FOOTNOTES:
[4] Cf. an article by O. Eckenstein in the Climbers’ Club Journal, 1914.
[5] See article in the Climbers’ Club Journal, 1912, p. 147.
[6] See also pp. [206], [292].
[7] See “Pegs and Aids,” p. [200].
[8] See also “The Himalaya” and “Mountaineering in the Tropics.”
[9] For further medical outfit, see “Mountaineering in the Tropics.”
CHAPTER III
GUIDED AND GUIDELESS MOUNTAINEERING
The question of climbing with or without guides is one of traditional importance. But the long controversy has proceeded without taking into account the change in modern conditions; and the terms ‘guided’ and ‘guideless’ are still used with a signification that now bears little relation to actual circumstance. Consequently the discussion for mountaineers has become profitless, for it is based upon definite misconceptions.
Old-time Errors.
The great public, or that part of it which has reached the point of accepting mountaineering as a legitimate background for sensational magazine stories, cherishes one fixed idea on the subject of climbing—that the guide is a providence who knows and shows and goes the one sacred and impeccable ‘path’ which every genuine mountain possesses: to go without him is to tempt destruction deliberately; something like ejecting the engine-driver, starting the lever and retiring to smoke in a first-class carriage. The importance of the error is that its persistence permits it to dominate the minds of a large number of men who ‘do mountains’ every year from the hotels. To them, mountaineering means only the traditional route up in the traditional way; and tradition demands the surrender of their intelligence and personal inclinations for a day to the unimaginative tyranny of any two chance peasants between whom they are advised to suspend the exercise of their own finer faculties and the direction of their very differently constituted frames. Their ambition is laudable, but they are in no sense mountaineers, and they may never become so, any more than those who cross the Channel in a steamboat are qualifying as sailors. But they form a considerable portion of those who go among the mountains, and include a large number of those who give the public their experiences. In so far their patronage contributes to confirm and perpetuate the long-lived error.
Among a large number, also, of climbers proper the error, though different in kind, is as constant. The magnificent school of foreign rock climbers which has of late years grown up in the regions of lesser peaks north, east and south of the Alps, and which, with some notable exceptions, has little conception of what independent mountaineering on the great peaks means, accepts the performance and narration of these tourists in the big Alps as typical of ‘guided climbing,’ and very justly condemns it for its obvious lack of many of the features which constitute the pleasure or merit of their own mountaineering. In so far as they accept the popular and mistaken classification into guided and guideless, these climbers help in continuing it. Our equally brilliant school of British rock climbers, recognizing the absurdity of taking guides on the short climbs of Scotland or the Lakes or Wales, often adopts the same attitude. Only by slow experience, and in individual cases, when they meet the problems and actual conditions of real mountaineering in the great Western Alps, do they learn the magnitude of the traditional fallacy. There is, therefore, excuse for the Press and the lay public.
The Guide of the Chronicles.
There is yet further justification to be found for them in the only literature accessible to them—the famous alpine classics, and the original relationship of amateur and guide therein set forth. We mountaineers owe so much to these early explorers and to their inspiring records, which first set our feet on the mountain way and which remain our most cherished and revered companions, that it is an ungrateful task to have to forsake them for a moment in the interests of veracity and of our modern mountain craft. But many of these notable pioneers, or at least those whose personality is most permanent in literature, were not mountaineers in the technical sense in which we understand the word to-day. Mountaineering, as an art, has made immense strides among amateurs and professionals alike since their time, due largely to the force of their original impulse. What was true of their time is no longer true; and while their writing will remain the source of every climber’s inspiration until mountaineering may be forgotten in the passion for winter sports and aviation, it is not in the best interests of the sport that their pronouncements should be considered as absolutely or, even on technical points, as relatively true of modern conditions. They were undoubtedly fortunate in their guides. When they were not, we do not hear of it, or only in a passing sentence. The amateurs were themselves few in number, and the most enterprising naturally attracted to themselves the few considerable personalities among a race of as yet unspoiled mountain peasants and hunters. They found them companions, men of intelligence, manners and courage. The knowledge of mountaineering conditions was in its infancy, and the peasant was accustomed from childhood to such knowledge as existed. Relatively to the present day he was better physically equipped than his employer, who was primarily an explorer or a walking enthusiast. He was therefore not undeserving of the implicit confidence placed in his judgment and skill.
