what is a mountaineer

Sat, Feb 23, 2008

I’m reading Killing Dragons at the moment, a superbly readable, entertaining and humourous account of the development of mountaineering in the Alps. I’m up to Whymper and Tyndall, having started with the greats of early Alpine exploration, Balmat and Paccard when they first climbed Mont Blanc, followed by Saussure and watched from afar all the time by Bourrit. The characters come alive in the book and you get a feel for what it must have been like to be a mountaineer in those far off days, of quaffing champagne on the summits and sleeping rough where there are now Alpine huts. But it also got me thinking about what it is to be a mountaineer.

Especially when I read the editor’s note in The Alpinist which I found from this post over on Summit Dreams. When I was young I read all about Everest in the hands of Mallory and Irvine, Hillary, Bonnigton, Haston, Scott and all those other larger than life characters. The stories were inspiring and were more or less responsible for me heading into the hills, though Tom Weir and Hamish Brown played a large part in that too. These men were mountaineers. They planned and climbed their routes. They were supported by teams of porters and other climbers. They were called mountaineers but they were different from the mountaineers described in the early parts of Killing Dragons.

Much has been written about the exploits of Victorian British mountaineers in the Alps but who really were the mountaineers? When Paccard and Balmat made the first ascent of Mont Blanc, Paccard was given the credit as he was higher up the social scale than Balmat. That was the way of things in those days. Balmat did eventually get the credit and the prize money but it was accepted that Paccard was the “mountaineer”. In truth, Paccard didn’t stand a chance without Balmat. Balmat planned the route, followed it, analysed the dangers and completed the expedition, with Paccard in tow. Similarly, Tyndall made an attempt on the Matterhorn but would have got nowhere without his guide, Bennen. And yet Tyndall was regarded as one of the best mountaineers of the age.

Comparing the Victorian mountaineers with those who guided them to the summits, the difference was the Victorian British had copious amounts of holidays from their middle class occupations and the cash to keep them in the Alps for the duration. The guides were chamois hunters who spent their lives in high places. They had the knowledge and skills to go just about anywhere in the Alps and combining the two social groups led to an explosion in Alpine exploration.

But is it enough to be on a mountain to be called a mountaineer? Is a guided client, who struggles and moans and derides everything below the summit a mountaineer? For that is how most of the Victorians behaved. Early forays into the the Alps were driven by Saussure’s prize for the first ascent of Mont Blanc but after that, people started to notice that they actually enjoyed being in the mountains and three types of individuals seemed to emerge. The scientists, who were accompanied to the summits by a mini village of guides, porters and copious amounts of wine, mutton and other fine materials and spent days or weeks at altitude, making measurements and noting everything in their journals. Then there were the spiritualists like Ruskin, who abhorred the tourist culture of Victorian infested Chamomix and who came to gaze on the mountains and sing their praises in poetry while the third group were those who came to conquer. They snapped up guides and stormed the summits and they were called mountaineers.

But underlying all these invasions of bombastic bravadoists were the guides. The real mountaineers. When chamois hunters died in the mountains, their friends would always go up to collect the body. The monks on the Great St. Bernard pass collected the frozen corpses that littered the route each winter and stored them in a makeshift morgue at their hospice. There was a silent respect for those who had died in the mountains. It was almost as if those who perished in mountains were part of a special community. A community who grieved at their loss and looked after their remains when they fell victim to the vagaries of Alpine winters. I remember reading about Doug Scott and Chris Bonnington on the Ogre and how Scott broke his legs and Bonnigton help him down. Joe Simpson recounts the tragic tale of Tony Kurtz in The Beckoning Silence and the efforts of the guides to save his life. These are all accounts of rescue, camaraderie and basic human friendship and help at altitude. These traits have endured throughout the history of mountaineering, from the days of chamois hunters dragging Victorian arrivistes to grumbling summits, through early Himalayan exploration and conquest to today’s high altitude, lightweight and very fast ascentionists. All share the same basic attributes of being a mountaineer. The ability to pick a good line, analyse the dangers, weigh them up against the goal and “go for it”. Add in the concern for fellow human beings sharing that environment and you have the basic definition of a mountaineer.

