Alpine History is not easy to divide into arbitrary periods; and yet the conquest of the Matterhorn does in a certain sense define a period. It closes what has been called “the golden age of mountaineering.” Only a few great peaks still remained unconquered. In this chapter we shall try to sketch some of the tendencies which differentiate modern mountaineering from mountaineering in the so-called “golden age.”
The most radical change has been the growth of guideless climbing, which was, of course, to be expected as men grew familiar with the infinite variety of conditions that are the essence of mountaineering. In a previous chapter we have discussed the main differences between guided and guideless climbing. It does not follow that a man of considerable mountaineering experience, who habitually climbs with guides need entirely relinquish the control of the expedition. Such a man—there are not many—may, indeed, take a guide as a reserve of strength, or as a weight carrier. He may enjoy training up a young and inexperienced guide, who has a native talent for rock and ice, while lacking experience and mountain craft. One occasionally finds a guide who is a first-class cragsman, but whose general knowledge of mountain strategy is inferior to that of a great amateur. In such a combination, the latter will be the real general of the expedition, even if the guide habitually leads on difficult rock and does the step-cutting. On the other hand a member of a guideless party may be as dependent on the rest of the party as another man on his guides. Moreover, tracks, climbers, guides and modern maps render the mental work of the leader, whether amateur or professional, much less arduous than in more primitive days.
But when we have made all possible allowance for the above considerations, there still remains a real and radical distinction between those who rely on their own efforts and those who follow a guide. The man who leads even on one easy expedition obtains a greater insight into the secrets of his craft than many a guided climber with a long list of first-class expeditions.
One of the earliest of the great guideless climbs was the ascent of Mont Blanc by E. S. Kennedy, Charles Hudson (afterwards killed on the first ascent of the Matterhorn), Grenville and Christopher Smyth, E. J. Stevenson and Charles Ainslie. Their climb was made in 1855, and was the first complete ascent of Mont Blanc from St. Gervais, though the route was not new except in combination, as every portion of it had been previously done on different occasions. One of the first systematic guideless climbers to attract attention was the Rev. A. G. Girdlestone, whose book, The High Alps without Guides, appeared in 1870. This book was the subject of a discussion at a meeting of the Alpine Club. Mr. Grove, a well-known mountaineer, read a paper on the comparative skill of travellers and guides, and used Girdlestone’s book as a text. Mr. Grove said: “The net result of mountaineering without guides appears to be this, that, in twenty-one expeditions selected out of seventy for the purposes of description, the traveller failed absolutely four times; was in great danger three times; was aided in finding the way back by the tracks of other men’s guides four times; succeeded absolutely without aid of any kind ten times on expeditions, four of which were very easy, three of moderate difficulty, and one very difficult.” The “very difficult” expedition is the Wetterhorn, which is nowadays considered a very modest achievement.
Mr. Girdlestone was a pioneer, with the limitations of a pioneer. His achievements judged by modern standards are modest enough, but he was the first to insist that mountaineering without guides is an art, and that mountaineering with guides is often only another form of conducted travel. The discussion that followed, as might be expected, at that time was not favourable either to Girdlestone or to guideless climbing. Probably each succeeding year will see his contribution to modern mountaineering more properly appreciated. The “settled opinion of the Alpine Club” was declared without a single dissentient to be that “the neglect to take guides on difficult expeditions is totally unjustifiable.”
But guideless climbing had come to stay. A year after this memorable meeting of the Alpine Club, two of its members carried out without guides some expeditions more severe than anything Girdlestone had attempted. In 1871 Mr. John Stogdon, a well-known Harrow master, and the Rev. Arthur Fairbanks ascended the Nesthorn and Aletschhorn, and in the following year climbed the Jungfrau and Aletschhorn unguided. No record of these expeditions found its way into print. In 1876, a party of amateurs, Messrs. Cust, Cawood, and Colgrove climbed the Matterhorn without guides. This expedition attracted great attention, and was severely commented on in the columns of the Press. Mr. Cust, in an eloquent paper read before the Alpine Club, went to the root of the whole matter when he remarked: “Cricket is a sport which is admitted by all to need acquired skill. A man can buy his mountaineering as he can buy his yachting. None the less, there are yachtsmen and yachtsmen.”
Systematic climbing on a modern scale without guides was perhaps first practised by Purtscheller and Zsigmondys in 1880. Among our own people, it found brilliant exponents in Morse, Mummery, Wicks, and Wilson some twenty years ago; and it has since been adopted by many of our own leading mountaineers. Abroad, guideless climbing finds more adherents than with us. Naturally enough, the man who lives near the mountains will find it easier to make up a guideless party among his friends; and, if he is in the habit of spending all his holidays and most of his week-ends among the mountains that can be reached in a few hours from his home, he will soon acquire the necessary skill to dispense with guides.
