1899 Riffelhorn } In his Pollux } first five days Breithorn (traversed from Schwarzthor) } at Zermatt Six chief points of Monte Rosa } Matterhorn Cols d’Hérens and Bertol Petite Dent de Veisivi } In 12 hours Grande ” } from Kurhaus Dent Perroc } Hotel and back Aig. de la Za (by face) Aig. Rouges (traverse of all peaks) Mt. Blanc de Seilon in one day Dent des Bouquetins Mt. Collon Pigne d’Arolla Dent Blanche (West Arête attempt)
I cannot pretend that this list is perfect, and the brief notes I append are intended rather to give in a small space some of the points of human interest in the above bald list of names than for his mountaineering friends, to whom anything that could be printed here could convey little or nothing that was new.
It is a coincidence that he commenced his acquaintance with the Alps in the very valleys--Ferpècle and Arolla--in which he spent the last days of his life, and down which his friends mournfully escorted his body eight years later. It was on one of the Dents de Veisivi (the Petite Dent) that, in 1898, Professor Hopkinson, one of Jones’ numerous climbing friends, met his death with his two daughters and his son. As we walked down the Arolla valley the day before he fell from the Dent Blanche, Owen Jones was chatting, with a wonderful freshness of recollection of detail, of his climb up the Grand Combin during his first season in the Alps, and I believe the guide who led him up then was one of the search party from Evolena who found his body on the rocks of the Dent Blanche.
The earlier climbs of 1892 were described by him in a paper entitled ‘The Dom Grat and the Fletschhorn Ridge,’ which appeared in the _Alpine Journal_ in 1898. A brief quotation from his own account will give some idea of the easy vivacity of his style.
Speaking of the Saas peaks which ‘were designed in pairs,’ he writes:--
‘It is, perhaps, to our credit that we took an easy pair first--the Mittaghorn and the Egginer--but our stay at Saas that year was to be short, and we could not afford to fail at higher work. A couple of Saas loafers undertook to guide us, but proved to be lamentably weak. They shed tears and ice-axes, and required much help from us dismayed amateurs. Then we left the district, and before my next visit my comrades were scattered over the globe, beyond the seductive influence of axe and rope.’