The Guide as he is.
Conditions have changed. Guides have no longer the opportunity of travelling up and down the Alps to secure the same wide basis of experience. Only a few of them are taken beyond their own valleys; and when they are, they are associated in most cases with local experts, who relieve them of the necessity of exerting their brains to discover the new conditions. Only in very rare cases among their multiple employers do they ever get the same opportunity of long contact with more active or educated intelligences, such as could react upon their own appreciation of their own mountain problems. The organized conditions for tourist life in the Alps, the separate quarters in hotel and hut, the rapid succession of engagements with men of different nationalities and divergent types, and their own guide-schools, inculcating precise codes of manners to use with ‘Herren,’ forbid the old freedom of intercourse. The best and most travelled of guides has a different manner on the mountain and in the hotel. There is no authority so absolute as that of the hotel-keeper in a small democratic Swiss community in all that affects the tourist traffic. And the ideas of an average hotel-keeper as to the nature of tourists and as to the proper behaviour towards them on the part at least of his, the hotel-keeper’s, dependents or inferiors are not unlike those of a head waiter in a city restaurant. The tradition that the guide is a professional servant has become engrained. The stoutest of mountaineering democrats has to accept its restrictions, once off the mountains, if only to save his guide’s discomfort. And the average guide on his side, dealing every summer with succeeding varieties of incapable amateurs often ignorant of his language, and accustomed to the passive acceptance of his service to hoist them up conventional peaks, has grown up in a traditional atmosphere of aloofness and of courteous disregard for his employers as mountaineers in his own professional sense. A collective professional attitude has established itself of which the early days knew little or nothing; the most independent of guides, however well he may know his employer’s capacity by experience, cannot but find the utmost difficulty in discarding tradition and associating himself with the amateur’s judgment if it happens to conflict with local hear-say or with the view of some inferior professional using the familiar patois. And just in so far as a collective opinion, in theatre or crowd or guild, is inferior to the individual judgment of the majority of intelligent individuals who compose it, and echoes, as if unanimously, the more blatant voice of the more vulgar elements, in so far is the capacity, even of good individual guides of the present day, inferior to that of their predecessors in matters requiring the exercise of wider intelligence upon unforeseen problems or new conditions. Just in so far, also, are guides hampered by their body of tradition and prejudice from profiting by their contact with more educated minds, or from learning to apply new principles to the special circumstances of their profession. With the formalizing, even in details, of the route up every regular peak, the stimulus of romance and adventure has gone for them far more than for the amateur. The new generation finds its only outlet in the autumn chamois-hunting, if at all. Its mountaineering is just business.
There are some rare and notable exceptions—perhaps as many in actual number as formed the chosen band of guides who led the early mountaineers in their pleasant comradeship of triumph—but they are attached in almost all cases for each season to affectionate and jealous employers, and for the general mass of climbers there exists only a general mass of guides of the limited and professional cast of mind. In continuance of early pioneering tradition some great amateurs of the old school still maintain that the guide’s word should be law in all tactical and even strategical decisions. These are the fortunate men, whose knowledge and reputation can command the services of the surviving body of exceptions. If they were not so fortunate, they would have to reconsider their view, or they would, at the present date, see more of hotels than of huts, of pastures than of peaks.
The Amateur as he may be.
If guides have, as a whole, not progressed in the responsible and sympathetic qualities essential for management, amateurs have improved out of all proportion. Mountain craft, the mastery of the laws that govern ice and rock and of their application, has become an exact science, and the educated intelligence, under right guidance, is able in a season or so to enter upon a whole inheritance of knowledge, of detail and principle, which it took decades of tentative experiment to discover. In the matter of purely technical skill also, of physical performance, of balance, the use of the feet, of the axe, the rope and the eyes, the phenomenon common to all sports has made itself evident: each new generation of climbers appears to inherit, almost as an instinct and without visible or conscious study, a greater adaptability, an easier apprehension, as it were, of the necessary and improving physical adjustments which had to be laboriously acquired by the previous generation. Consequently the good amateur now brings to the partnership a mountaineering qualification unimagined fifty years ago, possessed of an accumulated knowledge of all varying and recorded conditions and of a transmitted instinct for the novel athletic requirements.
