Rosenlaui — and so to the Tatra

by P. A. Bell

WITH twelve weeks’ holiday, some excellent equipment and a large motor cycle I left London after my exams, at the end of July 1960 in high spirits. My Norton, my duvet and the size of the planned routes more than made up for lack of money. It was with utter contentment that I climbed into my sleeping bag in a ditch half way to Chamonix, realising as I settled down that I had averaged 58 m.p.h.

After the usual training climb on the Aiguille de I’M. (or to give it its geographical name, Aiguille des Petits Charmoz), news of an accident or two and no sign of a mountain through the mist, rain and snow, we decided to search elsewhere for better conditions. Terence Goodfellow, whom I had arranged to meet and climb with in Chamonix, wanted to go to Arolla to join up with the C.U.M.C. and with his father, B. R. Goodfellow, who was there too.

The year before we had climbed the West Arete of the Aiguille de la Tsa, which involves a long grind to the foot, a detour around this, and up by a stone-swept couloir to the start of the rock climb. The climb itself is excellent where it keeps to the ridge, but the final section is avoided by traversing on to the ordinary route.

We hoped to climb from the foot to the West Arete route and once on it to keep to it as far as the summit, thus avoiding the couloir where we had been very frightened by a vast stonefall last year. On arriving at the foot we thought the north face offered a much better route and so scrambled up the left flank to reach it. Here ice and snow covering everything on the slabs made climbing difficult and without security until we reached an overhanging wall. Below this we belayed to a piton and I used another to climb the overhanging crack up a slight corner on the right of the wall. I had tried to by-pass this wall on the left but after 120 feet with no sign of any alternative on extremely delicate holds I returned. We hauled the sacks up to the stance above the wall, Terence retrieved the pitons and we climbed on up over ice and snow to the right of the great gendarme to a small saddle level with the main one. Since it was by now 4 p.m. we had to abandon any further attempt to climb over the gendarme and quickly traversed around the south face to the start of the guide book route. This we climbed easily—though I tried and failed to climb one fine crack which could have saved time. At the point where one should traverse right across the face to the normal route we managed to go straight on up the ridge. It was rather harder than the rest of the climb, not so fine but worthwhile since one has the pleasure of the normal route in descent. At 6 p.m. we were on the summit and by 9.30 back in Arolla just after dark. The deep snow on the glacier and a sixteen hour day made us very tired and it was with relief that we sat down to a drink in the Mont Collon Hotel bar.

B.R. Goodfellow gave us excellent advice, as always, both about the weather and where to go to avoid it. Since we had little other interest in Arolla we moved off to the Engelhorner Group; limestone mountains, like small Dolomites, between Grindelwald and Meiringen. We arrived after a gripping ride over the Grimsel Pass in pouring rain and it was dark as we slid off the machine and squelched into the only big building in Rosenlaui to order a strong drink. We must have looked miserable for they took us for Germans, whom we all seem to reckon are hard men. They were vastly amused when, still dripping, we took ourselves off to a woodshed we had found.

In the morning we set off with a newly made friend who knew the area, to climb the West Buttress of the Rosenlaui-stock, easy but great fun, for the exposure and the fabulous flora of the limestone make a perfect setting. The weather here did not worry us, though over the Gross Scheidegg it must have barred most climbs in Grindelwald. We returned delighted to a hay loft, price 1 franc, with all our gloom and despondency forgotten.

Mr. Arnold Gladdhart, who runs the Swiss school of climbing at Rosenlaui, is a prudent and invaluable source of advice; he recommended the climbs we were to do. He has done his best to avoid the mountains becoming cluttered with ironmongery by placing large fixed rings at the numerous and inevitable abseil points in the range. Following his advice we traversed the Similistocks, abseiling from the Grosser. It was hardly very difficult but again great fun. Having abseiled down the famous Macdonald’s Kamine, which B. R. Goodfellow had told us about, we decided we would reclimb it.

Broken into three pitches by abseil rings, the chimney starts as a thin black crack in a corner, like Cenotaph Corner, having a slight overhang before it widens and flattens into the first stance. The second pitch is rather like “The Crevice” (also in Wales), a safe but strenuous fight, it widens into the third pitch which is also delightful to climb. Macdonald first climbed this (I believe before f 900) in hobnailed boots, had a quarrel with his guides at the summit and threw the rope to the bottom—whereupon they all climbed down it solo. This does not, however, mean it is easy.

Neither Macdonald, nor anyone else it appears, had climbed the first pitch, but we knew nothing of this and so, seeing it was going to be hard, we used the abseil rope as a top rope, the second holding the other half. It is harder than Cenotaph Corner in Wales but the normal route avoids the obvious crack by an easy climb on the right.

On returning to the col we witnessed an extraordinary spectacle, the sun shining weakly through the mist above us cast a shadow on to the mist below us. Around the head of the shadow was a circular rainbow; the whole effect was remarkably eerie due to the variable densities of mist above and below us, causing the halo to advance and recede continually.