Until you get to Everest that is. To me, Everest is the Victorian invasion of the Alps all over again, only this time better equipped and higher but the concept is the same. Adventurous individuals with time and cash to spare hire a guide to drag them up the world’s highest mountain. In Paccard’s day, it was Europe’s highest mountain. Today, the highest point on earth makes a better substitute for those same urban adventurers. Nothing stands in their way of reaching the summit. Dying men and women passed by as they pull themselves up fixed ropes, cocooned and anonymous in their high altitude survival suits. Which brings me to a point, which I don’t fully understand.

Modern mountaineers refer to Everest as being in the “death zone” and try to explain reactions to dying people in these terms. Above a certain height on Everest, apparently, human nature breaks down and one becomes nothing more than a barely functioning collection of organs and bodily functions. I can very much believe this of the likes of Messner, Scott and Haston and all those others who climbed Everest without oxygen. But these modern Victorians are bottle fed oxygen and wrapped in the warm insulation of down suits. They’re no more in the death zone than an airplane passenger at twice the height. Can you imagine the same situation occurring on a plane? Let’s take a contrived example to illustrate the point I’m about to make. You’re in a team who are about to make the first ever gravity free flight. To do this you have paid 50,000 pounds for a place on the team and when the time comes, everyone must remain stock still, to allow the plane to reach the correct point in the trajectory to achieve a gravity free flight path. If anyone moves just prior to the manoeuvre, this upsets the delicate balance of forces, the flight fails and everyone must come down. 2 mins before the manoeuvre the lady in front of you starts to choke. It’s obvious it’s not just a cough as she goes blue and stops breathing. What do you do? You could unbuckle, rush in front her and give her the heimlich manoeuvre and save her life but that would make your objective unreachable. Your decision to save her life would affect everyone on the team. So what would keep you in your seat? The fact you’d parted with 50 grand and you had the chance to be the first to reach this particular objective? What if the flight was 20 quid and one left every half an hour?

That hypothetical scenario was enacted at 60,000 feet, twice the height of the “death zone” in which these new Victorians operate. They have the same constraints though. A large price to pay for entry to the team. If they descend, the whole team descends but the option of climbing Everest the next day isn’t available. It’s all or nothing. For a month or two, they’ve bought their way into the life of a mountaineer but they are not of a mountaineer’s context. Their context for climbing is different and what they see on the way is outwith their context. They don’t know how to react. They don’t have the skills to survive once the contract has been ripped up and they’re on their own, thinking for themselves. For a guided client, I imagine coming across a dying person on Everest must be like someone like me going across the walkway between the Petronas Twin Towers and a gust of wind blows down the walls and causes the floor to slope at 45 degrees. It’s completely outwith the experience I would associate with an urban context. Add to that someone next to me clinging on for dear life and I can almost start to imagine what decisions would have to be made. What if I was on my way to an important interview that could change my life? I could just crawl the last bit across the walkway and continue as normal once back in the building. But what would be normal after such an experience? Could I stand in the building and think “that was close, that could have been me falling”. Would that life changing interview be the same? When something of that magnitude occurs it’s in itself more life changing than anything that awaits should I survive the situation. Could I salvage something from the experience by helping the person next to me? Would I be capable of helping the person? I really don’t know.

There’s a hidden core to us all. Some call it the “fight or flight” syndrome but that’s too base in this context. There’s no immediate danger to you on a fixed rope, in an oxygen mask, in a down suit, in radio communication with base camp. The threat is psychological. The monetary value that places you there, the social value of the outcome of your adventure, the almost talismanic following of the fixed rope. The physical and mental motions you have performed have got you this far. If they stop, you stop, or so the inexperienced perceive. A dying person appearing out of the blizzard, crouched and alone is a question posed by the mountain.

The mountain is asking, “Who are you”?