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Above the Snow Line: Mountaineering Sketches Between 1870 and 1880 cover

Above the Snow Line: Mountaineering Sketches Between 1870 and 1880

Chapter 14: Footnotes
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About This Book

The author offers a series of first-person sketches of Alpine climbing adventures and observant travel essays, mixing detailed accounts of ascents and failed attempts on prominent peaks with camp life, guide relations, hotel anecdotes, and practical techniques such as detecting crevasses and sleeping outdoors. Interwoven are reflections on the psychology and social habits of climbers, changing mountaineering methods, near-miss episodes and landscape impressions, concluding with an essay on the sport's future that considers high-altitude physiology, directions for development, and the possible limits of ascent.


Footnotes

1.
Franz Andermatten died in August 1883. His name is mentioned elsewhere in these sketches, but I leave what I have written untouched: for I do not hold with those who would efface the recollection of all that was bright and merry in one taken from us.
2.
In the old house, be it noted—not the modern luxurious combination of a granite fortress and a palace.
3.
Travels in the Alps, p. 119.
4.
Described in anatomical text-books as forming the swelling of the calf.
5.
It has transpired since that our judgment happened to be right in this matter, and we might probably have saved an hour or more at this part of the ascent.
6.
Hector Berlioz.
7.
This is Mr. Edward Whymper’s measurement. Humboldt, as quoted by Mr. Whymper, gave 21,460 feet as the height. (Alpine Journal, vol. x. p. 442.)
8.
The Frosty Caucasus, by F. C. Grove, p. 236.
9.
Travels in the Air, edited by James Glaisher, F.R.S., p. 57 (2nd ed.).
10.
Op. cit. p. 9.
11.
I understand that the expedition has since been accomplished in a much shorter time.
12.
In Messrs. Coxwell and Glaisher’s ascent from Wolverhampton the balloon when at the height of 29,000 feet was mounting at the rate of 1,000 feet a minute.
13.
I am aware of M. Paul Bert’s researches; but these questions are not to be settled in the laboratory.
14.
Vide Alpine Journal, vol. xi. p. 78. “The Alpine Obituary,” by C. E. Mathews.