of ice, the size of four grand pianos, came sliding majestically toward us. It crossed our path about twenty yards in front, cutting a deep track in the snow, and popped into a crevasse below, like a rabbit into its burrow. It came so slowly that there was no sense of danger – in, fact I called out to my brother to snap-shot it – but if the snow had been hard, it might have been otherwise. MORAL: Don’t sit in the pit at a mountain matinée.

This incident woke us up a bit, but when we had got an hour further and found ourselves looking across a snow valley at the final rocks, with the summit some hour or two away, the white flag was hoisted, and after trying what a nap would do, we turned and made our way back humbly to the Hut.

We had gone very slowly – ‘schrecklich langsam,’ we overheard old Christian call it; but if we had held on we should have missed the view, as the usual afternoon thunderstorm was brewing – and likewise that other “brewing” towards which climbers’ thoughts always turn in the afternoon. MORAL: Don’t try to eat the rôti, before the hors d’oeuvres.

The descent over soft snow and sloppy glacier was a bit of a nightmare, and our sun-kissed faces smarted for some days afterwards, but hot tea and a rest at the Hut put us in a better frame of mind.

We lingered some time at the Hut, but not quite long enough. Another five minutes and we should have had the honour of making tea for a young and pretty scion of the Grand-Ducal house of Baden, who came up with two lady companions just after we had left. We saw them afterwards at the Hotel, with the rest of their party, and admired their pluck, for it is quite a big grind up to the Hut.

The Morteratsch Hotel is like the Montanvert or the Riffelhaus, crowded with ‘poly-glots’ in the daytime, but deserted at night, and it did not take much to persuade us to stop there instead of driving back to the crowded rooms of Pontresina, and we spent the night in great comfort.

We drove down next morning to Pontresina, picked up our luggage, sent off a bag or two to Sulden and the rest to Zurich, lunched at St. Moritz and drove up the valley past Silvaplana and all the other ‘cure’ places to the Maloja, and spent the night, not at the huge and fashionable Palace Hotel, but at a homely German house – the Hotel Longhin – where you dine en famille in the only sitting-room, smoke as you please, and shake hands with the landlady and waitresses when departing.

The upper end of the Engadine, or the Inn Valley, is very curiously constructed. Right up from Samaden and even lower down, the valley bottom is flat and at one level, save for a small rock barrier below St. Moritz, where the well known Cresta ice-run is made in winter, and much of it is filled with lakes; but the corresponding valley on the other side breaks down suddenly at the watershed in steep slopes, bounded with blue mountains, towards Italy.

And it was Italy that we pined for, as do all climbers who have tasted its charms, and we gladly turned our backs next morning on the tourist-ridden Engadine and made our way, by a side valley, over the Muretto pass, to Chiesa in the Val Malenco. There are easy snow slopes on both sides, not bad enough to stop the peasants from coming over with butter and cheese to the Maloja, and the view from it of the great Monte della Disgrazia has few rivals in the Alps. Its sharp ridges and streaming glaciers, seen from the fragrant pine woods and sunny pastures, made a splendid picture.

The Disgrazia has been climbed from this side, though with difficulty; but it is usually taken from the other, and to get there we had to descend to Chiesa and work round.

All Italian valleys are beautiful and the Val Malenco is no exception. It lies at “the back of the Bernina,” to use Mr. Freshfield’s words, and is a smiling contrast to the country we had left behind, nor has the tourist, English or German, discovered it.

The tide of travel indeed rises higher every year against the northern slopes of the Alps, but as yet only the spray flies over, and the answering tide from the south flows but slowly.

Chiesa – “the village of the Church” – boasts a decent inn, and we slept comfortably in the dépendance, a large panelled room, centuries old, built over gloomy vaults, at one time perhaps a nobleman’s mansion or a Town Hall, but now the village schoolroom.

We started next morning up through the steep woods, past a new hotel – half finished – to a green oasis in the woods, which has once been a lake, and beyond to a cluster of stone-built “shielings,” – you could hardly call them chalets, and so on past great boulders gushing with living waters, and up banks of tumbled rocks to the Corna Rossa Hut (now dismantled) perched high above a great glacier. It takes a lot of rocks to build up a big peak, but we thought the Disgrazia had more than its share.

