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Updated: June 27, 2025
Tucker improvised what he regarded as highly satisfactory sandals out of felt slippers and pieces of a rubber poncho. Since there seemed to be no rock-climbing ahead of us, we decided to depend on crampons rather than on the heavy hob-nailed climbing boots with which Alpinists are familiar. The snow was very hard until about one o'clock.
With the instinct of the born mountaineer, he had brought out his crampons with him, and had now fastened them on his feet; he knew every part and ridge of the mountains, and had more than once climbed over to that very spot where Kaiser Max had hung in peril of his life. On second thoughts he bade Waldmar go back to the house.
They tend to wear away the aluminium or linoleum plates fixed to the Skis under the foot, but on the other hand they are almost indispensable when Skis are carried across a hard, steep slope, or down an icy path. It seems to me that it is positively dangerous to go any real Ski tour with unnailed boots unless crampons or spikes to fit on to the heels be carried.
Even now one feels the cold strike directly one stops. We get fearfully thirsty and chip up ice on the march, as well as drinking a great deal of water on halting. P.O. Evans, the inventor of both crampons and ski shoes, is greatly pleased, and certainly we owe him much.
We had no crampons for this work as they were all on Scott's own sledge, so that it was necessary at times to pull up the slopes on hands and knees, assisted by our ski sticks, an unusual procedure but the only one possible to employ on the steeper blue ice. We took the sledges up one by one and then went down with an Alpine rope to help James Pigg.
We agreed that he should make a sample pair after the pattern of ski-boots. The sole was to be thick and stiff for we had to be prepared to use crampons but the uppers as soft as possible. In order to avoid leather, which usually becomes stiff and easily cracked in the cold, he was to use a combination of leather and thin canvas for the uppers leather nearest the sole, and canvas above it.
He was a native of those parts and knew every bend and turn of the river. We were, indeed, in great need of help. The doctor's knee grew worse rather than better, and Arthur was suffering the return of an old rheumatism in his leg. I was the only sound member of the party, and my shoulders were galled by the rope and my feet tender and sore from continual wearing of the crampons.
The walls, with panels covered with hieroglyphics, and representations of allegorical processions, must have been the work of thousands of hands for thousands of years; the corridors, of an interminable length, ended in square rooms, in the middle of which pits had been constructed, to which we descended by means of crampons or spiral staircases.
But clever as this device was it still left them without Lashly's active assistance, because directly he relaxed his hold the sledge began to slip. Not for a longtime had he swarmed a rope, and to do so in thick clothing, heavy crampons, and with frost-bitten fingers seemed to him impossible.
The primus stove and cooking apparatus were brought into the tent once more; our sleeping foot-gear was changed for our marching finneskoe and good steel-spiked crampons fixed to the soft fur boots to give us grip in places where the ice was blue and slippery.
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