“Some courageous hunter might attempt this route”

Translation: a short walk on the Mer de Glace (Glacier des Bois) during the Little Ice Age, as described by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 

As I said above, on July 15 we came up to stay at the Montenvers, so that we could leave at dawn the next day and venture down into the valley of ice. But where can you lay your head at the Montenvers? We slept in a château, for this is what the Chamoniards, a cheerful and mocking folk, ironically call the shabby refuge of the shepherd who guards the flocks on this alp. 

A view of the Montanvers by Carl Ludwig Hackert, c. 1781
Image by courtesy of Wikipedia

A large block of granite, carried there formerly by the glacier or by some more ancient turmoil, sits on one of its faces while another slopes up at an acute angle to the ground, thus leaving an empty space beneath it. The ingenious shepherd has sheltered himself from the circling winds by taking the projecting face of this block for the roof and ceiling of his castle, and the earth for his floor, and then walling this shelter round with dry stones. Leaving in the topmost part an open space, he has placed a doorway some forty inches high and sixteen wide. As for the windows, he has no need of them nor of a chimney; the daylight enters and the smoke seeps out through the gaps between the stones of the wall.

This is the interior of the Montenvers shepherd’s dwelling; this angular space between the granite block, and the earth and the wall forming his kitchen, bedroom, cellar and dairy, in sum all of what he calls his home. And he was kind enough to give it up to us for the night, which he himself spent with our guides in the open air around a fire that they kept going in the upper tracts of the forest. For ourselves, we strewed over the somewhat uneven floor of the castle a bale of straw that we’d brought up, yet we slept there better than one often sleeps in suites where art and luxury have exhausted all their resources. The next day, a little before daybreak, our guides came to awaken us: I was then fast asleep, and the light shining into us from behind them lit up the granite block under which we were lying so singularly that I was for some moments unable to understand where I was and what I saw.

The Glacier des Bois and source of the Arveyon
By Jean-Anthoine Linck (via Wikipedia)

We set out at daybreak, and began by skirting the glacier, following a path fairly high above it. At first, this path is safe and easy; but a quarter of a league from the Montenvers it loses itself on the steep slope created by the slanting planes of veined granite slabs. On the two previous occasions that I had passed there, I found footing only on a few rugosities or dimples in the rock, and if one of us had slipped, he would have fallen a goodly distance onto the glacier below. But in 1778, as soon as I arrived in Chamonix, I sent two men there, who, during our trip to Buet set off some blasting charges in the rock and made this passage, if not exactly easy, at least rather less dangerous. Those who follow in our footsteps to visit the glacier will be obliged to us for having facilitated their access.

There are two passages like this, one after the other, which are known as Les Ponts. Having got by them, we went down to the glacier’s edge and for a while followed its moraine, as the rock and gravel that borders a glacier are known. We went past a freshet that springs from the rock in a natural alcove; its water is of an admirable freshness and limpidity, and hosts some beautiful Ranunculus glacialis, which grow in large clumps in a rock cleft, carpeting the whole alcove. At this point, we thought we’d try walking on the glacier, but it was still too jumbled, because its bed is still too steep here. As mentioned above, when discussing glaciers in general, they are only practicable where they are more or less level and not disrupted by the slope angle or an uneven bed.

The glacier eventually became more tractable, and we returned to it an hour and a half after leaving the Montenvers. Here, however, we faced a new difficulty. It had rained the day before, and the drops had frozen as they fell onto the glacier, forming an extremely slippery ice on its surface, which is usually rough. So we put on crampons so that we could keep our footing and step up our pace. Here and there we found crevasses that were a little too wide to cross, or slopes that were too steep to cross above these abysses; but we nevertheless kept heading east-south-east across and up the glacier. On the way, we remarked how large accumulations of hail had filled up hollows in the ice.

After a good half hour of walking on the glacier, we crossed an ice ridge heaped with earth, sand and rock debris. The ice under these ridges rises much higher than in the gaps between them because the accumulated debris keeps the sun off the ice, preventing it from melting or evaporating. Ten minutes later we crossed a second ridge higher than the first, and we judged that the ice was twenty or twenty-five feet higher under this debris than where the air and the rays of the sun could act freely upon it. We came up to a third ridge twenty minutes from the second, and the fourth, the final one, was close by.

