“The most beautiful pyramids of ice”

Translation: Horace-Bénédict de Saussure visits the Glacier des Bossons at Chamonix during the Little Ice Age

Like that of the Bois, the Bossons glacier is a spectacle of the Chamonix valley that most visitors will see. We pass below this glacier on the way to the Prieuré and there, at a small hamlet called the Bossons, which doubtless lent its name to the glacier, the guides await who offer to conduct travellers thither. 

Ice pyramids on the Glacier des Bossons
Engraving by Samuel Birmann of Basel (1793-1847)

It is a charming path, first through a small alder wood along the stream that comes out of the glacier, then through meadows and finally through a forest of fir trees. This last stretch is difficult because of its steepness, which is some thirty or thirty-one degrees. After overcoming this slope, the glacier is at hand, and one has the pleasure of seeing very close by the most beautiful pyramids of ice. As I have remarked before, wherever glaciers rest on a level plane, their surface is also more or less flat, but where they rest on a slope, their ice blocks topple and cram themselves together, taking on varied, often grotesque shapes and attitudes. Continuously washed by the waters that melt from them, the steep sides of these ice towers are absolutely clean and brilliant; neither sand nor gravel is to be seen on their flat surfaces, and they gleam a dazzling white where they reflect the sunlight, or a beautiful aquamarine green where the sun shines through them. Seen through the fir trees, which they often overtop, these brilliant and colourful pyramids make the most striking and extraordinary sight.

At the top of this short if steep ascent, one finds a stretch where the glacier rests on a level plane and offers a more or less equally flat surface. There, after crossing the dyke of stones and gravel that bounds borders almost any glacier, one can climb down onto the ice, cross the glacier and return to the Prieuré by a different route from the way up. As it is much narrower than that of the Montenvers, this glacier exhibits only a few of the great phenomena which we see on the Glacier des Bois. Nevertheless, there are quite large crevasses, and one can get an idea of the waves which we have compared with those of a rough sea. Travellers who have seen the Glacier des Bois can therefore dispense with the Bossons glacier but those for whom the Montenvers excursion is too strenuous would do well to go up to the Bossons, which is much lower.

Seen from the top of the Brévent, the Bossons glacier seems to descend directly down the side of the Mont Blanc valley. It is true that some optical illusions must be in play here, since the extreme brightness of the snow and ice, together with the absolute lack of aerial perspective because of the air’s purity, deprive the eye of any means of measuring distances, so that Mont Blanc, seen from Plianpra or from the top of the Brévent, appears to hover almost directly above the lower end of this glacier, even though there is really a horizontal distance of more than a league and a half. In spite of this distance, however, it is quite certain that snow and ice stretches uninterrupted from the summit of Mont Blanc to the bottom of the Bossons glacier. More than once, people have even attempted to reach the summit of Mont Blanc by entering this glacier at the top of the eminence known as La Côte, which separates it from the Taconay glacier.

Going up the eastern bank of this same Glacier des Bossons, one arrives at the Glacier des Pèlerins under the foot of the Aiguille du Midi, and then one can skirt the foot of the other aiguilles as far as Montenvers, making one’s descent along the Glacier des Bois. I did part of this route in 1761 but with too much haste; fearing benightment among these wildernesses, my guide made me descend with such haste that, as I was not yet fit enough to run through these mountains, I stumbled at almost every step. I did not return to Chamonix until well into the night, and this in a state of agitation and fatigue from which I had great difficulty in recovering.

References

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

"Suddenly transported to a world forgotten by nature"

A visit to the Talèfre glacier on Mont Blanc during the Little Ice Age, as described by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure 

The view of the Talèfre glacier is majestic and awe-inspiring. As it descends an extremely steep slope, its jostling seracs surge up into towers and pyramids leaning this way and that, and threatening to obliterate any reckless traveller who dares approach them. To reach the glacier’s upper tier, where it is less steep and hence less broken up, we scaled the rocks to its left on the western side. Known as the Couvercle, this crag is dominated by an inaccessible summit, which as usual in these parts is called an “aiguille”, and taking the name of the nearby glacier, is known as the Aiguille du Talèfre.

