Das Wetterhorn.

Title

Das Wetterhorn.

Description

View shows the Wetterhorn in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland. In the foreground mountain huts and locals fetching water. Oil colour print after the original drawing by Johann Bernhard Schmelzer.

ca. 1900

Artist

Wolf

Historical Description

The Wetterhorn (3,692 m) is a peak in the Swiss Alps towering above the village of Grindelwald. Formerly known as Hasle Jungfrau, it is one of three summits on a mountain named the "Wetterhörner", the highest of which is the Mittelhorn (3,704 m) and the lowest and most distant the Rosenhorn (3,689 m). The latter peaks are mostly hidden from view from Grindelwald.. The summit of the Wetterhorn was first reached in 1844 by Grindelwald mountain guides Hans Jaun and Melchior Bannholzer, three days after they had accompanied a large group organized by geologist Édouard Desor on the first ascent of the Rosenhorn. The Mittelhorn was climbed for the first time in 1845 by the same guides, this time accompanied by a third, Kaspar Abplanalp, and the British climber Stanhope Templeman Speer. Speer was the son of a Scottish doctor and lived in Interlaken, Switzerland. Chromolithographic Christmas card of the Wetterhorn as seen from the Kleine Scheideck, by Helga von Cramm, c. 1880 Joseph Anton Koch, Das Wetterhorn mit dem Reichenbachtal, 1824 An ascent in September 1854 by a group that included Alfred Wills, who apparently believed he had made the first ascent, is much celebrated in Britain. Wills' description of this trip in his book Wanderings Among the High Alps (published in 1856) helped to make mountaineering fashionable in Britain and ushered in what has been called the golden age of alpinism, the systematic exploration of the Alps by British climbers. Despite several now well-documented earlier ascents and the fact that he was guided to the summit, Willis was praised in his 1912 obituary as "Certainly the first who can be said with some certainty to have stood on the really highest peak of the Wetterhorn itself" (i.e., the 3,692-meter summit). In 1866, Lucy Walker was the first documented woman to climb the peak.