Here we found ourselves at the point where the Glacier des Bois forks into two streams, as mentioned above, of which the one veering to the right, towards Mont Blanc, is known as the Glacier du Tacul. The other, leftward, stream is the Glacier de Léchaud. It would undoubtedly be more interesting to follow the right-hand fork, thus heading for Mont Blanc. As they looked to us, its snow and ice fields seemed to be by no means unscaleable, but appearances are deceptive. Glaciers seamed with deep crevasses masked here and there by thin layers of snow defend the approaches to this formidable mountain, although perhaps in a year with heavy snowfall, and by choosing a season when the snow is still firm, some skilful and courageous hunter might attempt this route. But, as matters stood then, an attempt would have been completely impossible for us, and so we followed the valley’s left-hand After two hours walking on the Glacier des Bois, we left it at the bottom of the Talèfre, which is where the latter glacier pours its ice into the Glacier des Bois, which is known here as the Léchaud glacier. 

References

Translated from Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes, édité et présenté par Julie Boch, Genève, Georg éditeur, 2002

“Worthy of any traveller’s attention”

Translation: how a glacier of Chamonix looked in the Little Ice Age, as described by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure

The Arveiron is a powerful torrent that issues from the lower end of the Glacier des Bois through a great arch of ice, which the local people call the Arveiron’s “embouchure” or mouth, although this is actually its source, or at least the first place where it comes out into the open air. One can get there, as I have said, directly by descending from Montenvers; but this is a path so steep and strenuous that I can hardly recommend it. From the Prieuré, by contrast, there is a charming walk of an hour or one could even take a carriage, all on the flat, across beautiful meadows and through a splendid forest.

Source of the Arveiron: print made by Sigismond Himely, 1820s
From the British Museum collection

The Arveiron’s source is worthy of any traveller’s attention. It is a deep cavern, with the entrance formed by a vault of ice more than a hundred feet high, and of proportionate width. Carved as if by the hand of nature, the cavern opens amid an enormous mass of ice, which shines opaquely and white as snow here, or a translucent aquamarine there, just as the light may play on it. From the bottom of this cavern, a river surges out, foaming white and, ever and again, tumbling in its waves large floes of ice.

Raising your eyes above this vault, you see an immense glacier, crowned by pyramids of ice, amid which the obelisk of the Dru thrusts upwards, its summit lost in the clouds. Finally, this whole picture is framed by the beautiful woods of the Montenvers and the Aiguille du Bochard, these forests running upwards alongside the glacier as far as its highest reaches, which merge into the sky.

The place where one enjoys this spectacle is extremely wild; since the ice has greatly diminished, there remain only piles of sand and blocks deposited by the glacier; one sees no verdure. But seven or eight years ago, when the glacier came down much lower, the ice cavern was situated next to a larch wood floored with a beautiful white sand sprinkled with clumps of the beautiful red blooms of the epilobium, the starry flowers of Sempervivum arachnoideum, and those of the Saxifraga autumnalis.

Source of the Arveyron: watercolour by Samuel Grundman, 1826
By courtesy of Chamonix City Office

I have sometimes been inquisitive enough to enter this cave, and indeed one can go quite far inside when it is wide enough and the Arveiron does not fill it up; but this is always a temerity, as the vault often drops large fragments. When we went to visit it in 1778, we noticed in the arch which formed the entrance to the vault a large, almost horizontal fissure, cut at its ends by vertical cracks. It was easy enough to see how this whole piece would soon come adrift and, indeed, a report like a thunderclap was heard that very night. This piece, forming the vault’s keystone, had collapsed, dragging down the whole outer part of the arch. The ice mass had then blocked the course of the Arveiron for some moments. Pooling up in the bottom of the cavern, the waters then burst abruptly through the dam, violently sweeping away all these great blocks of ice, smashing them to pieces against the rocks that stud the torrent’s bed and carrying the fragments far and wide. The next day, with a sort of horror, we saw how large slabs of this ice covered the place where we had stood the day before.

