Named after Horace Walker (1838–1908), the English alpinist who reached this highest summit of the Grandes Jorasses on 30 June 1868 with Melchior Anderegg. The collective name 'Jorasses' derives from the Aosta-side Franco-Provençal joràsse, a regional word for a wooded mountainside (compare French jorat).
Highest summit of the Grandes Jorasses and one of the great north walls of the Alps; the normal route climbs the south flank from the Italian side.
Horace Walker, with the great Oberland guide Melchior Anderegg, reached the highest point of the Grandes Jorasses on 30 June 1868. The mountain's true fame, though, comes from its north face — a 1200-metre granite wall above the Leschaux glacier. The central Croz Spur was climbed in 1935 by Rudolf Peters and Martin Meier, and the Walker Spur, the last of the three classic 'last great problems of the Alps' (with the Eigerwand and the Matterhorn north face), was climbed on 4–6 August 1938 by Riccardo Cassin, Luigi Esposito and Ugo Tizzoni. Cassin had never seen the face before he arrived in Chamonix.
Route lines are approximate — drawn from guidebook waypoints, not GPS tracks. Don't navigate by them.
