![]() ![]() Shockingly, given how many attempts had been made before, Whymper’s team found the ascent of the mountain fairly simple, Ruck writes. Convinced that an approach beginning at the Zermatt glacier was the right approach, Whymper pressed on with a team of six others. Eventually, writes Ruck, they differed on how to approach the mountain and the two went separate ways. First Whymper and Carrel tried one approach, then another. Like it is today, mountaineering in the 1860s was a technical field, and questions of “approach”–on what side of the mountain to begin a climb, and how to continue it–are key. “Stimulated to make fresh exertions by one repulse after another, I returned, year after year, as I had opportunity, more and more determined to find a way up it, or to prove it to be really inaccessible,” Whymper wrote. On most of them, he was accompanied by a local guide named Jean-Antoine Carrel, who also wanted to reach the summit. Whymper made no fewer than seven failed attempts to scale the mountain, the first in August 1861, writes Adam Ruck for The Telegraph. Surprisingly few of them died in the process of seeking to reach the top for glory, England and scientific advancement. ![]() Whymper was climbing during the “ golden age of alpinism.” During that era, mountaineers-mostly British-raced to be the first to reach the peaks of mountains in the Alps and elsewhere. "It was considered to be the most thoroughly inaccessible of all mountains, even by those who ought to have known better.” “The Matterhorn attracted me simply by its grandeur,” Whymper later wrote in his memoir, Scrambles Among the Alps. But one continue to elude him: the Matterhorn. In the first half of the 1860s, he summited several mountains. The British engraver came to Switzerland to do art for a book on the Alps, according to Encyclopedia Britannica, and found his calling. Edward Whymper, born on this day in 1840, headed an era-setting mountaineering trip. ![]()
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