Angeled-White
An ascent of the Weisshorn East Ridge (4506m)
Isolating yourself is meaningless without the chance of finding something beautiful. For six months I had lived alone in my university room through the early-pandemic and the seclusion was not good. So at the end of term I decided to leave for some place wilder and made plans to travel to south-western Switzerland.
It was August and the night was clear and colder for it. The Perseids were passing in streams high above the Schaligletscher brief as flint sparks. Out of reach except for our eyes, appearing only on these nights and never to be caught or kept. I’d made it here before it had got dark. Now I lay wrapped in a sleeping bag, heavy-mitted, indistinguishable in the dark and waiting.
It was a wild place to make camp. Empty space all around, a steep mountainside to my left and glaciers on my right. The mountains were slowly falling apart to the south, shedding loose stones as under the sound of the wind I cinched up my hood and turned over.
I left the single platform of Randa train station three vertical kilometres deep in the hollow of the Zermatt valley. Stepping out into July day, I hauled my backpack into the village for a taller view west. Reaching a church and cemetery, I saw they were both built at the lowest height the Weisshorn is visible from. Stopped in the middle of the street, I stared up to where the peak floated in sunlight and saw the mountain. Its appearance is so powerful that seeing it just once you are drawn in.
Separating two valleys, its three ridges extend lance-like. Each so tall that their height enfolds glaciers. A diadem of rock crowns the snowy north face and a glacier hangs improbably beneath it.
The glacier is ever threatening and endangers all ideas of certainty beneath it. Cleaving in the winter of 1819, its serac ice fell thundering down out of the dark. The newspaper print later read:
On the 27th of December, about six o’clock in the morning, towards the eastern and very steep side of the highest summit of the Weisshorn, a part of the glacier became loose, fell with a noise like thunder on the mass of ice below, and announced, by the most dreadful crash, the ravages with which the valley was threatened, At the moment when the snow and ice struck on the lower mass of the glacier, the clergyman of the place and some other persons observed a strong light which, however, immediately vanished and everything was again enveloped in the darkest night. A frightful hurricane occasioned by the pressure of the air, instantly succeeded and in a moment spread the most tremendous devastation. The fall of the glacier itself did not hurt the village, but the hurricane which it occasioned was so powerful that it threw millstones several tosses up the mountain, tore up by the roots distant larch trees of the largest size; there blocks of ice of four cubic feet over the village a distance of half a league.
Taking a dust path west out of the village of Randa I crossed into forestry that covers this side of the valley and followed the paths of ibex to a separation between trees. I waded across the stream ankle-deep. Cold cold and blue, the water revealed its source still far above. Switch-backing through stone-pines the path then twisted out into larch country.
The turns slowed every movement. In afternoon sun, I cut through the last over loose rubble sliding dangerously to where the ground lay white. Grit scattered in the wet summer snow. I sunk heavy steps to cross the first snowfield in a semicircle toward the lowest pass of a rising spur. Climbing up rock now, I found the cliff wet with snowmelt pouring off from above. I gained the spur and followed it to a slab where I could sleep for the night. I took rest there. On that small crest where the altimeter read 3220m. Unrolling my sleeping bag upon the flat edge I looked to the mountains around and sat still hands buried in my parka and made tea. Evening light lengthened, brightening the peaks to the southeast. Their faces slowly thinned. Details washed out to leave nothing but outlines.
My alarm sounded at 12 and overhead stars burned in patterns and clusters. I lay there shivering and looking upwards, not getting up. I really didn’t know what was to come. Forcing myself into the cold I shook myself loose and bent double coughing breath that plumed white. The stove was soon lit. Water heated for coffee. Beyond the red of isopropane fire I took in the scale of dark glaciers and mountains and even the subtler peaks of the range were intimidating. The Mettlehorn black.
Stepping into crampons I left my bivouac and set off over the first slabs. I passed to the other side of the spur and traced a path of least resistance until beginning a traverse east over a snowfield. Towards its furthest edge I tilted my headlamp to what was above and found the route’s first rib of rock. Up and up its forbidding aspect I became wary of rockfall with each metre and couldn’t help but send loose splinters flitting away down the mountainside. The wind blew colder across the second pillar of blackened gneiss. Committed and climbing, I found its top precipitate out in space. Clambering over its last metres of stone I came to the relief of the Frühstücksplatz (“breakfast place”) and its momentary refuge. I felt held there. Stopped by the exposure and the sound of the wind blowing through the valley. Nothing else spoke. Only the wind and faint rattle of stonefall skittering away down the ridge below. Certain positions on a mountainside instruct pause
You can turn around. Mountain climbing is stupid. You know you dont have to do this right?
