Blood in the Snow

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 407, 16 July 1928, Page 9

Blood in the Snow

ALPINE TRAGEDY Four Men Plunge to Death (United P.A.—By Telegraph — Copyright) (United Service) Received 11.47 a.m. LONDON, Sunday. THE Geneva correspondent of the “Daily News” says a tragedy occurred, in the Zermatt district which is the worst in 25 years, four persons being killed.

Watchers from an hotel on the Gorner Grat witnessed every phase.* It was even possible through a telescope to observe the three alpenstocks in the snow, and trace the blood where the climbers had fallen. The victims were French tourists, Mm. Lebecque, Degigord, Guilbert and Langlois. They started early on Friday to climb the Breithorn, and remained for hours at a spot some distance up, and finally they made a supreme effort to reach the summit. The first man lost his footing, and fell 1,000 feet into a crevasse, dragging two companions. The third soon disappeared into the abyss.

Relief columns immediately searched, and found them all dead. The Breithorn is a mountain on the frontier of Switzerland and Italy, between the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa, and forming a commanding feature of the scenery about Zermatt. Its elevation is 13,685 feet. It contributes the large Breithorn glacier, also a summit in the Lauter-Brunnen region. The Gorner Grat is a famous point of view and rocky ridge, a part of the Riffelberg, about three and a-half miles south-east of Zermatt, with which it is connected by mountain railways. Its altitude is 10,290 feet. It affords an extraordinary panorama of the snows and ice of the Monte Rosa-Breithorn-Matter- * horn group of mountains.