So much for guideless climbing. Let us now consider some of the other important developments in the practice of mountaineering. In the Alps the tendency has been towards specialisation. Before 1865 the ambitious mountaineer had scores of unconquered peaks to attack. After the defeat of the Matterhorn, the number of the unclimbed greater mountains gradually thinned out. The Meije, which fell in 1877, was one of the last great Alpine peaks to remain unclimbed. With the development of rock-climbing, even the last and apparently most hopelessly inaccessible rock pinnacles of the Dolomites and Chamounix were defeated. There is no rock-climbing as understood in Wales or Lakeland or Skye on giants of the Oberland or Valais, such as the Schreckhorn or Matterhorn. These tax the leader’s power of choosing a route, his endurance and his knowledge of snow and ice, and weather; but their demands on the pure cragsman are less. The difficulty of a big mountain often depends very much on its condition and length. Up to 1865 hardly any expeditions had been carried through—with a few exceptions, such as the Brenva route up Mont Blanc—that a modern expert would consider exceptionally severe. Modern rock-climbing begins in the late ’seventies. The expeditions in the Dolomites by men like Zsigmondy, Schmitt, and Winkler, among foreign mountaineers, belong to much the same period as Burgener and Mummery classic climbs in the Chamounix district.
Mummery is, perhaps, best known in connection with the first ascent of the Grepon by the sensational “Mummery crack,” when his leader was the famous Alexander Burgener aided by a young cragsman, B. Venetz. Venetz, as a matter of fact, led up the “Mummery” crack. Mummery’s vigorous book, which has become a classic, contains accounts of many new expeditions, such as the Grepon, the Requin, the Matterhorn by the Zmutt arÊte, and the Caucasian giant Dych Tau, to name the more important. His book, My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, is thoroughly typical of the modern view of mountaineering. It contains some doctrines that are still considered heretical, such as the safety of a party of two on a snow-covered glacier, and many doctrines that are now accepted, such as the justification of guideless climbing and of difficult variation routes. Shortly after the book appeared, Mummery was killed on Nanga Parbat, as was Emil Zsigmondy on the Meije soon after the issue of his book on the dangers of the Alps.
But even Dolomites and Chamounix aiguilles are not inexhaustible, and the number of unconquered summits gradually diminished. The rapid opening up of the Alps has naturally turned the attention of men with the exploring instinct and ample means to the exploration of the great mountain ranges beyond Europe. This does not fall within the scope of the present volume, and we need only remark in passing that British climbers have played an important part in the campaigns against the fortresses of the Himalaya, Caucasus, Andes, and Rockies.
Meanwhile the ambitious mountaineer was forced to look for new routes on old peaks. Now, a man in search of the easiest way up a difficult peak could usually discover a route which was climbable without severe technical difficulty. On a big mountain, it is often possible to evade any small and very difficult section. But most mountains, even our British hills, have at least one route which borders on the impossible, and a diligent search will soon reveal it. Consider the two extremes of rock-climbing. Let us take the Matterhorn as a good example of a big mountain which consists almost entirely of rock. It is impossible to find a route up the Matterhorn which one could climb with one’s hands in one’s pockets, but the ordinary Swiss route is an easy scramble as far as the shoulder, and, with the fixed ropes, a straightforward climb thence to the top. Its Furggen Ridge has been once climbed under fair conditions and then only with a partial deviation. It is extremely severe and dangerous. The task of the mountaineers who first assailed the Matterhorn was to pick out the easiest line of approach. The Zmutt, and in a greater degree the Furggen routes, were obviously ruled out of consideration. The Italian route was tried many times without success before the Swiss route was discovered. Of course, the Matterhorn, like all big mountains, varies in difficulty from day to day. It is a very long climb; and, if the conditions are unfavourable, it may prove a very difficult and a very dangerous peak.