View of the Talèfre glacier and the "Jardin" by Jean-Antoine Linck
Courtesy of the Alpine Museum of Chamonix-Mt Blanc

The slope by which one climbs the Couvercle is excessively steep; one follows a sort of groove that Nature has carved in the rock. Clinging to some nubbins of rock, we climbed with our hands as much as on our feet, or rather more so, which moved us to name this passage the “égralets” or ladders. However, the climb is not dangerous because the rock, a very coherent granite, always gives secure holds for one’s hands and feet, although its steepness would make it somewhat offputting on the descent. After reaching the top of these ladders, the slope angle eased and we walked over grass and large granite slabs to the edge of the Talèfre glacier basin. The basin is the high and more or less horizontal part where the glacier can be crossed.

It took us an hour and a quarter to climb from the Léchaud glacier to the Talèfre’s basin. We were tempted to rest for a moment before stepping onto it. Everything invited us to do so here, a beautiful lawn watered by a brook which emerged from under the snow and rolled its crystalline waters out onto silvery sands. Even more compelling, there was a view so vast and magnificent that no amount of description could do it justice. How could one, indeed, paint for the imagination these scenes that have nothing in common with anything seen in the rest of the world; how would one convey to the reader's soul the mingled impression of admiration and terror that is inspired by these immense masses of ice, which are surrounded and surmounted by these yet vaster pyramidal crags; the snow’s brilliance contrasting with the drab colour of the rocks streaming with the snow’s meltwater, the purity of the air, the radiance of the sunlight that lends an extraordinary sharpness and vividness to all these sights; the profound and majestic silence that presides over these vast solitudes, a silence disturbed only from afar by the crash of some great block of granite or ice falling from the top of some mountain, and the very starkness of these lofty crags, barren of any beast, or shrub or verdure of any kind.

Glacier du Jardin (detail) by Gabriel Loppe (1866)
MAH Museum of Art and History, Geneva

And when one calls to mind the beautiful herbage and the charming landscapes that one recently saw in the lower valleys, one could believe oneself suddenly transported to another world forgotten by nature. The view from Montenvers gives only a very imperfect idea of it; there you see only one glacier, whereas from here you see the three great glaciers of Les Bois, Léchaud and Tacul, not to mention a large number of less considerable ones which, like that of the Talèfre, pour their ice into the main glaciers.

View of Mont Blanc from the "Jardin", c.1890
Wikipedia

After resting, and enjoying this beautiful spectacle, we walked onto the Talèfre glacier, and in twenty minutes came to a ridge of debris that divides the glacier along its length. As this was the highest point of our excursion, we took a long break to make observations with our instruments. To the south, the view from the middle of this glacier is similar to that from the Couvercle, but behind us to the north the Talèfre glacier itself, on which we stood, presents a scene as exquisite as it is singular. The glacier rises in stages to the foot of an exactly semicircular cirque, which walls it round it on the northern side. This cirque is formed by extremely high granite peaks, which end in sharply pointed summits of infinitely varied forms. The gaps between these peaks are filled by glaciers that flow into the Talèfre glacier. The same glaciers are crowned by snowslopes that rise in festoons sculpted in the shape of acanthus leaves between the black and vertical granite faces, where no snow can settle. The crest of this magnificent amphitheatre rises into the vault of the sky, which here takes on a blue so deep and azure that one could never see the like in the lowlands, and which singularly brings out the brilliance and contrast of the snow and the rocks.

A very singular piece of this picture is the flattened rock, situated like an island in the middle of the ice and snows of the Talèfre glacier. It is more or less circular in shape, standing a little above the glacier’s level. The eternal frosts that weigh on this whole region seem to respect it; they do not touch it, or at least they leave it much sooner than the rest of the mountain. This rock is even covered with a little greenery, which at this moment was only starting to appear, because early spring does not reach these high mountains until the middle of July, but at the end of August it would be covered with a beautiful lawn, spangled with a great variety of pretty Alpine flowers. The place is also known as the Courtil, a word that means 'garden' in both Savoyard and old French,. It is even walled in like a garden, since the glacier has deposited a ridge of stones and gravel around it, exactly in the manner of an enclosure. I very much wished to go there to see if there was not some hot spring, or some other local cause that melted the snow and favoured vegetation, but the deep crevasses of the glacier, lurking under soft and not very firm snow, would have made the way so dangerous then that our guides absolutely refused to take us there. Such a phenomenon is not unique in the history of glaciers; I have seen the like on Swiss glaciers, but perhaps not in such a beautiful situation, or covered with such beautiful verdure. When the snows have melted, this Jardin would be neither dangerous nor difficult of access.

