My summer in the Alps 1913 Author:William Williams Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Corner Glacier below. Fortunately the Italian fog halted at the Schwarzthor and did not cross the boundary into Switzerland. The upper portion of the Schwarze... more » Glacier consists of steep slopes of snow, and these were becoming very soft under the influence of a hot sun. We literally waded down them, and as we approached the bottom entered a veritable maze of broken and fissured ice, with surrounding ice towers, or seracs, differing however from the ordinary maze in that it sloped downward, which circumstance, taken in conjunction with the softness of the snow, would have rendered very difficult the task of returning; in fact, to remount the 2,000 feet of steep, soft snow that afternoon would have been next to impossible. As we progressed, we seemed to become more and more involved and finally found ourselves on a transverse band of ice with the way to the next one apparently barred. Usually, where the intervening fissures are too wide to be jumped, one can get around the ends, but not so here. After much careful consideration the guides determined that to extricate ourselves it would be necessary to enter what may be roughly described as an ice cave, and cut our way up partitions of ice within this cave a distance of some twenty feet. This was attended with some danger owing to the possibility of the chopping on a hot afternoon bringing down portions of the ice above; but as a result of much delicate ice work on the part of the guides we finally emerged in safety on to the next band of ice, whence progress became relatively easy. The descent of the Schwarzthor is not usually accompanied with serious difficulties and those encountered may be ascribed to the abnormal amount of snow, which affected materially the movement and configuration of the lower portion of the Schwarze Glacie...« less