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Gertrude Bell conquers the Bernese Oberland (circa 1901)
Gertrude
Bell, an energetic Victorian-era British traveler in the Alps and elsewhere around the globe, recorded her experiences in
a prodigious number of letters to her family. In this letter (somewhat edited), she describes her mountaineering exploits
in the vicinity of Grindelwald and Innertkirchen.
8 September 1901
Dearest Father:
Encountering chamois
I
sent you a postcard today, just to say that I was alive, and I am now going to give you a full history of my adventures. To
begin with Friday: we set out before dawn, the mists lying low everywhere, on the sporting chance of finding fine weather
above them. We walked up the hour and a half of steep woods which is the preface to every climb here, and got to our familiar
scene of action, a rocky valley called the Ochscuthal.
Our problem was to find a pass over a precipitous wall of the
rock at the S. end of it. Now this rock wall had been pronounced impossible by the two experts of these parts and by their
guides. We cast round and finally decided on a place where the rock wall was extremely smooth, but worn by a number of tiny
water channels, sometimes as much as 3 inches deep by 4 across. These gave one a sort of handhold and foothold. Just as we
started up it began to snow a little. The rock was excessively smooth and in one place there was a wall some 6 ft high where
Ulrich had to stand on Heinrich's shoulder [the Swiss guides].
Above this 100 ft it went comparatively easily and
in an hour we found ourselves in a delightful cave, so deep that it sheltered us from the rain and sleet which was now falling
thick. Here we breakfasted, gloomily enough. After breakfast things looked a little better and we decided to go on though
it was still raining.
The next bit was easy, rocks and grass and little ridges. A rotten couloir and a still more
rotten chimney and we were on the top of the pass, 1 h. 20 m. from the cave. We were pleased with ourselves! It was a fine
place; about 2000 feet between the great peak of the Engelhorn on the right and a lower peak on the left. The pass is a great
haunt of chamois. It is the place on which we had seen the 5 chamois three days before and the day when we got to the top
we saw a mother and a little one quite near us. They scampered off up the side of the Englehorn. The whole place up there
is marked with chamois paths, no one, I expect, having ever been there before to disturb them.
It was snowing so hard
that we decided we could do no more that day and returned by the way we had come, lunching in the cave. There was a skeleton
in the cave, a sheep which had been lost on the mountain side, or a Steinboch, we don't know which. We got down the smooth
rocks with the help of the extra rope. It was most unpleasant for the water was streaming down the couloirs in torrents and
we had to share the same couloir with it. It ran down one's neck and up one's sleeves and into one's boots - disgusting! However
we got down and ran home through the woods.
Climbing the Engelhorn
In the afternoon it cleared and
at dawn on Saturday we were off again. We went again to the top of the Gemse Sattel; it was a beautiful day and we knew our
way and did the rocks in an hour and 10 minutes less than we had taken the day before. Here we breakfasted and at 10 we started
off to make a small peak on the right of the saddle which we had christened beforehand the Klein Engelhorn. We clambered up
an easy little buttress peak which we called the Gemse Spitz and the Klein Engelhorn came into full view. After a great deal
of complicated rope work we reached the Gemse Sattel again after 4 hours of as hard rock climbing as it woud be possible to
find. Lunch was most agreeable.
Our next business was to get up the Engelhorn. This proved quite easy - it has
not been done before however, and at 3.30 we were on the top of the Engelhorn. Now we had to come down the other side - this
is the way the Engelhorn is generally ascended. It's a long climb, not difficult, but needing care especially at the end of
a hard day when you have no finger tips left. There were quantities of chamois; they stood and looked at us from the tips
of rocks.
Overnighting in a shephard's hut
The end of it was that it was 7 o'clock before we reached
the foot of the rocks. It was too late and too dark to think of getting down into the valley so we decided that we would sleep
at the Eugen Alp at a shepherd's hut. But this was not so easy to do as you might think. We wandered over Alps and Alps -
not the ghost of a hut was to be found. It was an exquisite starry night, one didn't the least mind how long one went on walking
and I had almost resigned myself to the prospect of spending the whole night on the mountain side, when suddenly our lantern
showed us that we had struck a path.
We kept to it with varying fortune until at 9.30 we hove up against a chalet
nestled in to the mountain side and looking exactly like a big rock. We went in and found a tiny light burning and in a minute
3 tall shepherds with pipes in their mouths joined us and slowly questioned us as to where we had come from and whither we
were going. We said we were going no further and would like to eat and sleep. One of the shepherds lighted a blazing wood
fire and cooked a quantity of milk in a 3 legged cauldron and we fell to on bowls of the most delicious bread and milk I ever
tasted.
The chalet was divided into two parts by a wooden partition. The first part was occupied by some enormous
pigs, there was also a ladder in it leading up to a bit of wooden floor just under the roof, where the fresh hay was kept.
Here I slept. The other room had a long berth all down one side of it, and a shelf along another filled with rows of great
milk tins. The floors were just the hard earth and there was a wooden bench on which we eat and a low seat by it. I retired
to my hay loft, wrapped myself in a new blanket and covered myself over with hay and slept soundly for 8 hours, when my neighbours
the pigs woke me by grunting loudly to be let out. The shepherd gave us an excellent breakfast of milk and coffee - we had
our own bread and jam. It was so enchanting waking up in that funny little place high up on the mountain side with noisy torrents
all round it. The goats came flocking home before we left; they had spent a night out on the mountains, having been caught
somewhere in the dark and they bleated loud complaints as they crowded round the hut, licking the shepherd's hand.
Visiting
Innertkirchen
It was about 7.30 before Ulrich and I set off down the exquisite Urbach Thal; Heinrich had gone on
before. We walked down for a couple of hours and then we turned into the valley of the Aar and dropped down onto Innertkirchen
in the green plain below. This is Ulrich's native place. We went to his home and found his old father, a nice old man of 70,
who welcomed us with effusion. It was an enchanting house, an old wooden chalet dated 1749, with low rooms and long rows of
windows with muslin curtains and geranium pots in them. All spotlessly clean. They gave me a large - well lunch, it was 11.30,
of eggs and tea and bread and cheese and bilberry jam, after which Ulrich and I walked up through the woods here and arrived
at 2 in the afternoon.
I don't think I ever had two more delightful alpine days.
Ever your very affectionate
daughter Gertrude
An online archive of Gertrude Bell's letters can be found on www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk
Note: Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) was born in County Durham. She was educated first of all at home, and
then at school in London; finally, in a time when it was not at all usual for a woman to have a university education, she
went to Oxford to read history, and, at the age of twenty and after only two years study, she left with a first-class degree.
In the years immediately following, she spent time on the social round in London and Yorkshire, she traveled extensively in
Europe, and visited Persia. Her travels continued with two round the world trips, in 1897-1898 and in 1902-1903. At about
this time too, in the seasons1899-1904, her climbing exploits in the Alps earned her renown as a mountaineer.
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