the valley was due to Joseph Beck of Gressoney-Saint-Jean. He put together a party, including his brother Valentin, and the Gressoney mountain guides Sebastian Linty, Joseph Zumstein, Nicolas (Niklaus) Vincent, François Castel and Étienne Lisco. They set out on a Sunday of August 1778. They started from their sleeping places at midnight, and roped carefully. They had furnished themselves with climbing irons and alpenstocks. At the head of the glacier, they encountered a slope of rock devoid of snow, which they climbed. "It was twelve o'clock. Hardly had we got to the summit of the rock than we saw a grand-an amazing-spectacle. We sat down to contemplate at our leisure the lost valley, which seemed to us to be entirely covered with glaciers. We examined it carefully, but could not satisfy ourselves that it was the unknown valley, seeing that none of us had ever been in the Vallais." The valley, in fact, was none other than the upper valley of Zermatt, and the pass, which these early explorers had reached, was the Lysjoch, where, to this day, the rock on which they rested bears the name that they gave it, the "Entdeckungsfels" (German: Rock of Discovery). Beck's party thus reached a height of 4,178 metres (13,707 ft), probably a record in the Alps at that times. Count Morozzo of Turin was inspired by the view of Monte Rosa and in 1787 he tried to reach its summit from the east face. However he did not go very high, and the mountain looked much too inaccessible to encourage him to proceed further. He reached the place of the actual Marinelli hut, 1,500 m below the summit. The route on the east face was opened only in 1872. In 1789, following the recommendation of the Count, Horace-Bénédict de Saussure went to Macugnaga to explore the mountain. He climbed Pizzo Bianco, a 3215 m summit facing the mountain from the east and measured the altitude of Monte Rosa. He found a height of 2430 toises. A first serious attempt was made in 1801 by a doctor of Alagna, Pietro Giordani. He reached alone a great height when climbing a 4,046 metres high point on the south-east ridge of the Vincent Pyramid, later named Giordanispétz or Punta Giordani in his honour. He arrived too late to proceed to the Vincent Pyramid summit and night drove him away. He had to sleep in a