If you haven't a broadbean connection you'll just have to wait a short while. OK?
 |
Hell's (frozen) teeth!
How many climbers have died here on the Eiger North Wall? We peered through our binocs, but saw no-one climbing (nor falling).
At first it seemed odd to see big hotels such a long way up in the mountains, (6762ft). I say a long way, but from here the train continues, (we didn't), up into the Eiger then inside and across the Mönch to the Jungfrau Joch ("The Top of Europe" as they say), where at 11,333ft there's a weather station and a restaurant and a webcam. I took so many photographs and I like nearly all of them. Throughout the 'moon we took a lot of video too. Jo had given me for my birthday a superb little digital video camera. It does all sorts of tricks, many of which I don't yet understand, but suffice to say it takes video and photographs and you can also make DVDs from the results! I think I'll be putting our stuff onto VHS initially. |
With some embarrassment I remembered going to the pictures in the mid-70s in Ambleside with my Adventure Education student colleagues. We filled the place with howls of derisive laughter as we watched Clint Eastwood faking-up climbing scenes on the Eiger North Wall in "The Eiger Sanction".
Shame, it's a good film really.
|
We found a small bar-restaurant where cold apple sauce formed part of my excellent pasta-based meal. You see that red-topped conical thing near the centre? That's a teepee, a large teepee-cafe. Much as I like teepees, (and don't say wigwam, it's not cool), a teepee can only ever look slightly silly and very incongruous at such a location.
So there we were feeling excitingly dizzy at the altitude and what do you do? Well, you drink beer, don't you! |
|
Not a sporran, but the video camera case.
Eiger, (Nordwand around to the left). |
Mönch, (that's not cloud, it's windblown snow). |
We'd walked one mile, near enough, to the foot of the Eiger North Wall.
|
|
These mountains, compared with ours,
are new and they're still changing every day.
When Mark Twain visited Europe he stood on a glacier and was most disappointed to find that it didn't take him down into the valley.
Europe's glaciers are all very much shortened this year, but if we all turn our fossil-fuelled central heating down really low, (OK?), perhaps they'll creep back again. Better still, buy a woodstove. Even allowing for emissions of fossil CO2 in planting, harvesting, processing and transporting the firewood, replacing fossil fuel with wood fuel will typically reduce net CO2 emissions by over 90%!! (A monk and) The Monk. |
That evening we felt as if we'd had some exercise.