Interior of the ice cave at the source of the Arveiron
By Samuel Grundmann and J-P Lamy
Alpine Museum of Chamonix-Mont Blanc

So this is how the vault collapses and how it renews itself. In winter, it hardly exists; the shrunken Arveiron creeps out from under the ice, which slopes down to ground level, and it is only when the growing warmth of spring swells the waters of this torrent and melts away some of the ice that the rivers starts gnawing at the icy walls that resist its passage, and then those in the middle, no longer supported, collapse into the stream, which carries them along, successively breaking away more and more fragments until the upper part of the ice takes the form of a vault whose blocks hold each other up. This vault changes from day to day; sometimes it collapses entirely, but soon a new one is formed.

It may be asked why this glacier is the only one that ends in such a large and beautiful ice arch. This is because it is the only one, at least to my knowledge, which has ice of such great depth and consistency at its lower end, and which terminates on horizontal ground, and from which emerges such a considerable torrent, as all these conditions must be fulfilled in order to produce a beautiful arch. If the glacier ends on a steep slope, as they very often do, the slightest movement of the glacier causes the ice blocks to tumble down, giving an arch no time to form. Then, if only a little water issues from the glacier, the arch is necessarily narrow and low in proportion, because it is the breadth of the torrent which determines that of the arch, and thus its height. And if, finally, the ice is thin or fragile, no arch can be either sizeable or stable.

Moreover, this vault of ice is not always so impressive or vast, nor does it remain always in the same place. This is because the glacier sometimes advances into the valley, and at other times retreats. The granite blocks it has deposited show that it once descended much lower on this slope than it does today.

References

Translated from Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes, édité et présenté par Julie Boch, Genève, Georg éditeur, 2002

Saving our salamanders

A heartwarming story in the Guardian describes how a Brit is building ramps for giant salamanders near Daisen, one of Japan's Hundred Mountains. And a longer article along the same lines appeared in the Japan Times just today. It seems that the new ramps will help the beleaguered amphibians to overcome the man-made dams which are destroying their habitat.

For beleaguered they certainly are, these giant salamanders (Andrias japonicus). Last year, says the Guardian, an international conservation body changed their status from “near threatened” to “vulnerable”. And they have long been under pressure, as a glance at Walter Weston’s Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps reveals. Here is a vignette from the mountaineering missionary’s ascent of Jōnen-dake in 1894:

At 3 P.M. we reached the first snow, at a height of 7,200 feet, at a spot where, in a gloomy ravine, dark cliffs rose steep and forbidding on either hand. No sooner was the word to halt here given, than at once our hunters threw down their packs and fell to prodding about with their sticks in the boles and crannies of the broken rocks in a state of wild excitement. They told us they were searching for a particular sort of lizard called san-shō-no-uwo, which this stream produced to perfection.

 When caught, skewered on long sticks, and dried, it is highly esteemed as a cure for various diseases of children. In China it is also much valued in the native pharmacopeia, and goes by the name of the "stony son of a dragon". In an advertisement drawing attention to its uses in a native Shanghai newspaper some time ago, it was stated that the medicine made from it was "not only unusually effective against the plague, but it is also infallible against different kinds of cholera, typhus and typhoid fevers, ague, diphtheria, liver and stomach aches, vomiting, diarrhoea, colic, apoplexy, sunstroke, asphyxia, tetanus in children, surfeiting, small-pox, malaria, all sorts of tumours, and inflammatory poisons, &c."

Presumably Weston's hunters were looking for the small variety of mountain salamander - incidentally, these are still occasionally served up in remote mountain villages, skewered on long sticks and baked in honey glaze. Delicious, you know. As for their larger cousins, Weston seems to know of these only by hearsay:

Chief of all reptiles of this class, however, is the Giant Salamander (Cryptobronchus Japonicus), found chiefly on the west or south-west spurs of this range (as well as in some other parts between 34° and 36° N. lat.). It appears to chiefly prefer the clear mountain streams of granite and schist ranges at a height of 2,000 to 4,000 feet above the sea. It feeds chiefly upon trout (in which those streams abound) and upon the larvae of insects and the smaller batrachians. Its flesh is valued chiefly for its medicinal uses and for keeping the water clean in wells. The largest specimens, five feet long or so, are brought to the principal cities, where they are found as curiosities in the naturalists' shops. 

