MOUNTAINEERING

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 38, 24 November 1938, Page 2

MOUNTAINEERING

A DANGEROUS SPORT. DEATHS IN THE ALPS. In the course of last summer, writes Fianlc Smytlie in “The Times” 100 or more persons have lost their lives as the result of mountaineering accidents in the Alps. Such a. death-roll tends to throw mountaineering into disrepute and non-mountaineers may be forgiven for questioning the justifiability of a sport that claims more lives than any other. Mountaineering is potentially a dangerous sport, yet its charm lies in combating and overcoming danger through the exercise of skill based on experience. Unhappily this quality is conspicuously absent in a large majority of those who spend their holidays climbing in the Alps. In its beginning mountaineering was the sport of the leisured and professional classes who had the time and the means to learn the art under the tuition of guides whose job it was, and has always been, to conduct their employers safely up and down mountains. Thus they learned through long apprenticeship and experience to differentiate safety from danger and acquired that instinctive feeling for their craft without which safe climbing is impossible. There were accidents—the Matterhorn disaster of 1860 threw mountaineering temporarily into disrepute and incurred the censure of Queen Victoria —but they were mostly accidents in the truest sense of. the word and hardly to be compared with the modern variety some of which more nearly resemble suicidcsv Ascent Without Guides. As the sport gained in popularity and the Alps were opened up as the playground of Europe, persons of moderate means and limited holiday* were able to indulge in it. Climbing without guides, at first regarded as a reprehensible proceeding by conservative mountaineers, became fashionable, but mostly the craft had been learned in the company of professionals. Mummery, Hastings, Collie, Wilson, Raeburn and Ling, to mention but a few, were all men who by virtue of apprenticeship and experience were entitled to climb without professional assistance. , The "great peaks were also sought after by those who had neither the means to employ guides nor the inclination to progress slowly; they were not prepai’ed to begin their mountaineering on lesser peaks; and too often the ultimate penalty was exacted for their misplaced enthusiasm.

A classic instance is the fate of Maurice Wilson, who, entirely without mountaineering experience, attempted to climb Mount Everest in 1934. He perished as inevitably as a non-swim-mer would perish who attempted to swim the Channel. Accidents occur to guided parties, for guides are not infallible, but most of those reported during the present season occurred to guideless climbers. How Tragedies Occur. There are many ways in which high mountains claim their victims. A party of athletic young men sets out to climb a peak. For a while all goes well ; the rocks are dry and warm; the sun kindly; mountaineering they think an easy game, and they laugh at. the ‘old fogies’ who have warned them of its dangers. Then, when success is almost within their grasp, dark clouds form quickly about their peak; lightning flashes and thunder roars; the wind rises to a hurricane and a terrible blizzard bursts upon them. Within a few minutes the rocks are plastered witli snow and sheeted with ice; landmarks are lost in a tourmente of whirling drift; they are confused by the fury of the elements, the battering,wind, the swift, merciless cold. There is no question of proceeding farther. Can they retreat? Never before have they experienced such conditions and they move downward with lamentable slowness. The way seems interminable; hours pass; they are fatigued, numbed Svith cold, and without hope. Suddenly one slips. As like as not the rope between him and the next man is loose and not “belayed.” The next man is pulled off, and the next . . . Some days later the shattered corpses are recovered from the foot of the precipice. Or they are overtaken by night and forced to bivouac on a windswept ledge. Fatigue and cold do the rest. The result is the same—another paragraph in the newspapers and a pitiable waste of life. Experience and skill were lacking Had they been present the probability of the weather breaking would have been noted in the first place. The party might have been hard put to it to retreat, hut the odds are that they would have won through to safety. A modern tendency is to climb in crampons (iron frames with projecting spikes affixed to the boots) before experience lias been gained with nailed boots. Crampons are admirable on ice or hard snow; on soft snow overlying ico they are a deathtrap. Climbing immediately after bad weather is another source of accidents.

Pioneering Instinct. But accidents are by no means all due to ignorance in the technique of mountaineering. Since alpine peaks were first climbed by the easiest and safest routes the pioneering instinct at the root of the sport has resulted in the making of other routes, some difficult and dangerous, and some verging on the impossible. Unhappily this pioneering instinct has since the war become associated with a new and undesirable spirit founded on national competitive instincts, at variance with the true spirit of mountaineering, which is essentially a personal communion between man and Nature. Thus, the desperate ventures, loss of life, and much lauded “conquests,” on the north face of the Grandes Jorasses and the Eigerwand have brought nothing but discredit, associated as they have been with a chauvinism entirely foreign to the sport.