Monte Rosa

The Monte Rosa (or synonymously used as a pleonasm: Monte Rosa massif is a mountain massif located in the eastern part of the Pennine Alps. It is located between Switzerland and Italy . Monte Rosa is the second highest mountain in the Alps and western Europe.Monte Rosa is a huge ice-covered mountain in the Alps, located on the watershed between central and southern Europe. Its main summit, named Dufourspitze in honor of the surveyor Guillaume-Henri Dufour, culminates at 4,634 m above sea level and is followed by the five nearly equally high subsidiary summits of Dunantspitze, Grenzgipfel, Nordend, Zumsteinspitze and Signalkuppe. Monte Rosa is the highest mountain of both Switzerland and the Pennine Alps and is also the second-highest mountain of the Alps and Europe outside the Caucasus.The north-west side of the central Monte Rosa massif, with its enormous ice slopes and seracs, constitutes the boundary and upper basin of the large Gorner Glacier, which descends towards Zermatt and merges with its nowadays much larger tributary, the Grenzgletscher , right below the Monte Rosa Hut on the lower end of the visible western wing. The Grenzgletscher is an impressive glacier formation between the western wing of the mountain and Liskamm, a ridge on its southwestern side on the Swiss-Italian border. On the eastern side, in Italy, the mountain falls away in an almost vertical 2,400-metre-high wall of granite and ice, the biggest in Europe, overlooking Macugnaga and several smaller glaciers. Monte Rosa was studied by pioneering geologists and explorers, including Leonardo da Vinci in the late fifteenth century and Horace-Bénédict de Saussure in the late eighteenth century. Following a long series of attempts beginning in the early nineteenth century, Monte Rosa's summit, then still called Höchste Spitze , was first reached in 1855 from Zermatt by a party of eight climbers led by three guides. The great east wall was first climbed in 1872, from Macugnaga. Each summer a large number of climbers set out from the Monte Rosa Hut on the mountain's west wing for one of its summits via the normal route or for the Margherita Hut on the Signalkuppe , used as a research station. Many tourists and hikers also come each year to the Gornergrat on the north-west side of the massif, to see the panorama that extends over the giants of the Alps, from Monte Rosa to the Matterhorn.
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