MONTE ROSA AND THE BÜNDNER OBERLAND
The conquest of Mont Blanc was the most important mountaineering
achievement of the period; but good work was also being done in other
parts of the Alps. Monte Rosa, as we soon shall see, had already
attracted the adventurous, and the Bündner Oberland gave one great name
to the story of Alpine adventure. We have already noted the important
part played by priests in the conquest of the Alps; and Catholic
mountaineers may well honour the memory of Placidus à Spescha as one of
the greatest of the climbing priesthood.
Father Placidus was born in 1782 at Truns. As a boy he joined the
Friars of Disentis, and after completing his education at Einsiedeln,
where he made good use of an excellent library, returned again to
Disentis. As a small boy, he had tended his father’s flocks and
acquired a passionate love for the mountains of his native valley. As a
monk, he resumed the hill wanderings, which he continued almost to the
close of a long life.
He was an unfortunate man. The French Revolution made itself felt in
Graubünden; and with the destruction of the monastery all his notes
and manuscripts were burned. When the Austrians ousted the French, he
was even more luckless; as a result of a sermon on the text “Put not
your trust in princes” he was imprisoned in Innsbruck for eighteen
months. He came back only to be persecuted afresh. Throughout his
life, his wide learning and tolerant outlook invited the suspicion of
the envious and narrow-minded; and on his return to Graubünden he was
accused of heresy. His books and his manuscripts were confiscated,
and he was forbidden to climb. After a succession of troubled years,
he returned to Truns; and though he had passed his seventieth year he
still continued to climb. As late as 1824, he made two attempts on the
Tödi. On his last attempt, he reached a gap, now known as the Porta
da Spescha, less than a thousand feet below the summit; and from this
point he watched, with mixed feelings, the two chamois hunters he had
sent forward reach the summit. He died at the age of eighty-two. One
wishes that he had attained in person his great ambition, the conquest
of the Tödi; but, even though he failed on this outstanding peak,
he had several good performances to his credit, amongst others the
first ascent of the Stockgron (11,411 feet) in 1788, the Rheinwaldhorn
(11,148 feet) in 1789, the Piz Urlaun (11,063 feet) in 1793, and
numerous other important climbs.
His list of ascents is long, and proves a constant devotion to the
hills amongst which he passed the happiest hours of an unhappy life.
“Placidus à Spescha”--there was little placid in his life save the
cheerful resignation with which he faced the buffetings of fortune.
He was a learned and broad-minded man; and the mountains, with their
quiet sanity, seem to have helped him to bear constant vexation caused
by small-minded persons. These suspicions of heresy must have proved
very wearisome to “the mountaineer who missed his way and strayed into
the Priesthood.” He must have felt that his opponents were, perhaps,
justified, that the mountains had given him an interpretation of his
beliefs that was, perhaps, wider than the creed of Rome, and that he
himself had found a saner outlook in those temples of a larger faith
to which he lifted up his eyes for help. As a relief from a hostile
and unsympathetic atmosphere, let us hope that he discovered some
restful anodyne among the tranquil broadness of the upper snows. The
fatigue and difficulties of long mountain tramps exhaust the mind,
to the exclusion of those little cares which seem so great in the
artificial life of the valley. Certainly, the serene indifference of
the hills found a response in the quiet philosophy of his life. Very
little remains of all that he must have written, very little--only
a few words, in which he summed up the convictions which life had
given him. “When I carefully consider the fortune and ill-fortune
that have befallen me, I have difficulty in determining which of the
two has been the more profitable since a man without trials is a man
without experience, and such a one is without insight--_vexatio dat
intellectum_.” A brave confession of a good faith, and in his case no
vain utterance, but the sincere summary of a philosophy which coloured
his whole outlook on life.
The early history of Monte Rosa has an appeal even stronger than the
story of Mont Blanc. It begins with the Renaissance. From the hills
around Milan, Leonardo da Vinci had seen the faint flush of dawn on
Monte Rosa beyond--
A thousand shadowy pencilled valleys
And snowy dells in a golden air.
The elusive vision had provoked his restless, untiring spirit to search
out the secrets of Monte Rosa. The results of that expedition have
already been noticed.
After Da Vinci there is a long gap. Scheuchzer had heard of Monte
Rosa, but contents himself with the illuminating remark that “a stiff
accumulation of perpetual ice is attached to it.” De Saussure visited
Macunagna in 1789, but disliked the inhabitants and complained of their
inhospitality. He passed on, after climbing an unimportant snow peak,
the Pizzo Bianco (10,552 feet). His story is chiefly interesting for
an allusion to one of the finest of the early Alpine expeditions. In
recent years, a manuscript containing a detailed account of this climb
has come to light, and supplements the vague story which De Saussure
had heard.
Long ago, in the Italian valleys of Monte Rosa, there was a legend of
a happy valley, hidden away between the glaciers of the great chain.