Turning to the nursery of Welsh climbers, Lliwedd can be climbed on a mule, and Lliwedd can also be climbed by about thirty or more distinct routes up its southern rock face. If a man begins to look for new routes up a wall of a cliff a thousand feet in height and a mile or so in breath, he will sooner or later reach the line which divided reasonable from unreasonable risk. Modern pioneer work in the Alps is nearer the old ideal. It is not simply the search for the hardest of all climbable routes up a given rock face. In England, the danger of a rock fall is practically absent, and a rock face is not considered climbed out as long as one can work up from base to summit by a series of ledges not touched on a previous climb. Two such routes will sometimes be separated by a few feet. In the Alps, the pioneer is compelled by objective difficulties to look for distinct ridges and faces unswept by stones and avalanches. There is a natural challenge in the sweep of a great ridge falling through some thousand unconquered feet to the pastures below. There is only an artificial challenge in a “new” route some thousand feet in height separated only by a few yards of cliff from an “old” route. We do not wish to depreciate British climbing, which has its own fascination and its own value; but, if it calls for greater cragsmanship, it demands infinitely less mountain craft than the conquest of a difficult Alpine route.
And what is true of British rock-climbing is even more true of Tirol. Ranges, such as the Kaisergebirge, have been explored with the same thoroughness that has characterised British rock-climbing. Almost every conceivable variation of the “just possible” has been explored. Unfortunately, the death-roll in these districts is painfully high, as the keenness of the young Austrian and Bavarian has not infrequently exceeded their experience and powers.
Abroad, mountaineering has developed very rapidly since the ’sixties. We have seen that English climbers, first in the field, secured a large share of unconquered peaks; but once continental climbers had taken up the new sport, our earlier start was seriously challenged. The Swiss, Austrian, and German have one great advantage. They are much nearer the Alps; and mountaineering in these countries is, as a result, a thoroughly democratic sport. The foreign Alpine Clubs number thousands of members. The German-Austrian Alpine Club has alone nearly ninety thousand members. There is no qualification, social or mountaineering. These great national clubs have a small subscription; and with the large funds at their disposal they are able to build club-huts in the mountains, and excellent meeting places in the great towns, where members can find an Alpine library, maps, and other sources of information. They secure many useful concessions, such as reduced fares for their members on Alpine railways. Mountaineering naturally becomes a democratic sport in mountainous countries, because the mountains are accessible. The very fact that a return ticket to the Alps is a serious item must prevent Alpine climbing from becoming the sport of more than a few of our countrymen. At the same time, we have an excellent native playground in Wales and Cumberland, which has made it possible for young men to learn the craft before they could afford a regular climbing holiday in the Alps. Beside the great national clubs of the Continent, there are a number of vigorous university clubs scattered through these countries. Of these, the Akademischer Alpine clubs at ZÜrich and Munich are, perhaps, the most famous. These clubs consist of young men reading at the Polytechnic or University. They have as high a mountaineering qualification as any existing Alpine clubs. They attach importance to the capacity to lead a guideless party rather than to the bare fact that a man has climbed so many peaks. Each candidate is taken on a series of climbs by members of the club, who report to the committee on his general knowledge of snow and rock conditions, and his fitness, whether in respect of courage or endurance for arduous work.
It is young men of this stamp that play such a great part in raising the standard of continental mountaineering. Their cragsmanship often verges on the impossible. A book published in Munich, entitled Empor, affords stimulating reading. This book was produced in honour and in memory of Georg Winkler by some of his friends. Winkler was a young Munich climber who carried through some of the most daring rock climbs ever recorded. Empor contains his diary, and several articles contributed by various members of one of the most remarkable climbing groups in Alpine history. Winkler’s amazing performances give to the book a note which is lacking in most Alpine literature. Winkler was born in 1869. As a boy of eighteen he made, quite alone, the first ascent of the Winklerturm, one of the most sensational—both in appearance and reality—of all Dolomite pinnacles. On the 14th of August 1888 he traversed alone the Zinal Rothhorn, and on the 18th he lost his life in a solitary attempt on the great Zinal face of the Weisshorn. No definite traces of him have ever been found. His brother, born in the year of his death, has also carried through some sensational solitary climbs.
We may, perhaps, be excused a certain satisfaction in the thought that the British crags can occasionally produce climbers whose achievements are quite as sensational as those of the Winklers. Without native mountains, we could not hope to produce cragsmen equal to those of Tirol and the Alps. One must begin young. It is, as a rule, only a comparatively small minority that can afford a regular summer holiday in the Alps; but Scawfell and Lliwedd are accessible enough, and the comparatively high standard of the British rock-climber owes more to British than to Alpine mountains. It was only in the last two decades that the possibilities of these crags were systematically worked out, though isolated climbs have been recorded for many years. The patient and often brilliant explorations of a group of distinguished mountaineers have helped to popularise a fine field for native talent, and an arena for those who cannot afford a regular Alpine campaign. Guides are unknown in Great Britain, and the man who learns to climb there is often more independent and more self-reliant than the mountaineer who is piloted about by guides. There is, of course, much that can be learned only in the Alps. The home climber can learn to use an axe in the wintry gullies round Scawfell. He learns something of snow; but both snow and ice can only be properly studied in the regions of perpetual snow. The home-trained cragsman, as a rule, learns to lead up rocks far more difficult than anything met with on the average Swiss peaks, but the wider lessons of route-finding over a long and complicated expedition are naturally not acquired on a face of cliff a thousand feet in height. Nor, for that matter, is the art of rapid descent over easy rocks; for the British climber usually ascends by rocks, and runs home over grass and scree. None the less, these cliffs have produced some wonderfully fine mountaineers. We have our Winklers, and we have also young rock-climbers who confine their energies to the permissible limit of the justifiable climbing and who, within those limits, carry their craft to its most refined possibilities. Hugh Pope, one of the most brilliant of the younger school of rock-climbers, learned his craft on the British hills, and showed in his first Alpine season the value of that training. To the great loss of British mountaineering he was killed in 1912 on the Pic du Midi d’Ossau.