Whilst near relatives are found in China and in North America, its closest kinsman of all is the one whose remains were found by Scheuchzer at Oeningen. Owing, however, to its weak reproduction and limited distribution, it will soon follow its departed cousin, that homo diluvia testis, and at no distant date will cease to form part of the living fauna of Japan.

Let's hope that Weston's gloomy prognosis is unfounded. Alas, it's not just the giant salamanders that we have to worry about. The header photo in this post is borrowed from Natural Monuments of Japan, an opulent volume published by Kodansha in 1995. Giant salamanders are in there because they have "special natural monument" status. 

The book’s yokozuna-like heft testifies to the extraordinary variety of flora and fauna that makes Japan a so-called biodiversity hotspot. The question, though, is whether this volume would be equally weighty if Kodansha were to bring out an updated edition in 2095? We hope that both the venerable publishing house and the giant salamanders will still be around then.

References

M Kato, M Numata, K Watanabe and M Hata (eds), Natural Monuments of Japan, Kodansha, Tokyo (in Japanese), 1995．八幡野八幡宮・来宮神社社叢．加藤陸奥雄，沼田眞，渡部景隆，畑正憲（編）日本の天然記念物, 講談社，東京．

W Weston, Mountaineering and Exploration in the Japanese Alps, J Murray, London, 1896.

Postscript

The idea of ramps for giant salamanders put Project Hyakumeizan in mind of a marvel closer to home: the famous cat ladders of Bern, Switzerland. Another ingenious solution for our animal friends....

Greenland, now and then

A Swiss museum commemorates the original lean, light and fast arctic expedition

In the summer of 1912, a Swiss expedition traversed the central Greenland ice sheet, bringing back a trove of scientific and geographical findings. Nobody died, fell in a crevasse or succumbed to frostbite. So how did they prosper, when so many other polar expeditions of the time came to grief?

Somewhere in Greenland, in the summer of 1912

Some pointers towards an answer can be picked up at the Greenland 1912 exhibition at the Forum of Swiss History – located in the town and canton of Schwyz, this is an offshoot of Switzerland’s National Museum. Quite a few of of the exhibits testify to the thoroughness of the expedition’s planning and preparation.

There’s a message even in the magnificent diorama – part of the expedition’s rich legacy of colour images – that stands at the entrance. This shows a Danish ship, the Hans Egede, icebound on Greenland’s west coast (below). 

The Hans Egede at Umanak, 1909

The expeditioners travelled to Greenland on this scheduled steamer by necessity. With a budget of 30,000 Swiss francs, they couldn’t stretch to chartering their own vessel, except for the final leg of their sea approach.

The expedition's cost estimate: not much change from SFr 30,000

Nor could they afford to overwinter in Greenland. Besides, the expedition leader, the meteorologist Alfred de Quervain, had to get back to his job in the autumn. So speed wasn’t just safety – it was enforced by the expedition’s finances. 

In a single summer month, the four members of the so-called eastern party crossed the ice sheet from west to east, driving their dog-drawn sledges some 640 kilometres. This was the original lean, light and fast polar expedition.

A theodolite, as used for tracking weather balloons

Meanwhile, a “western party” of three other scientists stayed on the west coast to study glaciers and the high-altitude winds, tracking pilot balloons through a theodolite like the one exhibited here. Their findings overturned a then-popular theory of stable wind circulation around the Arctic.

Glacier landscape photographed by the 1912 expedition

On the wet Sunday morning when Project Hyakumeizan took in the exhibition, it was introduced by Matthias Huss. Nobody could be better qualified for the task. As the moving spirit of GLAMOS, the project for Glacier Monitoring in Switzerland, Huss stands in a direct line of scholarly descent from de Quervain.

Like de Quervain, Huss has made his own scientific expeditions – by camel once to inspect a remote glacier in China. And among the Swiss glaciers that he monitors is the Claridenfirn, a medium-sized iceflow in the Glarus Alps that de Quervain started surveying in 1914. During last year’s torrid summer, Huss had to make an unscheduled visit there in order to replace measuring poles that had melted out.

Swiss glaciers lost about 6% of their ice in 2022, Huss reported. At this rate, only remnants will be left at the end of the century, depriving the surrounding regions of their summer water supply. The good news, if any, is that sea levels won’t be much affected by the loss of ice cover in the Alps and all other mountain ranges together. Greenland, though, is different – when its ice sheet melts, the oceans will rise by about seven metres.

