THE TRAGEDIES OF MONT BLANC.
Mount Blanc has been prolific in dramatic accidents and that not because of its difficulty but owing to the great expanse of its high snow region and its liability to storms. The weather high up on Mount Blanc would of course be thor-ght nothing of in the Arctic regior.s but men do not as a rule carry Arctic equipment up a mountain on whose high places they expect to snend at most a few hours of probably fine weather. The expectations of such parties have several times been disl appointed and they have escaped with difficulty or succumbed to exposure. There is a long list of the Mout Blanc accidents in C. E. Matthew's interesting "Annals of Mount Blanc." The first was the overthrow of Dr. Hamel's party in 1820 by an avalanche. In the conditon of the snow they ought not to have been where they were when it occurred. Some of them escaped. Others were buried in the depths of a crevasse. Forty-one years afterwards the ice gave up its victims. The fragmentary remains reappeared at the snout of the glacier having slowly travelled clown from near the mountain top. In 1866 another similar accident occurred and the victims' remains likewise were given up in 1897. But the most tragic of the Mount Bjanc fatalities happened in 1870 when a party of eleven succumbed. They duly reached the summit at 2.30 in the afternoon. Then a storm overtook them. They passed the night in a ho'e dug out of the snow and suffered greatly being doubtless insufficiently clad. They remained there the whole of the next day and night the storm continuing. They had no food. They were frostbitten and exhausted. One of them, wrote a piteous record of their sufferings. The following night all were dead, IViany others have, died on Mount Blanc from exposure as for ir-starce that refined Oxford scholar isutltVi ip. The same mountain on iis ii.oie difficult and Italian side l.\ied an equally hsavy toli on Cambridge when it destroyed that admirable man of science Frank Balfour.
Permanent link to this item
Hononga pūmau ki tēnei tūemi
https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/WAG19090706.2.50
Bibliographic details
Ngā taipitopito pukapuka
Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9535, 6 July 1909, Page 7
Word count
Tapeke kupu
349THE TRAGEDIES OF MONT BLANC. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 9535, 6 July 1909, Page 7
Using this item
Te whakamahi i tēnei tūemi
Stuff Ltd is the copyright owner for the Wairarapa Age. You can reproduce in-copyright material from this newspaper for non-commercial use under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). This newspaper is not available for commercial use without the consent of Stuff Ltd. For advice on reproduction of out-of-copyright material from this newspaper, please refer to the Copyright guide.