Another comparatively recent development is the growth of winter mountaineering. The first winter expedition of any importance after the beginnings of serious mountaineering was Mr. T. S. Kennedy’s attempt on the Matterhorn in 1863. He conceived the curious idea that the Matterhorn might prove easier in winter than in summer. Here, he was very much mistaken. He was attacked by a storm, and retreated after reaching a point where the real climb begins. It was a plucky expedition. But the real pioneer of winter mountaineering was W. A. Moore. In 1866, with Mr. Horace Walker, Melchior Anderegg, Christian Almer, and “Peterli” Bohren, he left Grindelwald at midnight; they crossed the Finsteraarjoch, and returned within the twenty-four hours to Grindelwald over the Strahlegg. Even in summer this would prove a strenuous day. In winter, it is almost incredible that this double traverse should have been carried through without sleeping out.
Most of the great peaks have now been ascended in winter; and amongst others Mr. Coolidge must be mentioned as a prominent pioneer. His ascents of the Jungfrau, Wetterhorn, and Schreckhorn—the first in winter—with Christian Almer, did much to set the fashion. Mrs. Le Blond, the famous lady climber, has an even longer list of winter first ascents to her credit. But the real revolution in winter mountaineering has been caused by the introduction of ski-ing. In winter, the main difficulty is getting to the high mountain huts. Above the huts, the temperature is often mild and equable for weeks together. A low temperature on the ground co-exists with a high temperature in the air. Rock-ridges facing south or south-west are often denuded of snow, and as easy to climb as in summer. Signor Sella also made some brilliant winter ascents, such as the Matterhorn and Monte Rosa.
The real obstacle to winter mountaineering is the appalling weariness of wading up to the club-huts on foot. The snow in the sheltered lower valleys is often deep and powdery; and the climber on foot will have to force his way through pine forests where the snow lies in great drifts between the trees, and over moraines where treacherous drifts conceal pitfalls between the loose stones. All this is changed by the introduction of ski. The ski distributes the weight of the climber over a long, even surface; and in the softest snow he will not sink in more than a few inches. Better still, they revolutionise the descent, converting a weary plug through snow-drifts into a succession of swift and glorious runs. The ski-runner takes his ski to the foot of the last rock ridges, and then proceeds on foot, rejoining his ski, and covering on the descent five thousand feet in far less time than the foot-climber would take over five hundred. Skis, as everybody knows, were invented as a means of crossing snowy country inaccessible on foot. They are sometimes alluded to as snowshoes, but differ radically from snowshoes in one important respect. Both ski and the Canadian snowshoe distribute their wearer’s weight, and enable him to cross drifts where he would sink in hopelessly if he were on foot, but there the resemblance ends. For, whereas snowshoes cannot slide on snow, and whereas a man on snowshoes cannot descend a hill as fast as a man on foot could run down hill, skis glide rapidly and easily on snow, and a ski-runner can descend at a rate which may be anything up to sixty miles an hour.
Ski-ing is of Scandinavian origin, and the greatest exponents of the art are the Norwegians. Norwegians have used ski from time immemorial in certain districts, such as Telemarken, as a means of communication between snow-bound villages. It should, perhaps, be added that ski-jumping does not consist, as some people imagine, in casual leaps across chasms or over intervening hillocks. The ski-runner does not glide along the level at the speed of an express train, lightly skimming any obstacles in his path. On the level, the best performer does not go more than six or seven miles an hour, and the great jumps one hears of are made downhill. The ski-runner swoops down on to a specially prepared platform, leaps into the air, and alights on a very steep slope below. The longest jump on record is some hundred and fifty feet, measured from the edge of the take-off to the alighting point. In this case, the ski-runner must have fallen through nearly seventy vertical feet.
