Ride the Alps Across the Glaciers of Waters that Feed Europe’s Greatest Rivers, the Rhine, Rhone, Danube and Po

Ride the Alps across the glaciers of waters that feed Europe’s greatest rivers, the Rhine, Rhone, Danube and Po

Hannibal of Carthage crossed the Alps to relentlessly overcome the power of ancient Rome, Caesar to conquer Gaul and Britain, Napoleon to subdued Italy. Today these mountains attract sportsmen rather than soldiers of fortune, but their challenge is as formidable as ever. About 200million years ago, Africa collided with Europe, and the gigantic geological chaos gave birth to the highest mountain range on the continent of Europe. Alps, offers an impressive landscape of peaks and ridges and fingers pointing towards the sky.

The ancient Romans were content to keep to the passes through the Alps without bothering to explore the peaks above the snow line. That task was left mainly to a handful of tough amateur mountaineers from Britain in the last century. They struggled across glaciers, whose waters feed Europe’s greatest rivers-the Rhine, the Rhone, the Danube and the Po. Since the dawn of time Alps was considered to be the water cascade of Europe. They inched their way towards peaks – not to found empires, but because the summits of the Matterhorn and Mount Blanc were there.

Compared to other continents, Europe today seems neat and tidy. Its towns, its tilled fields, its roads and railways, its rivers and canals, its villages with their cottage s and church spires, all suggest that man is master, that nature has been tamed and bridled. But in Alps not even the most arrogant man can cling long to the pretention of human superiority of nature. The mountains dwarf him, inspiring awe, demanding respect. They put man in his place, despite all his artificial aids. They yield to men of courage and skill; but they punish reckless and thoughtless adventurers without mercy.

From these early days to the present generation of climbers, who are undeterred even by such terrifying challenges as the North face of the Eiger, the Alps have achieved a mystique of their own. Peaks like the Matterhorn have been endowed with an almost religious symbolism. ‘Mountains,’ one climber has written, ‘do not seem hostile to man. No. they put on an aspect of higher dignity.’ And another mountaineer has explained the eternal fascination of the snow-covered peaks. When he climbs, he sees mountains ‘as no one has ever painted them, full of wonder that no fairy tales have ever shown me, even in dreams’.

The glaciers round Mont Blanc show the hostile face of the mountains; the climber puts a foot wrong at his peril, and the crevasses give up their dead years later, when the ice has crept its slow way to the warmer regions at the mountain’s foot. The glaciers are a relic of the Ice Ages, when life was a continual struggle against the cold. And their grip has slackened only slightly since then; there is still enough ice in the glaciers of the world to cover the whole of South America.

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