Thinking of climbing ice this winter drove me to read four chapters in the definitive northeastern climbing history - YANKEE ROCK & ICE - by the Watermans. In reading the chapter entitled, "The First Ice Age: before 1927" I was entranced by the 1905 epic on the Great Gulf Cirque. In Whipple's account in APPALACHIA he quoted a passage by the Victorian alpinist-author Leslie Stephens writing about the Eiger:
"The result of a slip would in all probability have been that the rest of our lives would have been spent in sliding down a snow slope, and that the employment would not have lasted long enough to become monotonous"
