With the Führers she went on that season to climb two other peaks in the Mont Blanc range, the Grépon and the Dru. And in spite of remaining aloof from journalists and photographers, she became rather boastful among her own circle, writing with overweening confidence of her prowess in this new field: “Ulrich is as pleased as Punch and says I’m as good as any man, and from what I see of the capacities of the ordinary mountaineer, I think I am . . . I rather hanker after the Matterhorn and must try to fit it in . . . Guess I can manage any mountain you like to mention.”
She was riding for a fall, but she was so natural and agile a climber, combining such strength and courage, that it would be some time before the reckoning. In 1901, she met Ulrich and Heinrich again, this time in the Bernese Oberland. At seventy miles, the longest range in the Swiss Alps, it offered the most complex concentration of major ice routes. And this time, according to the diaries of an admirer, one Lady Monkswell, Gertrude had acquired a blue climbing suit with trousers. She never wore it, however, off the mountain, and still decorously changed back into her skirt at the base hut. From a written request to Molly in London for “two gold pins for my necktie, and thick black garters” it is clear that her trim and masculine appearance on the mountains set the fashion for the women skiers of the next couple of decades.
Her first ambition was to climb the Schreckhorn, which lifts its two streaming peaks against the sky like enormous waves just before they break. The high point on a long narrow ridge of crags, it is one of the most rugged and difficult of all 13,000-foot peaks in the European Alps, primarily due to the 2,000-foot rock tower that forms its ice-bound summit. It is dominated only by the immense razor of the Finsteraarhorn, and even with modern equipment is still considered too hard for most mountaineers.
At the mountain hut at the Baregg, where she and her guides spent the first night, she was joined by two cheerful young men, Gerard and Eric Collier, together with their guides, and much enjoyed the evening. They all started up the mountain together soon after midnight. She appears from a letter home to have vaulted up the first snow couloirs and small arêtes without turning a hair. Then: “I was beginning to think that the Schreckhorn had an absurd reputation, but the hour of arête from the saddle to the top made me alter my opinion. It’s a capital bit of rock climbing . . . a couple of very fine bits of climbing in it . . . thoroughly enjoyable!” She beat Gerard and Eric to the top by fifteen minutes, glissaded down in high spirits, and returned to the hut much looking forward to lunch, only to discover three Frenchmen burning her wood and drinking her tea. She gave them a piece of her mind, then dodged back outside to change into her skirt. After their rapid departure, she settled down to discuss with the Führers a wild ambition she had conceived: to climb the virgin north-east face of the Finsteraarhorn. It had been tried three times, unsuccessfully. They would work up to it, said Ulrich, probably swallowing hard, and for the moment they would keep this ambition a deadly secret.
Meanwhile, it was time to apply herself to the main purpose of the visit: to become the first mountaineer to climb, systematically, the peaks of the Engelhörner range. This, a romantic but horrendous skyline of small limestone peaks, is famous for its preponderance of perpendicular routes. Conan Doyle could find no wilder place to set the disappearance of Sherlock Holmes than the nearby Reichenbach Falls, where the torrent, swollen by melting snow, disappears in a cloud of spray into an abyss of black rock. She planned to apply herself methodically to one peak after another over the course of a fortnight. With the Führers as her guides, she would make several first ascents of what had hitherto been considered impossible challenges. She wrote home: “I am enjoying myself madly!”
She met up with the jolly Collier family in her hotel at Rosenlaui, and joined them for a game of cricket using pine branches for stumps and their butterfly nets to fish the balls out of the river. Temporarily driven out of the higher mountains by a heavy snowfall, Ulrich took Gertrude through her paces, pitting her against the most difficult rockfaces he could find at the lower levels. He led her up awkward gullies and set her to hammer in nails, sling ropes, and cut rock steps. She retained enough energy to climb a small crag that had not been climbed before, and to build a cairn on top. Ulrich was sufficiently impressed to agree to her daunting programme.