We stopped awhile to admire the blue hills of the Bergamasque Alps to the south and the broad stretches of the great Val Tellina, and then clambered and glissaded down to the glacier and crossed it to the new St. Cecilia Hut in time to have a sun-bath on its sheltered side before turning in to a comfortable night in its cosy bunks. There is a small hut close by used by gendarmes on the look out for smugglers from the Swiss side.

We started next morning by moonlight for the Disgrazia, going straight up the glacier, almost as far as the col, and then taking to the rocks reached the summit in about six hours, after an interesting rock scramble with one short ice-slope. The wind was keen and a light mist was whirling about the steep ice-slopes and jagged rocks of the other side. Far below us lay the valley we had descended the day before, and further away the back of the Bernina range, and in the West the snowy summits of the Monte Rosa group – a vision of mountain beauty. But our chief thought was for Monte Viso, our last year’s conquest, and we persuaded ourselves that we saw it on the horizon over a hundred miles away, like a tiny lighthouse across a waste of waters. A view like this is worth much climbing for.

But the cold wind soon drove us down and we returned in our tracks, though not so far as the Hut, crossed the glacier to the Corna Rossa and so by yesterday’s path to Chiesa at 5.30 p.m., hot but happy.

I am superstitious about names and had had misgivings about that of our peak, which is Italian for ‘disaster’; but none happened, save that my hob-nails slipped twice on the slippery rock paths, and tempted one to follow the country custom of wearing only carpet slippers, or going barefoot on such places.

I ought to add that we had taken two guides from Chiesa, worthy fellows called by high sounding names, Silvio Lenardi and Carlo Albaredo to wit.

We had meant to drive down from Chiesa that night, but there was no carriage, so for the only time that trip we slept twice in the same bed.

We spent the next two days travelling in state, though not always in comfort. An hour-and-a-half’s drive in the cool of the morning took us down the beautiful Val Malenco to the important town of Sondrio in the Val Tellina; and I know of few more striking views, as you come suddenly out of the narrow. verdant gorge on to the hill platform above the town and see the broad valley at your feet, glowing warm in the morning sun, with cornfields and vineyards and gleaming campaniles – Italian right through.

An hour in the train, by the newly opened railway, brought us to Tirano, another quaint Italian town; and then, scorning the humble diligence, we drove in a lordly landau, in the heat of the day, to Bormio. It is a splendid valley, dotted everywhere with villages and churches – there were always six spires at least in sight, but we did not appreciate it to the full. When the mercury stands at anything in the sun, and the dust you raise is all consumed on the premises – the wind being dead astern – you can only gasp, and I seem to remember nothing very clearly but the satisfactory lunch half way, on the cool verandah of the inn at Bolladore.

We spent the night at Bormio, a quiet little town with a big church, dining at the cheerful table-d’hôte with a mess of smart Italian officers and some foreign (i.e. native) tourists. One of the latter, a fine child of two, was especially lively and did its best to pull everything on to the floor.

We ought to have walked next day over the Stelvio Pass, but true climbers never walk when they can ride, so we lolled on our cushions all the way up the endless zig-zags of the well graded road, whilst the thriftier German ‘bergsteigers’ tramped steadily past, cutting off the corners, and reached the top as soon as we did.

There is some wild but not very striking scenery on the Italian side, but the view of the Ortler group that bursts upon you suddenly from the summit is worth a long journey; grey limestone, grey snow, grey sky – a symphony in grey on Nature’s most majestic scale.

The carriage road (the highest in Europe) is carried down a precipice on the Austrian side, and tempts one to ask with the American attaché at the Tugela, if there was no way round!

Trafoi, a cluster of hotels, lies at the bottom of the deep valley on the Austrian side, with a tiny church, scarce bigger than that at Wasdale, but overshadowed by its successor, built in that uninteresting plaster-work Gothic now unfortunately so common on the Continent.

We stayed at a second-rate hotel – the Post – with a crowd of Germans, for whose amusement a drawing room entertainer was provided, and dined sumptuously off trout, kept ready in a tank in the garden and costing their weight in marks.

