THE CLIMBING SEASON IN THE ALPS.
FOR the first time since 1914 Zermatt is having a summer season slightly recalling those of pre-war days. It may not be positively crowded with visitors, but most of the hotels are well filled. Only a few of the guests are British, the decided majority of them being Swiss. Quite half Zermatt's visitors, indeed, are French-Swiss, many of whom have probably never before had an opportunity of seeing this mountain resort, Really, it is one of the minor but not least curious results of the war that many Swiss are now for the first time able to afford to visit some of their own best-known summer resorts.
Before the war Zermatt was reputed among Swiss to be only for " the rich English." Now, however, the physiognomy of
its summer visitors crowd has wholly changed. Among the rich Swiss who are usurping the place of the rioh English in • Zermatt this year are a number of war " profiteers " who have made their money in various ways, avowable and unavowable ;
and even certain German-Swiss journalists, who, since August, 1914, and perhaps even before then, put their pens at the service of the German General Staff. No assemblage, indeed, could be more miscellaneous than that of this year's visitors to Zermatt. It includes a surprising number of statesmen and diplomatists, who at one time were in the first rank, but who now ask nothing save to be left in peace to read their papers and thus keep track of the more or less depressing fortunes of their respective countries. For the first time in Zermatt's history there is also a sprinkling of Asiatics, among them some Japanese.
The hotel-keepers are well enough satisfied with these guests. Not so, however, the guides, who of course prefer English visitors, and who, after five lean years, are only too anxious for a fat year. But most of the Ilerrschaften here this summer either cannot climb, or do not wish to climb, or cannot afford to do so. At most only about a dozen members of the Alpine Club have come to Switzerland this year ; and, as is well known, the Swiss themselves very often do not employ guides, which is the main reason for the great frequency of accidents to Swiss climbers, for perhaps no one is less fit than the average Swiss town-dweller to attempt a guideless ascent of a high mountain, as the long list of this year's Alpine accidents already sufficiently proves.
Had the Swiss Consular officials in London not put so many difficulties in the way of obtaining visas to passports, and had it not been rumoured that food scarcity prevailed in Switzerland, Zermatt at any rate would probably have had a very fair number of British tourists this year, even although perhaps not a single other Swiss summer resort might have had any. Judging by the accounts of those few British who have succeeded in getting here, however, a visa is not easy to obtain, and travelling is trying in many respects. Moreover, there is now the additional complication that the traveller must leave Switzerland by the same frontier as that by which he entered it, while the duration of his stay in the country is strictly limited. Finally, any climber who wishes to traverse the Matterhorn or cross the ThiSodule Pass leading into Italy cannot now do so without risking imprisonment so soon as he reaches the other side of the Alps.
As for food conditions in Switzerland, one who has been domiciled in the country since before the war is in as good a position as possible to know what they are. Food in Zermatt itself is abundant and excellent, although here, as of course everywhere, hotel charges have been raised from fifty to one hundred per cent. But in such a place as this, where the chief hotel-keepers have their own farms, there is no lack of anything. In certain parts of Switzerland, however, there is still not too much dairy produce. A British. Colonel and an Oxford don staying at my hotel both assure me that never since the beginning of the war have they enjoyed such wholesome and plentiful food as here ; but of course what is true of Zermatt is not true of all Switzerland. Thus, in May last I was staying in one of the best town hotels in the country,and the food was so meagre and so poor that after dinner I had to ask the head-waiter for some bread and cheese to satisfy my hunger. In short, food conditions in Switzerland cannot be said to be bad, and are tending steadily to improve.
As for the conditions during this year's climbing season, in Zermatt they have been extraordinarily favourable. So favourable a year, indeed, there has not been since 1911. In other parts of the Swiss Alps, however, the weather was bad in July, although it has since improved. Last winter was not only snowy but late—in the higher mountains snow fell until nearly the end of June. Consequently the quantity of snow still lying on the Zermatt ranges and glaciers at the end of July was exceptional ; but now, after a spell of about seven weeks of almost unbroken fine weather, the peaks around here have never been in better condition. The other day, together with my guide Siegfried Burgener, I traversed the Zinal Rothorn in 'fourteen hours, the traverse including the ascent of the Trif thorn and a descent by the Trift couloir. The Matterhorn has been ascended by the Zmutt. ardte several times this year ; once by a lady with one guide. Hardly a day has passed this August when there were not twenty to thirty people on the summit of the Monte Rosa, and the numbers who ascended the Matterhorn by the ordinary route were chiefly troubled by guideless climbers,
and not by falling stones. At any rate it was not stones whicb fell owing to natural causes that endangered mountaineers, but the atones perpetually set falling by clumsy and inexperienced tourists.
Lovers of those Alpine wild flowers of which so great a variety are to be found around Zermatt will learn regretfully that they have suffered greatly this year owing to the prolonged drought and the late, cold spring. Personally, long as I have known Zermatt, I have never seen the wild flowers so poor and stunted as this season. Except in favoured spots which are both well sheltered and watered by some mountain stream, they are too often simply shrivelled up, as, indeed, are many of the Alpine pastures, which look sometimes as if fire had passed over them.
During this month of August, in fact, we have had only one slight shower in the Zermatt district. Twice the local cure has ascended with his flock to the Schwarzsee in procession, more than 3,000 feet above Zermatt, to pray for rain at the foot of the Matterhorn. The first time his prayers were unanswered. A few days later, therefore, the barometer being very low, he called upon the faithful to ascend to the Schwarzsee with him again, telling them that if the rain did not come this second time, they would have to make the upward pilgrimage a third time—barefoot. On their return a shower fell, but not sufficient to do more than lay the dust.
Zermatt as a summer resort has undoubtedly built its house upon the rocks. There is really something in and about it capable of attracting people, and attracting them year after year. Consequently, although it has assuredly suffered, it has done so much less seriously than any other Swiss tourist resort. It is safe to say, indeed, that even if British climbers should largely forsake the other summer resorts of German-speaking Switzerland, they are never likely to forget Zermatt, with its undying associations with the conquest of the Alps by Englishmen. Moreover, pro-German and anti-English as were many German-Swiss throughout the war, the Valaisan guides of Zermatt and Seas Fee never forgot their English Herren, and look forward with eager anticipation, of which lucre is not the sole motive, to climbing with them once more in happier days.
Zermatt, August 18th. JULIAN GRANDE.
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