Over the course of those two weeks Gertrude climbed seven virgin peaks, one of them first-class, and two “old” peaks, all of them new routes or first ascents. One of these was christened after her and remains in all the Engelhörner literature to this very day: Gertrudspitze—Gertrude’s Peak—situated between Vorderspitze and Ulrichspitze. At her personal best and with those successes behind her, on 6 and 7 September she undertook the most difficult ascent of the year: the unclimbed first-class traverse of the Urbachthaler Engelhorn, the Great Engelhorn itself.
Gertrude and her two guides began the climb from the tiny valley on the west side, the Ochsental. At the north, east, and south this desolate place is surrounded by precipitous walls of polished rock. They proposed to start at the southern end, a route that local guides and a couple of expert climbers had assessed as impossible. “We 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.”
As they set off, the snow started to fall. It took them forty-five minutes to climb the first hundred feet, and in one place they came up against a six-foot wall without handholds. Standing on Heinrich’s shoulders, Ulrich reached a more promising rockface, but in the meantime the snow had changed to thick sleet. By luck they found a deep cave and breakfasted, then carried on in the rain until they faced a smooth arête which gave no holds at all. They retreated, traversed, and tried again in another place. Climbing cautiously up a narrow couloir and a chimney of broken rock, they found themselves at the top of the pass. On one side lay the row of four peaks they had climbed previously; on the other, two peaks—the first, the Klein Engelhorn, blocking the view of the highest, the Urbachthaler Engelhorn itself. The way up the Engelhorn, of which she could see the top half, was by a path used only by chamois deer. Neither the north nor the south side of the saddle ahead had ever been climbed. But now the weather turned against them, the snow came down thick and wet, and with great disappointment they decided they could do no more that day. They let themselves down the rockface in torrents of melting snow that ran into their collars, sleeves, and boots. At dawn on the 7th, they started again, in perfect sunshine.
The Klein Engelhorn, which hid the ascent to the summit, was itself partly masked by a buttress of rock which they climbed easily enough. But when the lesser peak came into view it was as daunting a rock as she had yet seen.
The lower third [of the Klein Engelhorn] was composed of quite smooth perpendicular rocks, the next piece of a very steep rock wall with an ill-defined couloir or two, the top of great upright slabs with deep gaps between them. The great difficulty of it all was that it was so exposed, you couldn’t ever get yourself comfortably wedged into a chimney, there was nothing but the face of the rock and up you had to go.
They crawled their way forwards and upwards, scrabbled up a shallow crack, then halted. They were at the bottom of a perfectly smooth overhang. Their position was precarious in the extreme. Ulrich climbed onto Heinrich’s shoulders and groped to the end of his reach without finding a single handhold. For a minute or two they must have hung there, motionless; then Gertrude offered to take Ulrich’s place, standing on Heinrich’s shoulders, and Ulrich could try again, standing on hers. The minutes ticked by as they manoeuvred themselves, inch by inch, into position, only their gasps and muffled exclamations breaking the frozen silence. Stacked one above the other, Ulrich’s boots digging into Gertrude’s shoulders, he reached up again—and still found no handhold. Gritting her teeth, she stretched every muscle and sinew of her five feet five and a half inches to give him another inch and a half. That fraction more height allowed him to find the smalles
t of cavities, and with all his formidable strength he began slowly to raise himself on his fingertips alone. It was the only move available to him, but with no foothold to help him lift his body, it should have been a fatal one. Gertrude, suffering silently below him, understood what was going to happen. As his foot left her shoulder she raised her arm, extended it, and made a platform for his boot. Gertrude wrote: “He called out, ‘I don’t feel at all safe—if you move we are all killed.’ I said, ‘All right, I can stand here for a week.’ ”
With the utmost care, Ulrich struggled up to a safe ledge, and then it was Gertrude’s turn. Last on the rope but now in second place, she could not be lifted: the rope snaked down from Ulrich to Heinrich below her. She could, however, hold on to that rope for dear life, and by massive exertion she managed the next nine feet, to join Ulrich on the ledge above. Now Heinrich had to do the same, with two ropes but from five feet lower down. He could not manage it. “The fact was, I think, that he lost his nerve, anyhow, he declared that he could not get up . . . there was nothing to do but to leave him.”