To the mountaineer, the real appeal of ski-ing is due to the fact that it halves the labour of his ascent to the upper snowfields, and converts a tedious descent into a succession of swift and fascinating runs. The ski-runner climbs on ski to the foot of the final rock and ice ridges, and then finishes the climb in the ordinary way. After rejoining his ski, his work is over, and his reward is all before him. If he were on foot, he would have to wade laboriously down to the valley. On ski, he can swoop down with ten times the speed, and a thousand times the enjoyment.
Ski were introduced into Central Europe in the early ’nineties. Dr. Paulcke’s classic traverse of the Oberland in 1895, which included the ascent of the Jungfrau, proved to mountaineers the possibilities of the new craft. Abroad, the lesson was soon learned. To-day, there are hundreds of ski-runners who make a regular practice of mountaineering in winter. The Alps have taken out a new lease of life. In summer, the huts are crowded, the fashionable peaks are festooned with parties of incompetent novices who are dragged and pushed upwards by their guides, but in winter the true mountain lover has the upper world to himself. The mere summit hunter naturally chooses the line of least resistance, and accumulates his list of first class expeditions in the summer months, when such a programme is easiest to compile. The winter mountaineer must be more or less independent of the professional element, for, though he will probably employ a guide to find the way and to act as a reserve of strength, he himself must at least be able to ski steadily, and at a fair speed.
Moreover, mountain craft as the winter mountaineer understands the term is a more subtle and more embracing science as far, at least, as snow conditions are concerned. It begins at the hÔtel door. In summer, there is a mule path leading to the glacier line, a mule path which a man can climb with his mind asleep. But in winter the snow with its manifold problems sweeps down to the village. A man has been killed by an avalanche within a few yards of a great hÔtel. From the moment a man buckles on his ski, he must exercise his knowledge of snow conditions. There are no paths save a few woodcutter’s tracks. From the valley upwards, he must learn to pick a good line, and to avoid the innocent-looking slopes that may at any moment resolve themselves into an irresistible avalanche. Many a man is piloted up a succession of great peaks without acquiring anything like the same intimate knowledge of snow that is possessed even by a ski-runner who has never crossed the summer snow-line. Even the humblest ski-runner must learn to diagnose the snow. He may follow his leader unthinkingly on the ascent; but once he starts down he must judge for himself. If he makes a mistake, he will be thrown violently on to his face when the snow suddenly sticks, and on to his back when it quickens. Even the most unobservant man will learn something of the effects of sun and wind on his running surface when the result of a faulty deduction may mean violent contact with Mother Earth.
Those who worship the Alps in their loveliest and loneliest moods, those who dislike the weary anti-climax of the descent through burning snowfields, and down dusty mule paths, will climb in the winter months, when to the joy of renewing old memories of the mountains in an unspoiled setting is added the rapture of the finest motion known to man.
In England mountaineering on ski has yet to find many adherents. We have little opportunity for learning to ski in these isles, and the ten thousand Englishmen that visit the Alps in winter prefer to ski on the lower hills. For every Englishman with a respectable list of glacier tours on ski to his credit, there are at least a hundred continental runners with a record many times more brilliant. The Alpine Ski Club, now in its sixth year, has done much to encourage this “new mountaineering,” and its journal contains a record of the finest expeditions by English and continental runners. But even in the pages of the Alpine Ski Club Annual, the proportion of foreign articles describing really fine tours is depressingly large. Of course, the continental runner lives nearer the Alps. So did the continental mountaineer of the early ’sixties; but that did not prevent us taking our fair share of virgin peaks.
The few Englishmen who are making a more or less regular habit of serious mountaineering on ski are not among the veterans of summer mountaineering, and the leaders of summer mountaineering have not yet learned to ski. Abroad, the leaders of summer mountaineering have welcomed ski-ing as a key to their mountains in winter; but the many leaders of English mountaineering still argue that skis should not be used in the High Alps, on the ground that they afford facility for venturing on slopes and into places where the risk of avalanches is extreme. On the Continent thousands of runners demonstrate in the most effective manner that mountaineering on ski has come to stay. It is consoling to reflect that English ski-runners are prepared to work out the peculiar problems of their craft with or without the help of summer mountaineers. Of course, both ski-ing and summer mountaineering would be strengthened by an alliance, and ski-runners can best learn the rules of the glacier world in winter from those mountaineers who combine a knowledge of the summer Alps with some experience of winter conditions and a mastery of ski-ing. For the moment, such teachers must be looked for in the ranks of continental mountaineers.