The complete traverse of the Mittelgruppe along a wonderful knife ridge with gendarmes slender enough to tremble and with Dolomite-like exposure made an excellent day.

Each day climbing from Rosenlaui we had passed the Engelhornerhutte which we now decided to inhabit so as to make longer routes possible. Our first climb from here was the Vorderspitz West Buttress, a fine exposed buttress of one of the Mittelgruppe peaks. The climb was tremendously exhilarating, on sun-warmed rock of severe standard. Some pitches of very severe had pitons in, most of which, being unsafe or unnecessary, we removed, leaving only those which gave security with justification. Many of these useless pegs looked home-made, were rusty and annoying.

Finally we had intended to climb the Nordwand of the Kingspitz, supposedly harder and more artificial, but the weather hardly justified a major undertaking, so we drove off to another of those backwaters well-known and loved by the Swiss but almost unknown to the British, the Gelmerhorner. After a night in a hydroelectric workers’ shed we reached the Gelmerhiitte very near the Grimsel Pass, to find it occupied mainly by the Swiss Army. They were great fun and did all the cooking although they did insist on keeping the hut terribly hot. Next day they set off on a 25 mile route march across glaciers while we left in dense cloud to traverse the Gelmerspitze—all seven of them. After passing various peaks we climbed down a gully and to this day do not know whether we climbed one of the Gelmerhorner or one of the Gelmer-spitze. The cloud made distinction impossible and certainly in these conditions it was no fun.

Terence then set off for Greece and I for Czechoslovakia where I was to meet David Fagan, a friend I had made a week before leaving England, in a train returning from Harrison’s Rocks. On that short journey we had decided to meet in Prague and to climb with some of his Czech friends in the High Tatra. All arrangements were remarkably successful, considering we only had a few days in which to make them, mostly by telephone, before I left.

I had arranged for my visa to be sent to Bern when it was ready. Having at last taken possession of it I motorcycled straight to Salzburg where, having failed to find a seat in the music festival concert, I had an excellent dinner and then an equally good night in a barn full of old carts. Next day I reached Prague, being directed for the last 100 miles by a peasant boy who had in fact only wanted to go five miles. However, the intense pleasure of overtaking absolutely everything was too much for him so he came all the way to Prague with me. He was not in the least worried about how he was going to get back, though he might well have been, for hitchhiking must be virtually impossible, the only cars being for the use of V.I.P’s.

I met Fagan at the Tourist Office and we had soon arranged to climb in the sandstone area near the East German border, for his friends could not come to the Tatra, where we would go by ourselves later. This turned out to be another paradise, as was Prague, but this was of an outcrop nature. We stayed in a hut five minutes from the sandstone columns and walls, next to a workers’ holiday camp. The rocks were up to 200 feet high, completely vertical, with routes as hard as at Harrison’s Rocks. Again we found fixed rings for belaying— an excellent idea avoiding the use of pitons, which would soon ruin the soft rock, apart from not being safe. To make a new route here one had to climb and try to belay naturally while one drilled a deep hole to take a ringed stake, then repeat the process to the summit. Sitting in slings from the ring, the second belayed the leader who would fall free, the safest way to fall after the first, and consequently the most dangerous pitch. We climbed several of these routes, after each of which we abseiled to the bottom and raced to the workers’ beer house to drink their 12 per cent, lager Pilsener at 6d. a pint. The sun being incredibly hot we climbed only in jeans and Pierre Allaine boots for the three days we stayed. We then returned to Prague and were soon on our way by train, since this was so cheap, to the Tatra in Eastern Slovakia.

In intense heat, with equipment for a week, we toiled up to the Terrihutte, where we were welcomed by the climbers and the guardian, who already knew David Fagan from the year before. The evening was spent in contest with the climbers for, as British, we had to compete—we climbed everything that they did, but not more. Unfortunately during this contest, while trying to run up, without hands, a 20 ft. slab I turned my ankle, which was to stop me climbing next day. David climbed with the others a north west face, which I can only say looked desperate, arriving back at dusk.

Once again the weather turned bad and it snowed on all the mountains, so we did little, but on one day we went off together to climb the east face of some mountain—all names are impossible though I gathered from David that they are all much the same in character as Ben Nevis. We climbed our own route—for we certainly missed the guidebook one—which was extremely difficult in places. At one point an overhanging corner followed by a tricky traverse nearly made us retreat, but eventually it went. After this the difficulties eased and we reached the top, having had some lovely climbing. I believe David wrote this up in the log book of the hut and it seems to be a new route though, we admit, by mistake. As always this summer our big ideas were shattered by the weather, so Hokeika, a really worthwhile looking route, will have to wait.

Certainly Czechoslovakia was well worth visiting, for the people and the way of life are so unlike anything we are led to believe by the press that climbing there was every bit as worthwhile as at any time in the Alps.

The journey home was no anticlimax. The first night I slept in the famous Vienna woods, the second in a Munich petrol station out of the rain and after a few days in Switzerland drove from Geneva to Brussels at an average speed of 64 m.p.h.