The effects of this melting are already dramatically apparent. When a descendant of one of the 1912 expeditioners attempted to follow his grandfather’s track - almost exactly a century later - a GPS reading close to the edge of the ice sheet suggested that his party stood 130 metres lower than their predecessors had been. In the end, the grandson's expedition had to turn back when their sledge started breaking up on the rough ice.

Alfred de Quervain's diary entries for 1-2 May 1912

Fortunately, the 1912 expedition used all available technologies to record what they saw: diaries, sketches, black-and-white glass slides, colour plates and even short clips of cinefilm, as displayed and replayed at the exhibition. Yet even at the time, de Quervain sensed the limits of these social media. Apropos a spectacular sunset seen from the deck of the Hans Egede in 1912, he wrote:

We felt at the time that this gigantic experience was inalienably ours. Prattle about it, promote it as we will, we can convey to others but a feeble gleam, and the fire remains ours alone. The real experience cannot be recreated, here or elsewhere.

These words carry even more force today. For nobody will ever again see the glaciers of Greenland as they revealed themselves to the 1912 explorers  –  the real experience cannot be recreated, here or elsewhere. But, like fragments of a distant memory, this exhibition’s photos and memorabilia hint at how those experiences might have been.

The Greenland 1912 exhibition runs until 12 March 2023 at the Swiss National Museum's Forum of Swiss History, Zeughausstrasse 5, 6430 Schwyz, Switzerland

References

Alfred de Quervain, Across Greenland's Ice Cap: The Remarkable Swiss Scientific Expedition of 1912, with an introduction by Martin Hood, Andreas Vieli and Martin Lüthi, McGill-Queen's University Press, May 2022

Christoph Haemmig, Matthias Huss, Hansrudolf Keusen, Josef Hess, Urs Wegmüller, Zhigang Ao, Wubuli Kulubayi, “Hazard assessment of glacial lake outburst floods from Kyagar glacier, Karakoram mountains, China”, Annals of Glaciology, vol 55, no 66, 2014

Postscript about polar bears

Relentlessly, as if it were still alive, the same stuffed polar bear has stalked into both iterations of the Greenland 1912 exhibition, the one now showing in Schwyz and its predecessor at the Swiss National Museum in 2020. For the record, during the actual 1912 expedition, no polar bears were harmed or even encountered. Yet, as August Stolberg, a member of the 1912 western party, observed: “people who come back from arctic trips should always be able to tell tall tales about their battles with polar bears!” So perhaps this musty beast does belong in the exhibition after all.

Celebrating the alpine savants

An exhibition in Geneva delves into the scientific roots of modern mountaineering – and yields insights into how science gets done

If you want to get to know somebody well, it’s best to visit them at home. And if that somebody is Horace-Bénédict de Saussure (1740–1799), who instigated the first ascent of Mt Blanc, the best place to start is probably the Musée d'histoire des sciences in his home city of Geneva. As the holder of many of de Saussure’s papers and memorabilia, the museum is currently using these to mount an exhibition on La montagne, laboratoire des savants.

De Saussure's party scales Mt Blanc in August 1787

Taking up the entire top floor of the museum’s repurposed villa, the exhibition all but brings de Saussure back to life. 

What the well-dressed alpinist wore in 1787

Visitors are received first by his frock coat and hobnailed shoes – there wasn’t much in the way of crampons in those days – and then by his devoted wife Albertine, ably re-enacted in a video display. While she reads out their correspondence, a light beam traces out her husband’s journeys of geognostic discovery on a relief map of the Alps in front of her.

This son et lumière notwithstanding, Horace-Bénédict isn’t allowed to hog the show. As promised in the exhibition’s title, savants are celebrated in the plural. Some were de Saussure’s predecessors: a display of antiquarian books includes those of alpine pioneers in German-speaking Switzerland such as Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672-1733), who famously documented the dragons of the Alps.

Strange encounter near Sargans by courtesy of Scheuchzer

For de Saussure, the most formative of these Swiss influencers were probably Gottlieb Sigmund Gruner (1717-1778), whose multivolume work on Die Eisgebirge des Schweizerlandes moved him to learn German, and Albrecht von Haller (1708-1777), celebrated throughout Europe for his lengthy poem on the Alps.

