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Le Cervin: Matterhorn, where it all began…
‘It is not the fortune of everyone to live in the sight of the mountains, nor is it the habit of all who dwell amidst their folding arms to seek inspiration on their topmost pinnacles. Many, indeed, who have only read of mountain climbing, consider it a waste of energy. But for all who are willing to receive their message, the glorious eternal mountains extend a silent invitation. To stroll up a hill or toil to the summit of a mountain is often to find at its uppermost vantage a new vision of life and all its possibilities. In mountaineering one enters into intimate relations with the greatest heights and depths our planet has to offer.’ -Leroy Jeffers (1878–1926)
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Try to construct an image in your imagination of a mountain. Any mountain. Chances are excellent that your imaginary mountain will stand out tall and forbidding in your mind’s eye: immense and ponderous, reaching up to the roof of heaven and shrouded by perpetual snow plumes borne on a relentless wind, it will be hard to visualise without feeling an attendant chill of forbidding excitement.
Mountains are the stuff of legends, the raw material of countless romantic stories about fearless adventurers who seek to know the solitary secrets of the earth’s highest places. For most of us, mountains will always remain thus, merely geological…
