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Dr. Jules Jacot-Guillarmod Diary Entry Sunday, 20 August 1905
It is from Tseram that the actual exploration of this region begins. Alone, Freshfield had passed there before us, in 1899, on his tour of Kangchinjunga; but he had not pursued his investigations in the Yalung glacial basin. As for extracting useful and precise information from the natives on the topography and on the possibilities of climbing the Kangchinjunga, there was no more to think of than to find among them a guide, however rudimentary. It is in these conditions that we enter this valley of the Yalung Chu that Europeans go up for the first time. It is not without a certain feeling of apprehension, tempered, it is true, by the unique happiness unknown to the uninitiated in opening up to human knowledge and science a new field for its investigations, that we let us now direct towards a frontal moraine still devoid of vegetation, and consequently of recent date, which gives us a presentiment of the vicinity of the glacier. This moraine completely obstructs the valley transformed, upstream, into a small lake, Merjelen style, whose outlet has opened up laterally an orifice which, mined every day, constantly causes the level of said lake to vary in which the walls plunge into peak of the glacier.
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