Wanderlust: A History of Walking (21 page)

The measurable part of an experience translates most easily, so the highest peaks and worst disasters are the best known aspects of mountaineering, along with all the records—first ascent, first ascent by the north face, first American, first Japanese, first woman, fastest, first without this or that piece of gear. Mount Everest has always been about these calculables for Westerners, to whose attention it first came through trigonometry. In 1852 a clerk in the office of the British Trigonometrical Survey in India calculated that what they called “Peak XV” and
the Tibetans “Chomalungma” was taller than all the Himalayan peaks clustered around it. The man who had just measured it named it after a man who had never noticed it, former surveyor general of India Sir George Everest (thereby giving it a kind of sex change, since
chomalungma
means “goddess of the place”). The locals consider Chomalungma one of the less significant sacred mountains, but mountaineering writers sometimes call Everest (which is at the same latitude as southern Florida) the top or the roof of the world, as though our spherical planet were instead some kind of pyramid. The widely traveled mountaineer and religious scholar Edwin Bernbaum writes, wryly, “Whatever Western society regards as number one tends to take on an aura of ultimacy that makes it seem more real and worthwhile than anything else—in a word, sacred.” And number one is generally determined by measurement. Triumph in mountaineering, as in sports, is measured in firsts, fastests, and mosts.

Like sports, mountaineering is exertion with only symbolic results, but the nature of that symbolism dictates everything—why, for example, French mountaineer Maurice Herzog could consider his 1950 expedition to Annapurna, the world's seventh-highest mountain, a great victory because they made it to the top and not a failure because he got so severely frostbitten he lost all his fingers and toes and had to be carried down by sherpas. Perhaps it was that Herzog trod the terrain of history as selflessly as Egeria did Scripture. In the mid-1960s, David Roberts led the second-ever ascent to the summit of Alaska's Mount Huntington. As he recounted it in his book
The Mountain of My Fear,
the expedition seems to have begun in Massachusetts with his study of photographs of the mountain, his surmise of a new route up it, and his desire to do something that hadn't been done before. That is, the expedition began with visual representation and desire to situate himself in the historical record, with months of planning, fund-raising, recruiting, collecting gear, and writing lists; it only became a bodily engagement with the mountain long afterward. This tension between history and experience, between aspiration, memory, and the moment, fascinates me, and though it exists throughout human activity, it seems to become, so to speak, more transparent at high altitudes. History, let me clarify, means an act imagined as being situated in the context of other such acts and as it will be perceived by others; it arises from a social imagination of how one's private acts fit into public life. History is carried in the mind to the remotest places to determine what one's acts mean even there, and who can say how much it weighs for those who carry it?

Because mountain heights are usually so remote from inhabited earth, because mystics and outlaws have so often gone there to vanish from sight, because climbing is “the only time my mind doesn't wander,” making history in the mountains seems a particularly paradoxical idea and mountaineering a particularly paradoxical sport—when it is regarded as a sport. Being first up a mountain means entering the unknown, but for the sake of putting the place into human history, of making it known. There are those who decline to record their ascents or name their climbs, who see their mountaineering as a retreat from history. Gwen Moffat, who became Britain's first certified woman climbing guide in 1953, wrote about the immediate satisfactions: “And before I started to move I felt the familiar feeling that came when I was about to do something hard. Mental and physical relaxation, a loosening of the muscles so complete that even the face relaxes and the eyes widen; one's body becomes light and supple—a pliable and coordinated entity to be shown a climb as a horse is shown a jump. In that exquisite moment before the hard move, when one looks and understands, may lie an answer to the question why one climbs. You are doing something hard, so hard that failure could mean death, but because of knowledge and experience you are doing it safely.” She and a partner once decided to set the record for the slowest traverse ever of a ridge on the Isle of Skye and, with the help of a surprise blizzard, probably succeeded.

