ROUTE Z—BRIG TO GRINDELWALD

By the late W. E. Evans.

This route does not appear in Ball’s Guide, probably because it so teems with climbs and expeditions throughout its length that even his condensed style could hardly compress it into manageable proportions. On the framework of this journey could be built a guide to the whole central part of the Bernese Oberland.

Bel Alp, from whence the evening scene embraces the twinkling lights of Brig as well as the afterglow on the Pennine summits, has virtues, even on wet days, which are as yet unsung. If you have a taste for economic problems, you may consider why food and drink at the top of Snowdon cost 3 – 7 times as much as the equivalent articles at Bel Alp, which is twice the height and served by a mule instead of a railway. If your interests are mechanical you may suffer Reed’s fate when he examined the obscure workings of the dinner bell—a shout of laughter from the bonne femme and “You are ingenieur, and you do not know how it works ! “

There is much to be said for luxury at 7,000 ft., and the hotel has ” many noble wild prospects.” One of these is the Fiisshorner, a sort of concentrated and straightened Coolin ridge. For the summit peak at the north end, three guide­ books gave three routes ; ours may be described as “Variations on an Original Theme.” In thick mist, punct­ uated with driving snow, the west ridge, the south-west ridge, and sundry snow-slopes and couloirs were used and rejected as they became too unpleasant, and we reached the top by means of moving always in an upward direction, a simple procedure which does not always produce the desired result. It once failed me badly on Ingleborough.

The hour was late, and a more rapid descent by the snow was advisable. A stiff breeze now whipped the snow off the couloir, and we were equally blind with or without goggles, so the reverse principle of always proceeding downwards was applied, and we kicked steps vigorously for an hour. This brought its reward, and ten glorious minutes of glissading trebled our progress and brought us within sight of the Ober Aletsch glacier. Easy rock, easy grass, steep grass, and much too steep rock followed, and speed accordingly decreased, It was absurd, but there was the moraine path, and there were we, a hundred unclimbable feet above it. The weather was foul, the light failing. Something had to be done, and Reed and I prepared to abseil. Our position was desperate. Sale, for once, was unhelpful. He sat below, steadily con­ suming the last of the chocolate, having long since walked off by a grass ledge.

Tea fit for drinking and rock for climbing are hard to come by on the continent, but every year one seems to make the mistake of trying them once again. But now it was time for serious climbing, and accordingly the party went into com­ mittee to produce a grocery list for a stay at the Ober Aletsch hut. I had been smitten by a violent cold, and my contribu­ tions were limited to destructive criticism and gloomy predictions about the weather. The list was to represent food for two men for one day, and it was agreed that if I were sufficiently recovered on the morrow to be capable of multiplying by three, I should perform this operation, load the result on to a porter and join Sale and Reed at the hut. They departed, and the next morning I approached the landlord with my list. He was staggered. He pointed out that the bread would be inedible before we could eat it, and reduced the amount by half. I yielded and hit back by ordering a large quantity of biscuits. Nevertheless, I was shaken, and looked up Scott’s sledging ration (I was reading Cherry Garrard’s Worst Journey in the World). It was clear that we had enough food for a week. The calculation had taken some time, however ; the food was collected and the porter bespoke, so I put on a bold face and went through with it. The considerable remains were smuggled back into the hotel on our return, and the final remnants abandoned at the Bergli hut six days later. I announce with pride the discovery that a man, even with Alpine appetite, does not eat 6 lbs. of food per day. Never­ theless, Sale was wrong when he said, ” Half a pound is a lot of jam even when it’s marmalade.”

After a day of changeable weather which had restricted the advance party’s activities, I arrived at the Ober Aletsch hut in time to see the bold pyramid of the Nesthorn outlined against the western sky, its flanks and ridges veiled in brilliantly-lit cloud whose movement and changing colours made an evening pageant of unforgettable beauty.

The route to the summit lies up the Beichfirn, the western branch of the Ober Aletsch glacier, and an hour’s march the next morning brought us to the foot of the ice-fall between the rocky east ridge of the Nesthorn and the Lonzahorner. Three rock ridges divide the ice-fall into four couloirs, of which it is usual to take the first or second from the left. These, however, appeared to be the most broken and difficult, and the tracks of a previous party could be seen ascending the third from the left, which we decided to follow. Whether we were right or no, it took nearly four hours of zig-zagging through crevasses, and under seracs, and testing snow bridges to reach the comparatively level neve of the Gredetschjoch, below the summit ridge. They were hours of hard plodding in new snow, relieved by halts for which the view of the Aletschhorn and of the snow-clad spire of the Schienhorn behind us were sufficient excuse. Nor did we lack excitement. More than once the leader’s axe sank to the head, while the tinkling of ice particles in the blue depths of a crevasse persisted for ominous seconds.  The angle steepened until it was necessary to cut steps in the ice beneath the snow covering, and eventual success was always a little uncertain until the last serac was left behind, thus adding that spice to physical effort which goes to make a first-rate climb.

From the pass, hard snow ridges over the Klein Nesthorn and up to the summit gave eighty minutes of exhilarating labour in brilliant sunshine, followed by much clicking of cameras. The Alps were on show. The splendid mass of the Bietschorn dominated the western view ; to the south the cloud carpet was pierced by all the snow peaks of the Pennines and beyond, and a pale bulge on the horizon could only be Mont Blanc, 60 miles away.

