CATALOGUE FOREWARD BY WILLIAM MITCHELL
One hundred and fifty years ago, in 1865, Whymper became the first person to climb the Matterhorn; a triumph that concluded an extraordinary career as the most courageous and determined mountaineer of his generation. In fact, it has been widely suggested that Whymper was a generation ahead of his peers in terms of what he accomplished in the mountains. And he had done it all by the time he was twenty-five years old.
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This summer the narrative landscapist, James Hart Dyke, spent his own ‘season’ in the Alps. For over two weeks in August he trekked and climbed, retracing where possible Whymper’sfootsteps.
Over a period of thirty-one days in June and July 1865, Whymper and his guides climbed five mountains and crossed eleven passes. Four of those summits were first ascents including the Grandes Jorasses and the Aiguille Verte. He ascended just over 100,000 feet in the process and covered the same distance going down. After a string of successes the summer before, Whymper had devised a gruelling campaign for the following climbing season: he intended to scale all the significant unclimbed peaks, and had his sights principally on the Matterhorn. He had failed to climb it eight times since 1861 despite having never seen a mountain, let alone set foot on one, before 1860.
Whymper came from a family of artists who ran a wood engraving business. He too was apprenticed as an engraver although by the time he became proficient –which he soon did -technical advances in printing methods began to supersede this craft. As a young man he went on enormous, solitary walks covering sometimes as much as forty miles or more a day and yearned to be an explorer. At the time he didn’t realise it but his chance to fulfil part of his dreams came in 1860 when he was only twenty years old: the London publishers, Longman, commissioned Whymper to produce a volume of Alpine scenery. But once he had arrived, instead of being satisfied with recording what he saw, he wanted to climb and conquer. Neither a sentimentalist nor fearful, Whymper was an unashamed ‘peak bagger’: in July 1860 he made the following observation in his diary in Zermatt: ‘Saw of course the Matterhorn repeatedly; what precious stuff Ruskin has written about this, as well as many other things. When one has a fair view of the mountain, as I had, it may be compared to a sugar loaf set up on a table; the sugar loaf should have its head knocked on one side. Grand it is, but beautiful I think it is not.’ (from E.Whymper, 1871 Scrambles in the Alps).
To Whymper the unclimbed peaks, passes and glaciers represented a challenge and he didn’t show any enthusiasm for mountains that had already been summited. By comparing his opinion with that of his arch-rival, and arguably far more experienced mountaineer, the Irish geologist and scientist, John Tyndall (1820 -1893), who wrote: ‘The Matterhorn was our temple, and we approached it with feelings not unworthy of so great a shrine,’ one can understand the gulf that separated Whymper from his peers. And yet, like an impassable ‘bergschrund’, and despite so much prowess, Whymper never managed to fully relate to his contemporaries.
The mountain that came to obsess him above all others, the ‘impossible’ peak he craved to get to the top of first, was tragically the one that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Conquering the Matterhorn made him a household name but the infamous disaster on the way down on July 14th 1865 cast a long shadow over Whymper’slife and those of the deceased climbers’ families. The story needs no further telling but there is no denying that the rampage of giant walks, multiple traverses and epic climbing waged by Whymper over that month stands unique in the annals of mountaineering.
Two weeks before the Matterhorn climb, Whmper had laid waste to an equally formidable monster, the Aiguille Verte, which towers above Chamonix. This triumph was, in all likelihood, the first ascent he was most proud of and it is worth remembering when reading the staggering facts listed below that Whymper was an exceptionally resilient walker above everything else. During Whymper’s Alpine seasons, the ‘Golden Age’ of mountaineering, it was not unheard of for climbers to walk to Geneva and back from Saint Gervais, near Chamonix, in twenty-four hours; a journey of 86 miles.
A combination of titanic stamina and unusually fine and settled weather allowed Whymper and his equally hardy companions to follow, with very few deviations, the following itinerary:
