Mountain Craft

THE ALPS SYDNEY SPENCER
MOUNTAIN CRAFT
EDITED BY
GEOFFREY WINTHROP YOUNG
WITH 28 ILLUSTRATIONS
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS 1920
THE MEMORY OF
GALLANT COMRADES IN THE MOUNTAINS
This book is for mountaineers; and a mountaineer is not only one who climbs mountains, but anyone who likes to walk, read, or think about them.
I do not myself attach much value to mountaineering handbooks: an open-air pursuit can only be learned by practical attempt and from good example. I used to read them for the fun of surprising some hero of my youth as he strained his imagination to squeeze a grave principle out of a random holiday memory, and for the sympathetic pleasure of reconstructing for myself the real day of irresponsible adventure the recollection of which was bringing a thrill of forbidden joy to his mind before he composed his face to inflict it upon me in the form of an edifying three-line precept. I can read them now no more than I can read the ‘climbing accident’ type of fiction popular with magazines, which used to provide a less sensitive digestion with some acrid food for mirth. On the other hand I would still set myself to learn Chinese, if that would enable me the better to understand one more record of genuine mountain adventure or discover some unfamiliar attitude of the human mind towards the mountains and their symbolism.
I do not expect other mountaineers to read, or to refrain from reading, these opinions in a different spirit. Mountaineering, like other arts, has suffered much, for all its youth, from the limitations imposed by hasty tradition and by doctrine prematurely crystallized; and, as in other crafts, if ever a period comes that shall find the traditional rules too rigid to admit of a wholesome influx of new and original conception, mountaineering will cease to deserve the name of an art or craft, and become at best an ‘organized game.’
But the opinions as they stand may yet serve a limited purpose. Some men are born climbers. They will learn little about climbing from precepts. At the same time many of the finest climbers fall short of our ideal of safe method because they have never concerned themselves with the possible existence of any fundamental principles governing the various unrelated movements in which they delight; and so it comes that, though they may do nine things, by instinct, right, they do the tenth, by habit, wrong. For these climbers I am not without hope that the statement, made I believe here for the first time, of the principles which underlie all correct climbing motions, and which have been steadily emerging during fifty years of practical mountaineering, may not be entirely useless. If they find that nine spokes of their practice lead back to my hub, and the tenth does not, they may learn how to correct the tenth. If, on the contrary, they find that only one leads back to it, and nine radiate elsewhither, well then, no doubt they will decide that I am wrong.