Rifles, hot water bottles and seaweed

My father was sent to school in Switzerland and fell in love with the mountains. He became an experienced alpinist, never happier than when climbing in the worst of weathers and stopping overnight in the huts that provided refuge at high elevation. He made long-lasting friendships with some of the local guides.
This image from 1914 shows the Konkordia Hut in the Bernese Alps. My father on the far right, wearing the sort of clothes he would still be wearing 50 years later. His companion, Arnold Lunn, scion of the Lunn (Poly) travel company, is dressed in a peculiarly ostentatious leather coat and... carpet slippers. The two men on the left are probably guides.

Two years earlier, at Christmas 1912,  my father had been one of a party of four who had made the first winter ascent of the Dom, at 4545m. the second highest peak in Switzerland. It  was considered quite an accomplishment especially as the weather was severe and the mountain is almost vertical. His companions on that occasion were a Captain Lawrence Bird, 10 years his senior, and two well-known local guides, the brothers Johann and Ferdinand Summermatter.

 My father wrote to a friend the following day: 
We have performed the greatest feat of the season, namely climbed the Dom. They are going to put it in the papers. [It was reported in The Times.] By God it was cold. We had to take great care not to get frozen so had to move about all the time. We started from the hut at 5.45 and got to the top at 1 o/c. 10 minutes rest, not more all that time. There was snow up to our waists in places and on the arrete there was a fearful wind... We had to cut steps all the way. Coming down, an avalanche fell nearly on top of us, also I, who came third, fell into a crevasse - I must say it was a very unpleasant experience. I was walking along when suddenly I felt myself falling and found myself quite inside a huge crevasse hanging on the rope. It was about 500 metres deep and of blue ice. One could hear a rushing noise at the bottom. I was easily held by Capt. Bird and the guide.


Lawrence Bird died in 1960 and his obituary in The Alpine Journal recalls this famous climb. The Summermatter brothers were not keen on tackling the peak in the middle of winter, it states,  but Capt. Bird persuaded them by promising that the local chamois were wintering near the top - both guides being 'incorrigible poachers'. The party carried rifles and hot water bottles which (they claimed) they filled before leaving the hut and took with them to the summit.


Since my father's account makes no mention of rifles or hot water bottles I have to conclude that Bird was in the habit of embellishing the tale. However it has to be said that on another occasion my father did take a bunch of seaweed, brought specially for the purpose, to leave on the Aletsch Glacier in order to confuse scientists when it emerged from the ice in the distant future. (I wonder if it has?)

The extra image, taken by my father, shows Captain Bird (right) with guides Johann and Ferdinand Summermatter.  In the course of writing this blip I discovered that one of the present-day helicopter pilots for the Zermatt mountain rescue team is a Simon Summermatter -  saving climbers' lives a century after one of his forefathers lifted my father out of the crevasse.

(A FathersFriday blip which I missed last week when the site went down as I uploaded it.)