Trafoi exists for the Ortler, and the climber’s path is made very easy. Four hours up through woods and across screes, with a tea-house half way, take you to the Payer Hütte, built on the summit of the sharp ridge that divides Trafoi from Sulden Thal, and there you can get what you like to eat on that ‘penny-in-the-slot’ system which converts every meal in Tyrol into a feast of memory.

With the remembrance of other huts where we did not have first turn at the stove and blankets we arrived quite needlessly early, and spent the afternoon playing dominoes and watching the later comers of both sexes, as they stalked in, saluted the company, and made straight for the picture post cards – now the most noticeable equipment of a mountain hut, and sent off a dozen or so before settling themselves for the evening.

The weather was not good – our axes had hissed as we neared the hut – and there was a thunderstorm in the night; but it cleared off in the early morning, and at 5 a.m. we were following the long string of pilgrims for the summit.

Like other animals of an earlier period, they went two and two, a Herr and a guide, the latter leading the former with two yards of rope, very much like – but “caparisons are odorous,” and I will only say that whilst this method may be the best for a Mummery and a Burgener, it certainly did not appear so for the ‘Herrschaft’ we saw on the Ortler.

Some of the tourists were evidently not much at home either on snow or rocks, and the proceedings of one guideless couple – both young men – went far to explain the yearly increase in the Alpine obituary. Climbing has become as popular with the Germans as golf with us, and they have to pay the penalty, just as we should if the Alps were in Wales or Lakeland.

The ordinary route has been made as easy as possible, at first by a path across the rocks, very much like the Rake’s Progress on Scafell, and then by snow slopes, nowhere difficult, and we only made it interesting by suspending the usual rule, and trying how many of the couples we could overtake, just like a ‘bumping’ race at Cambridge. We passed a good many – some in fact never reached the top at all – and joined the steadily increasing crowd on the summit at 8.10 a.m. There was a fine view of the surrounding peaks and especially of the Ortler Grüppe, of which our peak is the crowning point; but we were more interested in the other “Ortler Grüppe” around us. We were thirty-nine in all – never have I seen a mountain so crowded !

We got away first, and were the first to reach the Hut, in spite of some of the guides, who, jealous perhaps of their reputation, raced their “Herrschaft’ to a standstill in their efforts to outstrip us.

We hurried down the steep Sulden side, partly in rain, and spent a wet afternoon and evening at the Eller Hotel – a second rate house. Sulden is like Trafoi, but more so, full of mountaineering Germans and Tyrolese guides, the latter most picturesque persons in “shorts” and feathered hats. Beside them an Almer or an Anderegg would look very cheap – in the valley I mean. I suppose there are good men among them, but their present cliéntéle and rules are not likely to give them much chance of showing it. Some, however, go to other parts of the Alps, and the village was even then awaiting the body of one poor fellow, killed a few days before on the Ober Gabelhorn with his employer. We found one Englishman here, the only one we saw that trip – except of course in the Engadine – and he lived in Italy.

We proposed to take a guide for the Cevedale, and spoke to one of them, but he said we must have at least four, one for each Herr; such was the rule, so of course we did without; nor was there the slightest need for any.

We walked up the valley after lunch next day to the Hallescher Hütte at the head of an easy glacier, and commanding fine views of the Königspitze, the best peak in the Ortler Grüppe. The accommodation was even better than that at the Payer Hütte, and after all, if you have to sleep in a hut you may just as well be comfortable. Some climbers sneer at huts, but at any rate they enable many to see the beauties of the High Alps who could not do so otherwise.

We had a pleasant snow walk up the Cevednle, next day, with a clear sky but a cool wind, and had a view much like that from the Ortler. Three hours took us to the summit and back to the level glacier, a quarter-of-an hour from the Hut, and here, with a sigh of relief we shook the snow of Tyrol off our boots, and crossing the Italian frontier, scrambled down the rocks to the Cedeh Hut, where we stopped to watch a party toiling up the slopes of the Königspitze, and then walked down to the Forno Hotel for lunch.

We had intended going on to the Baths of Sta. Catarina in the valley below, but the lunch was so good, the rooms so sweet and clean, and the company – or the lack of it – so attractive, that we decided to stay the night there; and very pleasant was the quiet afternoon, spent in an easy chair reading an account of Wasdale climbs in a recent number of the Bollettino of the Italian A.C.