In this secret and magic vale, the flowers bloomed even in winter, and
the chamois found grazing when less happy pastures were buried by the
snow. So ran the tale, which the mothers of Alagna and Gressoney told
to their children. The discovery of the happy valley was due to Jean
Joseph Beck. Beck was a domestic servant with the soul of a pioneer,
and the organising talent that makes for success. He had heard a rumour
that a few men from Alagna had determined to find the valley. Beck was
a Gressoney man; and he determined that Gressoney should have the
honour of the discovery. Again and again, in Alpine history, we find
this rivalry between adjoining valleys acting as an incentive of great
ascents. Beck collected a large party, including “a man of learning,”
by name Finzens (Vincent). With due secrecy, they set out on a Sunday
of August 1788.
They started from their sleeping places at midnight, and roped
carefully. They had furnished themselves with climbing irons and
alpenstocks. They suffered from mountain sickness and loss of appetite,
but pluckily determined to proceed. At the head of the glacier, they
“encountered a slope of rock devoid of snow,” which they climbed. “It
was twelve o’clock. Hardly had we got to the summit of the rock than we
saw a grand--an amazing--spectacle. We sat down to contemplate at our
leisure the lost valley, which seemed to us to be entirely covered with
glaciers. We examined it carefully, but could not satisfy ourselves
that it was the unknown valley, seeing that none of us had ever been in
the Vallais.” The valley, in fact, was none other than the valley of
Zermatt, and the pass, which these early explorers had reached, was the
Lysjoch, where, to this day, the rock on which they rested bears the
appropriate name that they gave it, “The Rock of Discovery.” Beck’s
party thus reached a height of 14,000 feet, a record till Balmat beat
them on Mont Blanc.
The whole story is alive with the undying romance that still haunts the
skyline whose secrets we know too well. The Siegfried map has driven
the happy valley further afield. In other ranges, still uncharted,
we must search for the reward of those that cross the great divides
between the known and the unknown, and gaze down from the portals of
a virgin pass on to glaciers no man has trodden, and valleys that no
stranger has seen. And yet, for the true mountaineer every pass is a
discovery, and the happy valley beyond the hills still lives as the
embodiment of the child’s dream. All exploration, it is said, is due to
the two primitive instincts of childhood, the desire to look over the
edge, and the desire to look round the corner. And so we can share the
thrill that drove that little band up to the Rock of Discovery. We know
that, through the long upward toiling, their eyes must ever have been
fixed on the curve of the pass, slung between the guarding hills, the
skyline which held the great secret they hoped to solve. We can realise
the last moments of breathless suspense as their shoulders were thrust
above the dividing wall, and the ground fell away from their feet to
the valley of desire. In a sense, we all have known moments such as
this; we have felt the “intense desire to see if the Happy Valley may
not lie just round the corner.”
Twenty-three years after this memorable expedition, Monte Rosa was the
scene of one of the most daring first ascents in Alpine history. Dr.
Pietro Giordani of Alagna made a solitary ascent of the virgin summit
which still bears his name. The Punta Giordani is one of the minor
summits of the Monte Rosa chain, and rises to the respectable height of
13,304 feet. Giordani’s ascent is another proof, if proof were needed,
that the early climbers were, in many ways, as adventurous as the
modern mountaineer. We find Balmat making a series of solitary attempts
on Mont Blanc, and cheerfully sleeping out, alone, on the higher
snowfields. Giordani climbs, without companions, a virgin peak; and
another early hero of Monte Rosa, of whom we shall speak in due course,
spent a night in a cleft of ice, at a height of 14,000 feet. Giordani,
by the way, indited a letter to a friend from the summit of his peak.
He begins by remarking that a sloping piece of granite serves him for
a table, a block of blue ice for a seat. After an eloquent description
of the view, he expresses his annoyance at the lack of scientific
instruments, and the lateness of the hour which alone prevented him--as
he believed--from ascending Monte Rosa itself.
Giordani’s ascent closes the early history of Monte Rosa; but we cannot
leave Monte Rosa without mention of some of the men who played an
important part in its conquest. Monte Rosa, it should be explained, is
not a single peak, but a cluster of ten summits of which the Dufour
Spitze is the highest point (15,217 feet). Of these, the Punta Giordani
was the first, and the Dufour Spitze the last, to be climbed. In 1817,
Dr. Parrott made the first ascent of the Parrott Spitze (12,643 feet);
and two years later the Vincent Pyramid (13,829) was climbed by a son
of that Vincent who had been taken on Beck’s expedition because he was
“a man of learning.” Dr. Parrott, it might be remarked in passing, was
the first man to reach the summit of Ararat, as Noah cannot be credited
with having reached a higher point than the gap between the greater and
the lesser Ararat.
But of all the names associated with pioneer work on Monte Rosa that
of Zumstein is the greatest. He made five attempts to reach the
highest point of the group, and succeeded in climbing the Zumstein
Spitze (15,004 feet) which still bears his name. He had numerous
adventures on Monte Rosa, and as we have already seen, spent one night
in a crevasse, at a height of 14,000 feet. He became quite a local
celebrity, and is mentioned as such by Prof. Forbes and Mr. King in
their respective books. His great ascent of the Zumstein Spitze was
made in 1820, thirty-five years before the conquest of the highest
point of Monte Rosa.