The descent by the same route was enlivened by the thought of what the mid-day sun had done to the new snow on the ice-fall. It is sufficient to state that continuous care was necessary, that only once did the surface peel off from below us, and disappear significantly into a crevasse, and that the leader inspired confidence.

Two days later we descended for the last time the zig-zags from Bel Alp to the glacier, that steep path which comes as a penance at the end of a long day for all the mountaineering sins you have committed, and by which you acquire merit, and your dinner. Whether you climb from Bel Alp, the Rieder Alp, the Ober Aletsch or the Concordia Huts, your fate is the same, a stiff pull-up at the end of the day, and it is never quite so bad as your imagination during the last hour’s trudge down the glacier has made it. The approach to the Bergli hut, on the other hand, requires care lest 3’ou arrive, like Father Christmas, down the chimney.

When we set off for the Concordia it was one of those mornings, not unusual in the Alps, which yet demands a mention and some attempted tribute. Everything is still, and fresh, and light ; the world has indeed been born again, and you with it. Across flowered pastures, up desolate moraines beside the toppling many-hued seracs of the lower ice-fall, and then we set foot upon the high-road of the level glacier. Seldom was backward glance so rewarded as here. The frozen waves diminished and fell away to the gorge from whence sprang up the rocky, tree-clad buttresses, dappled with the shadow of mounting cumulus, while between them, in the far distance, the Mischabel, the Matterhorn and the Weisshorn raised their silver heads against the azure sky.

High-road, I have called it, yet never was a road so pot-holed or gave the traveller upon it so devious and undulating a route as this one, nor one so packed with interest and delights. In its changing detail of form and colour it is extravagant ; its setting is magnificent, and its layout majestic. Two conspicuous breaks in its retaining walls of rock and snow ridges occur, First, on the west, the gap by which the Mittel Aletsch glacier joins the main stream reveals a fresh aspect of the shapely pyramid of the Aletschhorn. Then, on the eastern margin, the hills give way to form the hollow filled by the blue water of the Marjelensee, that astonishing lake with its glacier wall and doll’s house ice-bergs, where seeing is not quite believing, and photography is no use at all. We sat, we marvelled, and we moved on.

The last stage of this journey was easy going up the now less broken glacier, to a mounting climax of sensation as the peaks which fringe the shining carpet of the Concordia Platz, came into view, took form and place. At last we mounted the rickety ladders to the Concordia Hut, staked a claim to bunks amidst a babel of tongues and an atmosphere of steam and shot out again to that other world of blinding light. White clouds were boiling up from the Jungfraujoch, their shadows making a shifting mosaic of the glistening snowfield below. Turning to the south, the scene had a more permanent quality. Form took precedence over light. There is an inspiring rhythm in the lordly sweep of the great glacier to its destination. Here, you feel tempted to say, is perfection and unalterable.

The next day was spent in reaching the Bergli hut by the Ober Manchjoch, with an ascent of the Monch as diversion. All went according to plan, from the dull grey start, when the sky, the snow and the brain are all grey ; through the ever-recurrent miracle of dawn on the glacier, when life returns to the mind and body as the sun gilds the peaks ; through the exhilaration of a successful ascent, and finally to the delicious rest in a warm and fuggy, and this time almost deserted, hut.

We climbed the Monch by the ordinary route from the Ober Monchjoch. This may by all accounts be difficult and exacting if steps have to be cut up the long steep arete. For us there was a well-trodden staircase, and the difficulties lay only in putting one foot above the other, but with all the beauty of the Oberland unfolding as we mounted higher, there was nothing tedious about this ascent. Anyhow, it was the highest that any of us had reached. Possibly we had the air of intrepid adventurers as we started to descend, but our pride was dealt a mortal blow by an encounter with a crocodile of boys and girls equipped with shorts and walking-sticks, a bored guide at head, and tail, making a half-holiday excursion from the Jungfraujoch of what we had considered quite a climb. I felt uncommonly like Tartarin in the Alps.

I have spoken of the approach to the Bergli Hut, which must occupy the only horizontal spot for miles around. A twelve-hour stay there is not sufficient to overcome the sensation of astonishment at its existence, and even less of its continued survival, and it must be the devil and all of a place to get away from in bad weather. Its situation can be best appreciated in the early morning. As we stood that morning on the airy balcony, itself suspended over space, a tiny verdant patch of valley, 7,000 feet below, could be seen. On the left, this was cut off by the great frost-riven south wall of the Eiger, silent now, its avalanches not yet released from the grip of night. Above and all about us, the steep ice-fall of the Grindelwald glacier made a white and threatening chaos, innocent yet of the subaqueous hues which are born of the sun, still hidden behind the huge mass of the Schreckhorn which rose up in front, black, vertical, and forbidding. In the pale blue sky flew two flaming banners of cloud.

Somebody said it was time to move, and we picked a careful way down the glacier, before swinging into the long hot descent down the path that ended in the oven called Grindelwald, and so to a large dinner, soft beds, and trains for home.

It was a good time, yet we might have travelled from England only to see from Belalp the Mischabel peaks shine like a golden throne in the evening sky, to see the gold turned by the setting sun to rose colour and the last hues to drain away as the silver shadows crept upwards ; we might have gone only to see that, and come back content.