One of the first individuals whose ascent of a mountain is recorded is China’s “First Emperor,” who in the third century B.C. drove his chariot up T’ai Shan against the advice of his sages, who thought he should walk. Better known for starting the Great Wall and for burning all the books so that Chinese history would start with him, the First Emperor may have eradicated the record of those who ascended before him. Most people since have walked to T’ai Shan’s summit—for many centuries on the 7,000-step staircase leading from the City of Peace at the foot of the mountain through three Heavenly Gates to the Temple of the Jade Emperor on top. American writer and Buddhist Gretel Ehrlich walked up T’ai Shan and other mountain pilgrimage sites in China and wrote, “The Chinese phrase for ‘going on a pilgrimage,’ ch’ao-shan chin-hsiang, actually means ‘paying one’s respects to the mountain,’ as if the mountain was an empress or an ancestor before whom one must kneel.” In the fourth century A.D. a very different kind of pilgrim climbed mountains on the other side of Eurasia: the Christian pilgrim Egeria. Almost no trace of her but her pilgrimage diary survives, though that manuscript suggests she was an abbess or other religious figure of some stature and that Mount Sinai deep in the Egyptian desert was among the sites of Christian pilgrimage then. She was guided by resident holy men through “the vast and very flat valley where the children of Israel tarried during those days when the holy man Moses climbed the mountain of God” on their flight from slavery in Egypt. She and her unnamed companions scaled the nearly 9,000-foot peak of Mount Sinai on foot—“straight up, as if scaling a wall.” Egeria noted that “this seems to be a single mountain all around; however, once you enter the area you see there are many, but the whole range is called the Mountain of God.” For Egeria, Sinai was the mountain on which God had descended and Moses had ascended to receive the Tablets of the Law: climbing it was a profession of faith in Scripture and a return to the site of its greatest moments. Since her time stairs have been built up Sinai too, and one fourteenth-century mystic ascended them every day as his religious expression.
Mountains, like labyrinths and other built structures, function as metaphorical and symbolic space. There is no more clear geographical equivalent to the idea of arrival and triumph than the topmost peak beyond which there is no farther to go (though in the Himalayas many pilgrims circumambulate mountains, believing it would be sacrilegious to stand on the summit). The athletically gifted and enormously ambitious Victorian mountaineer Edward Whymper said of reaching the top of the Matterhorn, “There is nothing to look up to; all is below,” in a telling mix of literal and figurative language. “The man who is there is somewhat in the position of one who has attained all that he desires—he has nothing to aspire to.” The appeal of climbing to the top of mountains may also be drawn from language metaphors. English and many other languages associate altitude, ascent, and height with power, virtue, and status. Thus we speak of being on top of the world or at the top of one’s field, at the height of one’s ability, on the way up; of peak experiences and the peak of a career; of rising and moving up in the world; to say nothing of social climbers, upward mobility, high-minded saints and lowly rascals, and of course the upper and the lower classes. In Christian cosmology, heaven is above us and hell below, and Dante portrays Purgatory as a conical mountain he arduously ascends, conflating spiritual and geographical travel (starting with what modern climbers would call a chimney: “We climbed up through the narrow cleft, / rock pressed in on us from either side, / and that ground needed both feet and hands”). A walk uphill traverses these metaphysical territories; a goalless ramble across the same mountain moves through very different metaphysics.
In Japan mountains have been imagined as the centers of vast mandalas spreading across the landscape like, in one scholar’s words, “overlapping flowers,” and approaching the center of the mandala means approaching the source of spiritual power—but the approach may be indirect. In a labyrinth one can be farthest from the destination when one is closest; on a mountain, as Egeria found, the mountain itself changes shape again and again as one ascends. The famous Zen parable about the master for whom, before his studies, mountains were only mountains, but during his studies mountains were no longer mountains, and afterward mountains were again mountains could be interpreted as an allegory about this perceptual paradox. Thoreau noticed it and wrote, “To the traveller, a mountain outline varies with every step, and it has an infinite number of profiles, though absolutely but one form,” and that form is best apprehended from a distance. In every print but one of the Japanese artist Hokusai’s famous Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, the perfect cone of Mount Fuji looms largely nearby or small far away, giving orientation and continuity to city, road, field, and sea. Only in the print of pilgrims actually ascending the mountain does the familiar shape that unites the other prints vanish. When we are attracted, we draw near; when we draw near, the sight that attracted us dissolves: the face of the beloved blurs or fractures as one draws near for a kiss, the smooth cone of Mount Fuji becomes rough rock rising from underfoot to blot out the sky in Hokusai’s print of the mountain pilgrims. The objective form of the mountain seems to dissolve into subjective experience, and the meaning of walking up a mountain fragments.
A walk, I have claimed, is like a life in miniature, and a mountain ascent is a more dramatic walk: there is more danger and more awareness of death, more uncertainty about the outcome, more triumph at what is more unequivocally arrival. “To climb up rocks is like all the rest of your life, only simpler and safer,” wrote the British mountaineer Charles Montague in 1924. “Each time that you get up a hard pitch, you have succeeded in life.” What fascinates me about mountaineering is how one activity can mean so many disparate things. Though the idea of pilgrimage almost always seems to be present, many ascents derive their meaning from sports and military action as well. Pilgrimage draws meaning from following hallowed routes to established destinations, while the most revered mountaineers are often those who are first on a route or summit, who like athletes make a record. Mountaineering has often been seen as a pure form of the imperial mission, calling into play all its skills and heroic virtues, with none of its material gains or oppositional violence (which is why the superb French alpinist Lionel Terray called his memoir Conquistadors of the Useless). On March 17, 1923, while on a speaking tour to raise money for an Everest expedition, the great mountaineer George Mallory apparently got exasperated with the continual questions about why he wanted to climb it, and uttered the most famous line in mountaineering history, the one sometimes cited as a Zen koan: “Because it’s there.” His usual reply was, “We hope to show that the spirit that built the British Empire is not yet dead.” Mallory and his companion Andrew Irvine themselves died on that expedition, and mountaineering historians still debate whether they got to the summit before vanishing. (Mallory’s battered, frozen body was discovered seventy-five years later, on May 1, 1999.)
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 moun
taineer 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.
Wanderlust: A History of Walking Page 19