After they had rearranged the ropes, Heinrich tied himself onto the rockface, and grimly waited for their return. Ulrich and Gertrude carried on up the next slab, but just a few feet from the top they reached a sticking place and could get no further. Ulrich, looking thunderous, came down past Gertrude and told her they must try again from lower down. They were now on the opposite side of the mountain from where Heinrich hung, waiting. They edged across a precipice and came to a chimney. Here she wedged herself in as tightly as she could, and Ulrich climbed from her shoulders. Then, suddenly, it was done. They had reached the top of the Klein Engelhorn. One more problem assailed them when the wet rope by which they were letting themselves down became trapped between rocks and Ulrich had to return to the top of the chimney to release it. Twice it stuck fast, and twice he climbed back. Finally he threw it down to Gertrude and came down without it. There was some complicated rope work to do when they reached Heinrich, but they got to the bottom of the buttress, back to where the serious climbing had begun. Looking back on four hours of the hardest climbing it is possible to do, she found it incredible that so much had been endured in so short a time.
With fingers numb from the morning’s exposure, anyone else would have called it a day. Gertrude, however, had decided to get to the highest peak, the Urbachthaler Engelhorn, and get there she would. Heinrich appears to have joined them, under duress; he had probably expected to be home by nightfall, and being trumped by Gertrude on the precipice cannot have been pleasant for him. The three of them ate their picnic lunch and then, bypassing the Klein Engelhorn, took the arête up to the summit used by the deer. “This proved quite easy—it has not been done before, however,” Gertrude noted.
By 7 p.m. they were down at the foot of the rocks once more. It was too dark now to think of descending into the valley, so they decided to sleep at a shepherd’s hut known to the Führers. It was a kind of idyll, an innocent and charming experience. The chalet, nestling in the mountainside, was surrounded by rushing cataracts. Inside, three taciturn, pipe-smoking shepherds shared the accommodation with a family of large pigs. A fire was lit and the climbing party were given the most delicious bread and milk they had ever tasted. Afterwards Gertrude climbed up into the hayloft, wrapped herself in a blanket and a duvet of hay, and slept for eight hours, until she was woken by the grunting of the pigs. She was almost reluctant to leave, staying to watch the safe arrival of some goats that had been out all night. At 7:30, she swung off down the mountain path with Ulrich—Heinrich having vanished at dawn—and they conversed with the intimacy that shared danger brings. At the village of Innertkirchen he took her home and introduced her to his seventy-year-old father. “It was an enchanting house,” she wrote, “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 sat down to eat. Her appetite was enormous: she consumed bread, cheese, bilberry jam, and eggs. She had never had two more delightful Alpine days, she told Hugh and Florence: “What do you think is our fortnight’s bag? Two old peaks. Seven new peaks—one of them first-class and four others very good. One new saddle, also first-class. The traverse of the Engelhorn, also new and first-class. That’s not bad going, is it!”
And then, the fortnight over, it was back to Redcar and the autumn rain, the Mothers’ Meetings, and her adventures relived to the accompaniment of magic lantern slides for the benefit of the Clarence wives.
She was in Switzerland again in 1902, to hold Ulrich to his promise to take her up the Finsteraarhorn. She discovered that her reputation had grown. To her great pleasure the guard on the train asked her if she were the same Miss Bell who had climbed the Engelhorn the previous year. Now, in the same Rosenlaui inn, she ran into a rival, and one who sharpened her ambitions. She wrote:
There is another climbing woman here, Frl. Kuntze—very good indeed she is, but not very well pleased to see me as I deprive her of Ulrich Führer with whom she has been climbing. She has got a German with her, a distinguished climber from Berne, and I sat and talked to them this afternoon when they came in . . . They have done several things in the Engelhorn but the best thing hereabouts remains to be done.