The Ostgrat split the view ahead. There was only one path and at its beginning the sheen of a memorial plate shone gunmetal-black. I was standing at the base of the Lochmatter Tower. The beginning of the path that every other climber before had passed. Treading lightly along the same stone and following my own plan, I thought of Lochmatter, the visionary guide, and his fall from this exact same position. Placing one foot in front of another, shifting my body over the unknown, I concentrated on climbing this trembling way without mistake always knowing without doubt that one deviating movement would be a movement swiftly deathward.
I traversed the line of gendarmes in sequence through the dark. The stone crests had to be climbed and then descended and gave very few metres of altitude as reward for their passing. Between them the ridge was covered thick with snow and I stepped below its top along a rocky edge. However carefully I went I still loosened rocks. Turning and falling, they vanished. And a thousand metres below anything would crash soundlessly
In the first light a rumbling sounded from within the mountainside above. Hissing sounds blew down from above as beneath the spur of the ridge the runnels in the face turned channeled white debris until a second sounding came minutes later and they choked, becoming full and streaming filled with breaking ice and stone. Thundering, the serac of the upper north face calved some of its ice and debris was thrown down the face. I looked down from the relative shelter of the ridge towards the washout. I saw just certainty. Nothing living could exist down there. Everything falling down there would be buried and disappear extinct and irretrievable.
Shadows born of steepening light lengthened and swung underneath blue sky. Stradling snow too exposed to stand on either side of, I linked the east ridge to the upper north face and crouching with no protection I trembled over cornicing angle as the wind rose and snapped at my jacket. Over the roof of the hanging glacier and past gaping schrund, I made for more certain ground.
To the west mountains appeared in gradual revelations and crossing the threshold to the final top, the mountain reduced to the width of a single
stone. I saw at last what photographs can only point to. What cannot be fully captured or held. Surrendered and surrounded, I was there and nowhere else.
From this position you can see mythical north faces and curved views of far distances. The sky stretching so far. And I looked from the white corolla of the north ridge to clouds moving in flumes between mountain chains and how they petaled white in the eastern distance. Standing there beneath Christ crucified on the summit cross, I took my own photo, half-smiling
You can’t stay somewhere like that for long without risking not coming back. Still I stayed there for more than an hour and a half. When the wind dropped away, the wild sweep of mountains turned crystalline. This is what it is worth all the risk to find. It was like looking at Earth from outer space. The clarity and scale of the view you too much to be imagined. Mountains to innumerable mountains. Awe striking to no end
Reversing the climbing along the ridge, I descended with the exposure remaining an idle threat. “Go away” I called out to weakly and ultimately to no-one and nothing. I slowly slowly eased myself down. Everything downclimbed along the ridge had to be climbed again and the thousand metre depth didn’t move and seemed to hold my every stare downwards. I felt its presence, its gravitational draw, its high consequence. To the southeast thunderclouds gathered and rose columnar to mark the watershed across the Monte Rosa.
By the time I was in a position to depart the east ridge my eyesight had worsened. The day was reddening. Soon extinguishing itself my headtorch ran out of power and stumbling on ragged legs my shoulders bent forward, my head turned downhill. I went stumbling down to where I had slept the night before.
When I got there, I sat down and looked out. The mountains were silent all around. Nothing else living in sight. There were only mountains, cold stars and glacier forms.
Torch off and night blind, I felt warmth in exhaustion. The day burned out.
When I came down to the different warmth of the valley I left my climbing hardware behind to spend the next days walking with a near-empty backpack. In the evening I watched deer in the woods. I fed the goats kept beside the apartment I was renting. I knelt and pushed my face down in the river. It was a week later that I bought tickets to return home and it was on that train back to Visp that I lost sight of the mountain for the last time that summer. By then the climb had become already tinted already distant.
I’ve come to remember my experience of climbing the Weisshorn much like seeing the Perseids. I never had any possession or control over what I saw and after it was over I held nothing. I just had this experience of being somewhere intensely beautiful for a short time. This is hardly a novel observation and although it’s cliché, these days changed me and I am grateful for that.
My experience of being high on the mountain was only briefly possible and from the moment I turned away from the ridge the clarity provided by the height returned to the inaccessible. The photographs I have now only point to what you can find up there. The mountaintop remains atowering, angeled-white.