One of the charms of wanderings like ours is the discovery of pleasant wayside halts, and the Forno is now on the list of those to be visited again, though hardly among those I have sometimes heard my friends – guileless bachelors – select as the place at which to spend their honeymoon.

The chef was glad to show his skill, and turned out a, very good ‘savoury,’ a dish he said he had learnt to make when at ‘the gold mines of South Africa,’ but when we asked the waitress for an omelette he came in with a solemn face and said “The woman says you want an omelette, but I must tell you the eggs are not too good” – meaning of course that the salmi of chicken, already cooked, must not be wasted – nor was it.

We started next morning at a comfortable hour (8.30 a.m.) and, crossing the stream, made our way over the shoulder of the hill overhanging Sta. Catarina, whose pensionnaires we could see far below us, idling about the sunny ‘plaza’ in front of the big hotel or plodding up the valley on their way to the Forno Glacier, and turned up another valley to the Gavia Pass, a barren stretch of ground, very like some of our own Yorkshire fells. The clouds hung low on the hills as we went down the other side and along a flat valley bottom past St. Apollonia, where we found a battalion of Alpine troops encamped in tents and a little hotel crowded with tourists, and reached Ponte di Legno in the wet.

A crowded hotel full of pleasant Italians amusing themselves with dancing and games, more suo, much like guests at an English Hydro; a stuffy little bedroom in a back street; a brawling stream and a jumble of old houses, are about what I remember of this place, and we were not sorry to leave it next morning, in glorious sunshine, for the Adamello.

The Val Camonica, down which we walked for some distance, is broad and fertile, with quaint villages and white campaniles dotting the wayside and cultivated slopes – a typical Italian valley on the broader scale.

We turned up to the left at Pontagna and followed a side valley, well wooded and sunny, to a cluster of chalets in a green amphitheatre, with a cascade tumbling down its upper end, and had some milk. In Tyrol or the Engadine there would have been an hotel, or at any rate a tea house and a crowd of visitors, but the Italians do not seem to have thought of it in that light, and if they had I don’t think they would have done much to ‘beautify’ it. As it was, we had to sit on a log in a sea of nettles and mud, for the chalets were extremely dirty.

The path is carried cunningly up the side of the cascade, through a thick tangle of brushwood, for nearly a thousand feet, and emerges on another amphitheatre with a mountain tarn fed at its upper end by another and smaller cascade. Then came some more chalets and a toilsome climb up stone covered slopes to the Garibaldi Hut, a comfortable but not luxurious place, with a small snow-water tarn close by, where some of us had a refreshing dip before feeding. We found a party of Italians in possession, pleasant fellows, who knew how to do themselves well in the matter of food – one window-sill in particular was full of cold roast chickens. Our own little store – and when you have to carry it yourself you don’t carry much – made a very humble show and was soon despatched, what time the sun went down in glory behind the jagged ridge opposite, and the evening mists rolled up the valley beneath the crescent moon.

It was one of our best evenings, and I recall with pleasure the picture of one of our Italian friends, his cloak thrown over his shoulder, perched on a rock against the vesper light, rolling out airs from the Grand Opera in a glorious tenor voice.

The Adamello presents its steepest side to the Hut, and we had to go a long way round next morning, across and up a big moraine to the top of the great cirque which surrounds the Hut, through the rocky portal that gives on the wide stretch of glacier above, and so along the snow below the summit ridge and round a rock promontory to the easy rocks that lead to the actual summit. Moonlight and dawn and sunshine followed each other in their glorious sequence, and we had a good time, although a gathering vapour denied us much of a view.

In descending we turned off to the right at the rock promontory and followed the glacier right down; and hard going we found it, over snow furrowed into ridges by a wind and frozen hard and afterwards partly melted, much like paperchasing over thawing plough land, and we were glad to exchange it for a decent path down the left side of the icefall to the Mandrone Hütte, stopping to bathe in a lovely little tarn by the way.

