The making of a mountaineer

Some twenty-two years ago, on a dewy spring morning in October, I urged my panting pony towards a hill-top in the Australian bush, the better to spy out the whereabouts of a mob...

Comfortably seated in the depths of Bryn’s favourite and most somniferous chair, I browsed idly and half unthinkingly through the pages of a guide book that had found its way, a...

Grindelwald, the most popular of the climbing centres of the Bernese Oberland, is dominated by the Eiger and the Wetterhorn. The former is so close to the village that, owing to...

A glance at the map of the Bernese Oberland will show that a straight line drawn in a north-easterly direction from the Breithorn to the Eiger will pass through, or close to, th...

On reading the early annals of the Alpine Club, one cannot but be struck by the outstanding popularity of snow and ice-climbs and by the standard of efficiency reached in such c...

With the coming of the Christmas vacation of 1908, Max and I, in accordance with our well-established custom, returned to Grindelwald. Having in the preceding summer become more...

In later years we visited many other parts of the Alps on skis; but it was not until the Easter of 1914 that we returned to the great glaciers of the Oberland. On April 9, I boa...

Bad weather and unfavourable conditions had too often caused the postponement of several winter climbs, among them a long-planned ascent of the Tödi on skis. At length, towards...

Far to the north of the main chain of the Alps there lies a range of mountains crowned by the two outstanding summits of the Tödi and the Bifertenstock. The former, rising from...

Upon a bright summer’s morning in 1911, we[6] lay on the warm rocks of the Monte Moro, gazing spell-bound at the avalanche-swept slopes of the greatest precipice in the Alps--th...

When mountains reach an altitude of over 13,000 feet, one does not usually call them little. But the Twins, Castor and Pollux, are so overshadowed by their massive neighbours, t...

The throngs who swarm on the Matterhorn day after day in the summer, the airy contempt with which some climbers dismiss it as a climbing proposition, the fact that a clumsy novi...

Perhaps no other mountain in the Alps, or for that matter in the whole world, can make such an appeal to the eye as the Matterhorn. This appeal is not merely one of beauty and b...

One of the younger generation of mountain climbers once complained bitterly to me that there were no new climbs to be done in the Alps, the pioneers having, in his opinion, with...

Mont Blanc, 15,781 feet in height, the highest mountain in Europe, was almost the first of the great Alpine peaks to be climbed. On August 8, 1786, two Chamoniards, Dr. Paccard...

It is a curious fact that, to this day, the southern slopes of Mont Blanc rank amongst the least frequented districts of the Alps. Mr. James Eccles who, with Michel and Alphonse...

North-north-east of, and near to Mont Blanc, is a compact group of bold buttresses and ridges supporting a multitude of dark rock pinnacles whose slender spires seem close again...

After our border-line crossing of Mont Blanc, Max and I arrived at the Col du Géant on the evening of August 31, 1911. There we met a German climber armed with a letter of intro...

“To make a determined effort, with every available resource, to reach the summit” were the instructions with which the 1922 Mount Everest expedition left England. The personnel...

During my stay at the Base Camp my time was not really wasted. A study of Everest and of its meteorological conditions, photography, overhauling of equipment and experiments wit...

Not the least of the rewards of mountaineering are the memories of mountain comrades and adventures which cheer those of the true faith through the humdrum existence of ordinary...