The Rosenlaui Valley with the Wetterhorn

When Calame set up this view of the Rosenlaui valley in 1856, the peak filling the sky behind it had just become the most talked-about mountain in the Alps. Two years earlier, in 1854, the English judge Alfred Wills had climbed the Wetterhorn with local guides, and London celebrated the ascent as the opening of a golden age of Alpine climbing. Almost overnight these summits were turning from something travellers crossed with dread into something they came to conquer. Calame gives the Wetterhorn its full height above the valley, the glacier spilling down toward the firs in the foreground. The celebrated climb of 1854 was not even the first. Two Grindelwald guides, Melchior Bannholzer and Hans Jaun, had already stood on that summit ten years before, in 1844.