the new tick list the munro society tries spiritual

Mon, Aug 16, 2010

It seems these days that most things must be categorised. The mystery is being slowly bled from life to solidify in digital repositories such as Facebook and Twitter as bland and lifeless black pudding. The Munros List is a prime example but whereas is has merely been a list of mountains above 3000 feet, increasingly they are having more and more subjective attributes added to them. I first came across this segmentation into league tables when I was doing my ML. In order to pass ML assessment you must have accrued, as an absolute minimum, forty Quality Mountain Days (QMDs). This is still fairly subjective but with the objective eye of MLTS poring over your logbooks, looking for the tell tale signs of a QMD. Length of route, weather, challenges you faced, route planning, navigation etc. These are all fairly objective criteria as they can be measured, sort of and they’re pretty important things if you want to lead people. Categorisation stayed clear of the subjective side of things. Until now.

The Munro Society have come up with one of the most preposterous attributes to be applied to mountains I have ever seen. They call them Mountain Quality Indicators (MQIs) and the attribute to be assigned to a mountain is the “Degree of Aesthetic & Physical Response” it evokes in the mountaineer. Mountains will be scored using a points based system and I quote:

“A mountain scoring 28-32 is described … as an outstanding mountain with many notable strengths plus very likely to provide memorable experiences”.

Mountains scoring 8 to 12 can apparently “provide a limited range of memorable experiences”. Quite what they call a “memorable experience” is not mentioned.

You can download an MQI report form, where you record your day’s experiences, both objective and subjective, assign an MQI to the mountain and send it back to them for saving in their database or wherever these things live. However, the type of person who would download an MQI form in the first place, should rule them out from ever proffering an opinion on “memorable experiences”. People who sport Munro Society ties are most likely to be seen slapping summit cairns and reciting a numerical incantation along the lines of “40 to go”.

Mountain climbing, Munro Bagging included, for The Munros is just a list after all, is essentially a creative process. If it isn’t then you’re just following a list to get to the end. This might sound fanciful but a lot of what I was thinking about this crystallised for me when I saw this John Cleese lecture on being creative:

Like John Cleese, I like to learn something new each day. Not be told something new each day and the more times you climb a hill the better it becomes. It matures courtesy of one’s subconscious. Every time you climb a hill you leave behind an imprint in your mind of who you were at the time. You store away, deep in your subconscious, a stamp made by you in the form you took when you climbed the hill that day. Climbing that hill over the years slowly turns from new experiences to reminiscences of stages in your life. I can climb the Cobbler and regardless of its MQI I will have a memorable experience, if I make the effort to connect with the mountain and tap into all the memories I’ve stored there over the years. I can sit on the summit and look at the rock where I sat as a 16 year old in awe of a mountain I’d never climbed before, in a storm.

The mind is a timid thing and to experience a moment that can be called memorable it needs to be given the space and time to come out of its stress induced shell. You need to shove life’s demands to one side for a set period of time and hand control over to that little lump of grey matter where your subconscious lives. You then just have to go with the flow. Sometimes you don’t realise you’ve had a “memorable experience” ’til years later when you’re sitting remembering the day and you suddenly think, “ah yes, that’s right, forgot all about that bit. That was amazing and…” or you speak to other hill goers and you realise your experiences are vastly different than theirs’. You realise that day on Lochnagar really was a memorable experience.

Being told that the hill you’re climbing will provide you with a memorable experience will just add to the stress. You’ll get to the top to find a lot of other people clustered round the cairn waiting for their memorable experience to happen. The creative spark will be doused by the expectation of having to detect the memorable experience that is obviously awaiting your arrival on the summit, for in the words of John Cleese:

“If you’re racing around all day, ticking things off on lists, looking at your watch, making phone calls, and generally just keeping all the balls in the air, you are not going to have any creative ideas.”

and in the same vein, I think MQIs are just adding to the list of things that must be ticked off. You can’t tell a stressed individual that they are going to have a memorable experience. They’ll just become more stressed in case they miss it. They’ll come down the hill more stressed than when they went up it. Where was that memorable experience then? You said I’d have one!

So I think MQIs should be taken in the same vein as The Munro Society itself. Just a quaint set of rules for tie collectors.