The “best thing hereabouts” was the Finsteraarhorn. Gertrude was so intent on its conquest that she took in her stride the first of the “impossibles” that Ulrich had decided they would do together, the Lauteraarhorn-Schreckhorn traverse. It would be a first ascent. On 24 July they had climbed up to the high ridge when, somewhat comically, they came face-to-face with the formidable Fräulein Helene Kuntze, who had also determined to build her cairn on the top and get her name in the record books. It appears that there was an acrimonious exchange between the two ladies, but the laurels went to Gertrude. Amused and on her mettle, she achieved the first ascent without much difficulty, rather to her surprise. According to the Alpine Journal, it remains technically her most important climb.
Now she had truly earned her attempt on the Finsteraarhorn, the highest mountain in the Oberland. The first ascent had been made in 1812, but the north-east face had never been climbed, and it was this new and difficult route that she and Ulrich had cautiously been considering for two years. Sharp as a blade, this remote and bad-tempered mountain rises perpendicular to a razor ridge at 14,022 feet, its majestic steeple point visible for a hundred miles. Solitary and far from civilization, it is notorious for its bad weather and frequent avalanches. Experienced climbers had turned away from the challenge that this thirty-five-year-old woman and her guide now set themselves. This was to be Gertrude’s most dangerous mountain exploit. For the next twenty-five years, it would be regarded as one of the greatest expeditions in the history of Alpine climbing.
For practice, she and the Führers polished off the Wellhorn arête, with intense cold the only problem. Then she went with Ulrich for an inspection walk of the rock conditions on the Wetterhorn, an unconventional approach on to the Finsteraarhorn but one that he thought might get them off to a good start. “This morning I started out at 5:30 to—well, Ulrich calls it examining the movement of rocks, it means that you go up and see if a stone falls on you and if it doesn’t you know you can go up that way . . . We went under a glacier fall, where I examined the movement of a stone on my knee . . . it hurt.”
They lost twenty-four hours in trying this approach, and started again the next day. On a perfect evening, they arrived at the hut early, and Gertrude wandered off across the grass without a coat, turning over stones to admire the clumps of sweet pale violets. At 1:35 a.m. they left the hut, the first object being the unstable arête before them, rising from the glacier in a series of angled gendarmes and towers. “The great points are continually over-balancing and tumbling down . . . they are all capped with loosely poised stones, jutting out and hanging over and ready to fall at any moment.” Putting her hand into a crack, she loosened a crumbling two-foot-square rock. It fell on top of her and knocke
d her skidding down the ice until she managed to arrest her fall at a tiny ledge. “I got back on my feet without the rope, which was as well for a little later I happened to pass the rope through my hands and found that it had been cut half through about a yard from my waist.”
Now with a shorter rope, she toiled on up the arête, while the angle grew steeper, and below them, ominous black clouds began to boil up from the west. They could see the top of the arête still far above, and the summit of the mountain beyond. At first they were encouraged, but another hour passed without much progress, the weather getting worse by the minute. The snow began to fall, and they were still a thousand feet from the summit when the way narrowed to a single pinnacle, a terrifying prospect with a twenty-foot overhang. If they managed to climb the pinnacle, Ulrich thought, they should be able to make it from there to the summit. In any case, there was no alternative.
Meanwhile the wind strengthened, and a thick mist began to rise up from the valley. To get to the pinnacle, they had to creep along the knife edge of a col. Having managed that, they tied Ulrich’s rope to a rock, then lowered him gingerly onto a sloping ledge below the overhang, from which he would attempt to climb. He tried for a few minutes and gave up in despair: not only did the rockface slope outwards as well as downwards, but it was brittle and flaky. Next they tried the far side of the tower, where an almost vertical couloir of glassy ice ran upwards from the foot. This way, too, proved impossible. Although only fifty feet from the top of the arête, they were now in a desperate situation. There was only one option left, and it was a grim one: to turn back down the precipice in what was now appalling weather. The wind was bringing down upon them a continual avalanche of thin snow, and half an hour into the descent the mist was so thick that they could see nothing beyond the rock in front of their faces. She wrote: “I shall remember every inch of that rock face for the rest of my life.”
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