European mountaineering history had its beginnings in a competition of sorts. Decades before Mont Blanc was climbed, the glacier coming down from it to the Chamonix Valley and the valley itself had become tourist destinations (as they have remained ever since). The locals were, like those of north Wales and the Lake District, beneficiaries of travelers' growing taste for wild and rugged scenery. One outcome of this growing tourist economy was that a twenty-year-old gentleman scientist from Geneva, Horace Benedict de Saussure, arrived in 1760, became so fascinated by glaciers that he dedicated the rest of his life to studying them, and posted a handsome prize for the first person to reach the 15,782-foot summit of Mont Blanc. Mont Blanc, the highest point in Europe, was a magnet in the early years of the cult of mountains and a cultural icon for landscape romantics, the subject of a major poem by Shelley, the first measure of ambition of mountaineers. In 1786 a local doctor reached the summit with the aid of a local hunter. An attempt a few years before had so frightened the four guides who tried it that they declared it unclimbable, and no one in Europe was then
certain whether human beings could survive at such high altitudes. Chamonix resident Dr. Michel Gabriel Paccard, writes a notable later mountaineer, Eric Shipton, “turned his keen intelligence and his already keen experience as a climber to the problems of mountain survival. . . . He did not seek notoriety, and he spoke little of his exploits, many of which showed great resolution and physical stamina. His wish to climb Mont Blanc was apparently inspired more by his desire to be first for France—and in the interests of science—than by any desire to win fame for himself. Among other things he was anxious to make barometric observations at the top. . . .”

After four unsuccessful attempts, the doctor hired Jacques Balmat, a strong climber who made a living as a hunter and collector of crystals. They set out on a night of the full moon in August, without the ropes and ice axes of modern mountaineering, crossing the deep ice crevasses with nothing more than a pair of long poles. When they reached the dread Valley of Snow, the deep recess surrounded by icy walls where the four guides had given up earlier, Balmat begged to turn back, but Paccard convinced him to continue, and they climbed up a snow ridge in a high wind. They reached the summit early in the evening, fourteen hours after they had set out; Paccard made his measurements, and they descended to spend the night under a boulder. In the morning both were badly windburned and frostbitten, and Paccard was snow-blind as well and had to be led downward. “Judged by sheer physical effort alone, the first ascent of Mont Blanc was a remarkable performance,” Shipton concludes. But the story didn't end there. The scheming Balmat began to spread stories that it was he who had explored the route and led the expedition, and that Paccard was little more than baggage he dragged along. His stories grew until he was claiming that Paccard had collapsed several hundred feet below the summit and Balmat alone had completed the ascent. It wasn't until the twentieth century that the truth was uncovered and the brave doctor was restored to his place among the heroes of mountaineering. One of the mountaineers had betrayed his companion and the truth for the sake of history, publicity, and the reward (and a century later the explorer Frederick Cook lied and faked photographs to claim he had made the first ascent of Alaska's Mount Denali; for him history counted for everything, experience for nothing).

As soon as Mont Blanc was proved climbable, many others began to climb it. By the middle of the nineteenth century, forty-six parties, many of them English,
had reached the summit, and the focus turned to other Alpine peaks and routes. Though there are many greater mountaineers, I can't get over my affection for Henriette d'Angeville. It may be the effusiveness of her
My Ascent of Mont Blanc
that charms me, since it proves that great physical stamina need not be coupled with stoicism, or it may be that real mountaineering literature is for real mountaineers, who love passages full of hand-jams, mantelshelf moves, crampon or belaying technique, and so forth. D'Angeville was forty-four when she went up the mountain in 1838, though she had grown up among the Alps and walked in them before. She cleared up the inevitable question about why she climbed early in her book, writing, “The soul has needs, as does the body, peculiar to each individual. . . . I am among those who prefer the grandeur of natural landscapes to the sweetest or most charming views imaginable . . . and that is why I chose Mont Blanc.” Later she earned popular scorn by quipping that she climbed it to become as famous as the novelist George Sand, but she continued to climb mountains into her sixties without receiving further attention and wrote, “It was not the puny fame of being the first woman to venture on such a journey that filled me with the exhilaration such projects always called forth; rather it was the awareness of the spiritual well-being that would follow.” Her climb is a tender drama of arduous ascent bracketed by extravagant packing lists beforehand and a victory dinner with her ten guides afterward. Guiding was already becoming a profession, and technique and tools had evolved much since Paccard's time.