The Hütte is two storeys high, and would have told us, if our maps had not, that we had once more crossed the frontier and again put ourselves under the paternal care of the “Deutsch-Oesterreich Alpen Verein.” I hope I have got its august name correct. Douglas, who is a member, always spoke of it irreverently as the “Dutch Oyster Catcher.” But its food and shelter from the hot sun were very welcome, and we might well have stayed the day out, for it was long past noon; but the ‘sting of the gadfly’ was still in our veins, and we set off at 3 p.m. for Pinzolo, after dismissing the guide we had brought with us from St. Apollonia – the smallest man for the job I ever saw, but quite competent.

The first hour took us down the precipitous hill side by a cleverly made path into the flat bottom of the valley – the Val di Genova, and we spent the rest of the day walking down this valley. Competent critics declare it to be one of the most beautiful of all Italian valleys, and I agree. Not wide is it, but deep and bounded by steep cliffs over which thunder splendid cascades fed by the snows above ; thick woods, crushed here and there out of shape by the winter avalanches, alternating with sunny glades full of wild strawberries and bilberries; a foaming torrent chafing against the dams, natural and artificial – for there is much timber cutting, and beyond all this, at the lower end, the rocks of the Cima di Brenta glowing red in the sunset like ‘a throne set in heaven.’

This is how we think of it now; at the time, our thoughts were those of hungry and tired men, with heavy rucksacks, ‘legging’ it hard down the dusty paths and slippery pavements in the growing dusk – thoughts of bed and supper. In nothing is the alchemy of memory more potent or welcome than in this sublimation of past toil.

It was just ‘on the edge of dark’ as we came out of the narrows of the upper valley, and passing a little church – as old as Charlemagne – crossed the open water meadows, and reached the village of Pinzolo at 8 p.m.

We had seen but few peasants as we came down, nor were there any in the streets of the village, but when we came to the church we found the whole population filling the building and much of the space outside with a kneeling crowd praying for rain, for there was a great drought. Through the wide flung west door came a blaze of candles and a burst of harmony, overpowering in its contrast to the gloom and silence outside, and suggestive of much. Dr. Whitaker (the historian of Craven) imagines a like contrast in the services at Bolton Priory with the every-day work of the peasants outside.

It was a lovely morning, in spite of the overnight prayers, when we started next day for a long drive to Trent, a morning to make us glad that we were driving rather than riding in the train.

We left the villagers busy with the installation of some new marble statues in the church choir, and drove down the fertile ‘Judicaria,’ as that district is called, a broad and fertile valley dotted with villages and big houses, the latter built with open garrets for storing fuel and provender – veritable fire traps – and stopped to bait at the Baths of Comano. Very pleasant it was to creep out of the hot sunshine into the cool rooms of the little bathing stabilimento, where Italian visitors were placidly finishing their pranzo, as if the world had stood still for awhile. Thence by a road cut in the side of a deep gorge (‘the only one we had had this trip’ said the hungry members of the party), down to the shores of a placid lake, where the poplars and olives, and the sleepy towers of an old chateau spoke of the not-far-distant Italian Lakes. And so by an upland road over that broken limestone ground that always appeals so strongly to men from ‘Craven Coasts,’ and through another gateway in the hills, strongly fortified with drawbridge and rampart, into the broad valley of the Adige, where Trent – that historic city – sits enthroned.

Hot it was, 87° in the shade in the evening, with mosquitoes on the warpath – no place for climbing suits; but we saw as much of the city and its line churches and buildings as time allowed, and leaving next morning by train, swept round by Botzen and the Brenner to Innsbruck, and so by the Arlberg to Zurich, where we slept and spent an idle day in the Lake and the fascinating National Museum – a combination of South Kensington and the British Museum, splendidly housed – and reached Yorkshire the following night.

I have spared my readers as much topography as possible, and have attempted only an ‘impressionist’ description of what was, after all, more of a ramble than a climbing holiday. ‘Ars longa vita brevis‘ – ‘the Alpine Chain is long and holidays are short,’ and if one wants to know much of the Alps climbing must often give way to rambling. And though it is good perhaps to get to know one district thoroughly, if indeed anyone ever can, I prefer, for my part, to see an ever-changing horizon, and to be ever adding new pictures to memory’s gallery for solace in the time coming when ” they shall be afraid of that which is high.”