After completing our observations, we set off again to finish our glacier crossing. We aimed to make our return on the opposite side, both to see new scenery and to avoid having to descend the “ladders”, which we reckoned would be even more awkward on the descent than they had been on the ascent. In crossing the glacier, however, we encountered more difficulties than had been apparent at first sight. If we moved on upwards, we would have to cross crevasses covered with snow, like those between us and the Courtil, and below us we saw frighteningly steep ice-slopes, while the middle way seemed to combine the hazards of both these extremes. While our guides were holding council, one of them, Pierre Balme, who is the one for whom I have the most regard and confidence since the death of Pierre Simon, and who was then in charge of the magnetometer, grew tired of the discussions and, deciding to underline his opinion by example, set off by the most direct route, and all but ran down the extremely steep slopes of sheer ice, edged as they were by declivities. We shuddered as we watched; the slightest false step would infallibly have cost him his life; but he came out of it scot-free. In such cases, there can be no middle way; either one must safeguard every move by cutting steps in the ice, or walk firmly enough for one’s bootnails to bite into the ice, and quickly too, so that there is no time to slip. Pierre Balme’s example decided us, and we followed, not exactly in his footsteps but down the fairly steep slopes, preferring these obvious yet transient dangers to the more drawn-out hazard of falling unexpectedly into a crevasse.

On leaving the glacier, we found ourselves on a slope of broken rock, by which we descended along a sort of corridor or gorge between the glacier on our right, and a large granite rock on our left, and this long and steep descent brought us back to the Léchaud glacier.

We were now facing the bottom of this glacier, which ends in a cirque bounded by the Aiguilles de Léchaud and by the Grande and Petite Jorasse. Like that of the Talèfre, this cirque is enclosed by granite walls crowned by extremely high peaks. Rising against these rocks, the ice gives way to very steep snow slopes that dwindle into narrow tongues between stark and vertical granite faces. Visiting this glacier in 1767, I went as far as the floor of the cirque and then climbed these snowfields as high as their ever-steepening pitch would allow; I then returned, skirting the foot of the Aiguilles de Léchaud and passing the boutes or caves of Léchaud, a sort of den made under the granite rocks to serve as an overnight refuge for crystal-hunters from Chamonix. There, for the first time, I had the pleasure of collecting Achillea nana, Gnaphalium alpinum and other alpine plants that grow there in small recesses with a good southern exposure.

On this occasion, we hurried back to Montenvers: clouds were piling up on the summits and the change of wind direction threatened bad weather, as already presaged in the morning by the sky’s deeper shade of blue. Walking as fast as we could on the ice, it took us nearly two hours from the bottom of the Talèfre glacier to the freshet near where we had stepped onto the glacier. On the way, we crossed several of those pretty streams, glinting like beryl or aquamarine in the sunlight, that flow along beds they have scoured into the ice. While quenching our thirst with this pure fresh water, we saw how several of the streams had joined together into a small river that cascades into a chasm of living ice, forming a beautiful waterfall.

Nearing the western edges of this great valley of ice by a somewhat different route from our outward way, we passed over great avalanche debris that had fallen in the spring from mountains above the glacier. Riven by large crevasses, just like the glacier, these snows had already congealed to a density close to that of ice, and, as they become saturated with water as the sun melts their surface, they will freeze during the following winter into ice exactly like that of the glacier itself. We returned to the château of Montenvers at five o'clock in the evening and, taking just a moment's rest there, descended thence in two hours to the Prieuré, somewhat fatigued but well satisfied with our day.

References

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

“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