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Updated: June 24, 2025
If we fell from the arête we might not stop going for four thousand feet. Down below, a thin, blue line was a bergschrund that was capable of swallowing an army corps. That patch of bluish patina was a tumbled mass of séracs. The sloping glacier looked flat. Then the guides said we were going slowly. I knew they meant that for me, of course, and I felt very angry with them.
He therefore crossed the bergschrund, or crevasse between the glacier and the cliffs, on a snow-bridge, faced the mountain-side once more, and, toiling upwards, reached the summit of the pass a little before sunset. Fortunately the weather continued fine, and the country below appeared much less rugged than that over which he had passed, but he had not yet got clear of difficulties.
They crossed the bergschrund with less difficulty than they had anticipated, and ascending a ridge of debris, by the side of the lateral glacier which descended from the cliffs of the Aiguille d'Argentière, they advanced into the bay under the southern wall of the Aiguille du Chardonnet.
The ascent was comparatively mild, except where it became a sheet of smooth and slippery granite; but when he reached a clump of large junipers, his course was arrested by a bergschrund, which divides this block evidently a second outlier from the apex of the Sharr, the "Dome" and the "Parrot's Beak."
In this job he was the true professional. I was thankful Blenkiron was not with us, for the thing would have given a squirrel vertigo. The chips of ice slithered between my legs and I could watch them till they brought up just above the bergschrund. The ice was in shadow and it was bitterly cold.
These pinnacles are very hard to climb. As they are surrounded by a chasm of varying width the bergschrund which one must leap over, and as their precipitous escarpments afford but small footholds, most of the tourists climbing the mountain content themselves with reaching the bergschrund and from there enjoy the panorama.
Snow has been changed to neve, and neve to glacial ice, both by pressure, which drives the air from the interspaces of the snowflakes, and also by successive meltings and freezings, much as a snowball is packed in the warm hand and becomes frozen to a ball of ice. THE BERGSCHRUND. The neve is in slow motion.
There is really only five minutes of interest on the Schwartzberg-Weissthor. We came to that in the arête, for after following it for a few minutes we turned off it to the left and came to the bergschrund, the big crevasse which separates the highest snows or ice from the glacier. By now I was quite anxious that the guides should find the schrund difficult.
The bergschrund with its fragile lip of ice, the crevasse with its treacherous bridges, and the avalanche which an ill-timed footstep starts with overwhelming havoc, do not threaten the explorer of the Western mountains; and ordinarily he passes from height to height from the base with its wreaths of evergreens to the zone where vegetation is limited to the gnarled dwarf-pine, from the foot-hills to the basin of the crisp alpine lake far above the life-limits without once having to scale a cliff, supposing, of course, that he has chosen the best path.
The Gateway was a neck or saddle of drifted snow lying in a gap of the mountain rampart which flanked the last curve of the glacier. Under the cliffs on either hand, like a moat beneath the ramparts, lay a yawning ice-cleft or bergschrund, formed by the drawing away of the steadily moving Barrier ice from the rocks.
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