WRITES AND FREEZES.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 282, 28 November 1929, Page 11

WRITES AND FREEZES.

STUDENT'S DYING EXPERIENCE DIARY FOUND IN DEAD HANDS HIS LAST HOURS IN THE ALPS. An unusually precise account of a not unusual tragedy of the Alps—freezing to death —was furnished by the discovery in the frozen hands of a dead Innsbruck student of a diary containing an account of his last hours.

The 19-year-old student of the Innsbruck Technical College, Eranz Lutz, set out on a solitary ascent of the Gross Loft'ler, in the Zillerthal Alps. His body was discovered by a search party of Alpine jaegers and gendarmes on the glacier below the Gross Loffler peak, frozen so hard in the new snow that it had to be dug out with icepicks.

Lutz related in his diary how he began the descent at 5 o'clock on Sunday afternoon. He told how he crashed in the dusk over a 200-foot wall of on to the glacier. Though badly inured, he managed to drag himself over the ice for a hundred yards, when his progress was impeded by a crevasse.

"I do not. suffer particularly," he wrote,, "but the blood seems to be slowly turning to ice in my veins, and I suppose that before morning comes I shall be frozen to death. If help does not reach me before then, I want it to be arranged that the little which I posses in the world should go to my brother. And I want my parents to pardon me for my foolhardinesß in making this dangerous tour alone." He then quietly set down a description of the horror and grandeur of a storm in the Alps as seen by one slowly freezing to death on the edge of a glacier, until he lost consciousness.

The search party found that he had followed a wrong path and in his descent was undertaking a quite impossible task.