Accordingly, the next morning we set out for the peak. All previous
climbers, as we were aware, had attacked it from the west. That seemed
the obvious thing to do, because the westward slopes of the mountain,
while very steep, are less abrupt than those which face the rising
sun. In fact, the eastern side of the Grand Teton appears to be
absolutely unclimbable. But both Hall and I had had experience with
rock climbing in the Alps and the Dolomites, and we knew that what
looked like the hardest places sometimes turn out to be next to the
easiest. Accordingly we decided--the more particularly because it
would save time, but also because we yielded to the common desire to
outdo our predecessors--to try to scale the giant right up his face.
We carried a very light but exceedingly strong rope, about five
hundred feet long, wore nail-shod shoes, and had each a metal-pointed
staff and a small hatchet in lieu of the regular mountaineer's
axe. Advancing at first along the broken ridge between two gorges we
gradually approached the steeper part of the Teton, where the cliffs
looked so sheer and smooth that it seemed no wonder that nobody had
ever tried to scale them.
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