A glacier as seen by Gottlieb Sigmund Gruner

But it was more for Haller's botanical expertise that de Saussure looked to him. When the younger man visited Chamonix for the first time – this was in 1760 – his main aim was to collect plant specimens for Haller. But the magnificent views sparked de Saussure’s interest in finding a way to the top of Europe’s highest mountain. And the rest is history…

From the pages of De Saussure's pressed plant collection 

Next come exhibits on de Saussure’s contemporaries. These include André-César Bordier (1746-1802), whose Voyage pitoresque aux glaciers de Savoye set out one of the first theories to explain how glaciers flowed, Marc-Théodore Bourrit (1739-1819), the tireless promoter of Mont Blanc, and Louis Jurine (1751-1819), who assembled such a vast array of alpine minerals and fossils that his collection ended up at the Sorbonne.

Successors get a mention too. Here is a fine portrait of the astronomer Marc-Auguste Pictet (1752-1825), who took over from de Saussure as professor of natural philosophy at the Academy of Geneva when the older man’s health failed. There was Alphonse Favre (1815-1890), who published a three-volume geological study on the Mt Blanc range. In search of ground truth, he climbed extensively and later helped to found the Swiss Alpine Club, also serving as one of its first presidents. 

Alpine folding as modelled by Alphonse Favre

Lastly there was the great Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), who visited Chamonix with de Saussure’s magnum opus, the Voyages dans les Alpes, in hand (presumably only one volume at a time). Later, von Humboldt undertook his own scientific ascents, setting a world altitude record (at least for Europeans) during an attempt on Chimborazo in June 1802. De Saussure’s Voyages also furnished James Hutton (1726-1797) with some key geological evidence that he needed to nail down his Theory of the Earth (1785).

By now, your reporter was getting the picture. De Saussure didn’t work in a silo: instead he corresponded, hobnobbed and networked across the length and breadth of Europe. If he mounted higher than others – to borrow a bon mot from an eminent British natural philosopher – this was because he climbed on the shoulders of giants.

Richard Pococke in oriental dress
Image by courtesy of Jean-Etienne Liotard, via Wikipedia

Speaking of the Brits, they figure quite prominently in this exhibition. Up on the wall are portraits of William Windham (1717–1761) and Richard Pococke (1704–1765), who were among the first outsiders to tour and publicise the glaciers of Chamonix, making their visit nearly two decades before de Saussure.

De Saussure was well-known in English circles. Accompanied by Albertine, he had travelled round the country in 1768-69, visiting mines, universities and men of science and culture such as Sir Joseph Banks and Lord Palmerston, father of the prime minister. It may have been during this stay that he acquired from the workshop of John Dollond, a master optician, the fine achromatic telescope that is displayed on the museum’s ground floor.

An optic of distinction from the atelier of John Dollond

The English reciprocated these visits. In the summer of 1776, the polymathic Sir George Shuckburgh invited de Saussure on an excursion to a hill near Geneva in order to estimate the height of Mont Blanc. By triangulation, Shuckburgh arrived at a figure of 2,451 toises (equivalent to 4,779 metres), rather close to the altitude of 4,778 metres that de Saussure himself obtained just over a decade later, when he boiled up his thermometer on the summit. 

De Saussure's alcohol stove front-runs the MSR by 200 years

This prompted your correspondent to muse that, to get the measure of Mt Blanc more or less accurately, it took a joint Genevan-British collaboration. And to wonder how present-day Shuckburghs and de Saussures are going to fare in the face of take-back-control policies that stifle international cooperation. Outside the museum’s front door a drab December afternoon awaited. Across the lake, Mt Blanc was quite lost to view.

The exhibition La montagne, laboratoire des savants runs until 23 April 2023 at the Musée d'histoire des sciences, Geneva.

References

Musée d'histoire des sciences, La montagne, laboratoire des savants: Catalogue d’exposition

Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Voyages dans les Alpes, edited and introduced by Julie Boch, Georg, Geneva, 2002

Sir Arnold Lunn, The Swiss and Their Mountains: A Study of the Influence of Mountains on Man, Rand McNally, 1963

Summoning up the very shades of H-B de Saussure