Golden ages usually end with a fall, and the golden age of mountaineering was no exception. Usually described as the period between 1854 and 1865 when many of the Alps were climbed for the first time, it was a largely British golden age in which climbing mountains became a recognized, but by no means popular, sport (far more people continued to walk in the Alps without striving for summits). About half the major first ascents of that age were made by well-heeled British amateurs with local guides. The Alpine Club, founded in 1857 as a sort of cross between a gentleman's club and a scientific society, has so long been an accepted part of the mountaineering world that its oddness—a British club focused on Continental mountains—has seldom been remarked. But in those years the Alps were almost the exclusive focus of this new sport, or pastime, or passion; mountains farther afield and smaller, more technically demanding climbs in places like the Peak District or the Lakes had yet to receive much attention, and climbing in North America took place in a radically different context. The British
audience for this activity was far larger than its practitioners, and in Europe mountaineers and climbers still sometimes become celebrities. Albert Smith's popular entertainment
Mont Blanc,
based on his 1851 ascent, ran in a London theater for years, and books like Alfred Wills's
Wanderings Among the Alps
and the Alpine Club's
Peaks, Passes and Glaciers
series were well received.

Lured by this literature, the twenty-year-old engraver Edward Whymper managed to get an assignment to make images of the Alps. He spent his spare time exploring the mountains and turned out to have a talent for getting up them. Though he made a number of first ascents elsewhere, it was the Matterhorn that captured his imagination. Between 1861 and 1865 he made seven unsuccessful attempts on the spectacular peak, racing against other climbers to be the first. He finally succeeded, and his success is said to have ended the golden age. Whether it ended because Whymper had brought a different or at least more overtly ambitious spirit to the enterprise, because the Matterhorn was the last major Alpine peak to be summitted, or because of the ensuing disaster is unclear. His eighth ascent had been made in collaboration with the greatest amateur climber of the time, the Reverend Charles Hudson, two other young Englishmen, and three local guides. On the descent Hudson, the two young men, and the outstanding guide Michel Croz, who were all roped together, fell to their deaths when one of them slipped. The Victorian equivalent of a media circus ensued, with much condemnation of mountaineering itself as unjustifiably dangerous and much muttering about whether Whymper and the guides had behaved professionally and ethically. Whymper's
Scrambles in the Alps
became a classic anyway, and perhaps it's why the Matterhorn has become a ride at Disneyland.

The history of mountaineering is about the firsts, mosts, and disasters, but behind the dozens of famous faces are countless mountaineers whose rewards have been entirely private and personal. What is recorded as history seldom represents the typical, and what is typical seldom becomes visible as history—though it often becomes visible as literature. Something of this dichotomy is present in the two major genres of mountaineering book, the epics that the general public generally reads and the memoirs that seem to have a far smaller audience. The epics are heroic accounts of an attempt on a major summit; they are books about History and, almost always, Tragedy (high-altitude mountaineering literature, with its emphasis on bodily suffering, survival through sheer will, and the grisly details of frostbite, hypothermia, high-altitude dementia, and fatal falls, often reminds
me of books about concentration camps and forced marches, except that mountaineering is voluntary and, for some, deeply satisfying). In contrast, the cheerful memoirs by even some of the greatest climbers—Joe Brown, Don Whillens, Gwen Moffat, Lionel Terray—often read as humorous idylls that deemphasize difficulty. The satisfactions in these narratives come from minor and major excursions, from friendships, freedoms, love of mountains, refinement of skill, low ambition, and high spirits, with only an occasional tragedy on the rocks. The best books' merit comes from the vividness rather than the historic importance of the events they recount.