Storming the Schweizerland: The 1931 Mount Forel Attempt

The Lure of the Schweizerland Horn

Following the successful relief of Augustine Courtauld in May 1931, the British Arctic Air Route Expedition turned its attention from polar survival to high-angle alpine exploration. Rising above the western head of Sermilik Fjord was the Schweizerland Alps, a wild, heavily glaciated mountain range named by Swiss geophysicist Alfred de Quervain in 1912.

Dominating the range was Mount Forel (3,383 m), a magnificent mountain crowned by an enormous, symmetrical dome of crystalline ice. Standing just north of the Arctic Circle, Forel was the highest mountain in Greenland outside the distant Watkins Range. To Gino Watkins, it was an irresistible mountaineering challenge.

Watkins was determined to test whether high Arctic peaks could be climbed in rapid alpine style. On May 18, 1931, Watkins set out from the coast with chief surveyor Alfred Stephenson, driving two teams of Greenland sledging dogs inland across the fjord glaciers.

Ascending the Midgard Glacier

Navigating dog sleds across sea ice and the chaotic crevasses of the lower Midgard Glacier pushed the two men to their physical limits. Several times, dogs slipped into hidden snow chasms, requiring frantic hauling on leather harnesses to extract the howling animals.

Leaving the dog teams at a base camp on the upper glacier plateau at 1,750 metres, Watkins and Stephenson loaded rucksacks with three days of rations, an ice axe, crampons, and a 100-foot hemp climbing rope. They struck directly toward Mount Forel’s Northeast Ridge.

The approach required scaling steep 40-degree snow ramps beneath towering granite spires. The Arctic sun circled the horizon without setting, softening the upper snowpack during midday and freezing it into hard, gleaming névé at midnight. Taking advantage of the midnight freeze, Watkins and Stephenson climbed through the night, their steel crampon spikes biting into firm ice.

The Crux on the Ice Dome

By early morning on May 29, 1931, Watkins and Stephenson reached a razor-sharp col at 2,650 metres, peering down immense vertical rock walls into the untrodden valleys of King Christian IX Land.

Above them loomed the crux of the mountain: the crowning summit ice dome, a steep, bulbous carapace of hard blue ice perched at over 3,300 metres. Watkins led the way up the Northeast Ridge, kicking steps and cutting occasional handholds in the hard snow.

At an altitude of approximately 3,250 metres—a mere 130 metres below the summit apex—the climbers encountered a formidable bergschrund: a cavernous, bottomless crevasse cleaving the upper snow ramp from the ice dome. To the left, immense overhanging cornices barred progress; to the right, vertical, shattered rock fell away into the void.

Furthermore, the afternoon sun was now blazing down upon the mountain, turning the upper snow slopes into heavy, unstable slush liable to avalanche at any moment. Recognizing that they lacked the wooden ice pitons and fixed ropes necessary to bridge the bergschrund in melting snow, Watkins made the mature and disciplined decision to retreat.

The pair descended safely to Base Camp, having reached the highest mountaineering elevation achieved in Greenland up to that time. Seven years later, in 1938, Swiss alpinist André Roch would follow Watkins’ route to complete the first ascent of Mount Forel, paying tribute to the pioneering reconnaissance established by Gino Watkins.