In stating this, I do not wish for a moment to be thought to undervalue either the spirit or the skill of the few great early guideless parties who first broke loose from the growing oppression of the professional guiding traditions. They had to face a hostile criticism of whose intensity we have now little conception. In the then condition of mountaineering knowledge their independent action, undertaken deliberately in the best interest of mountaineering as a great pursuit, postulated a resolute courage and a readiness for responsibility that proved to be as well justified by their record of performance as it remains deserving of our wholehearted admiration. The relations of amateur and guide would probably in any case have followed the same line of development. But these pioneers did more than anticipate. They first taught the amateur that it was safe for him, if he wished, to prosecute the craft for himself, and that he possessed advantages that could make him, if he followed them up independently, all but the equal of the best guides.
A guide is, in fact, only a ‘guide’ in the sense that he belongs to a professional class. The name can no longer be used to imply an inherent supremacy in all fields of mountaineering. Similarly an amateur possesses an inheritance and opportunities which make it possible for him to make himself as good as a guide in many, and better than a guide in several, important qualifications.
The Composite Mountaineer.
The title mountaineer can no longer be confined to the man of the mountains. It connotes the perfect mastery of a difficult craft to which guide and amateur alike aspire. This mountain science consists of several departments of equal importance, in some of which the amateur, in others the guide, starts with an initial advantage. In relation to its absolute acquisition there are bad professionals and medium professionals, and bad amateurs and moderate amateurs, according to their personal and not their class values. If they develop their experience and skill at an even rate, either will retain his initial advantage over the other according as the degree of difficulty or the special character of the climbing gives the greater opportunity to the special qualities of the one or of the other. Ultimately, in the highest flights of mountaineering, a point of difficulty is reached which calls for the highest degree of efficiency in all the departments; and since human endurance is limited and economy is essential for emergencies, the ideal combination for swift and secure progress in these ultimate expeditions is to be found in the association of the qualities of the guide and the amateur, each supremely qualified in his own department.
The Guide as Mountaineer.
A good guide is acclimatized, accustomed from his youth to the food, heights and discomforts of sleep. The necessary muscles have been hardened by years of practice. No average amateur, coming out for a few weeks each year and unaccustomed to manual labour, whatever his skill or talent, can hope to compare with him in endurance and consistent pace, be it in step-cutting for long hours on an ice slope or in facing struggle after struggle on an exhausting rock climb. The guide is inured to snowstorms and cold winds, and his fingers can usually outlast an amateur’s in clearing out and clinging to snowy holds or iced rocks. He possesses thus more powerful reserves against unexpected bad weather or against unforeseen difficulty or exertion continued for an undue length of time. He has also another advantage. Amateurs who attempt big climbs are accustomed only to climb with safe companions. They have had, therefore, little practice in dealing with unexpected slips in easy places. Even if they have trained their observation and protective movement by leading beginners on British rock climbs, the duration of the attention demanded has been short, and they have known where to be on their guard, and with whom. But in the Alps the larger part of the day is spent in traversing comparatively easy ground well within the power of the party, but where the height and position may always convert an inattentive stumble into a fatal accident. A guide has been accustomed to looking after the unaccountable vagaries of beginners and incompetents over long days on easy and difficult ground alike. In his association even with a strong party this survives as an instinct. He is not caught napping by the misstep into which even fine amateurs or other guides in his party may be entrapped at the end of a long day by fatigue, wind, darkness or over-confidence. A good guide has, thus, special initial qualities which make him a sort of insurance policy in certain very important respects. His gifts reduce the percentage of accidental risk present on every climb, and his consistency of pace and endurance ensures a larger margin of time for emergencies. He can also carry more. He brings to the partnership physique, endurance, professional technique and watchfulness, and a local instinct for time or weather. His opinion in his own sphere is invaluable; it has generally the additional weight of freedom from the enticements of romance and enthusiasm. The amateur in control should give it every consideration; but it does not relieve him of his own responsibility. A first-class workman may make a very bad managing director.
The Amateur as Mountaineer.
On his side the good amateur has antecedents and opportunities, such as the guide cannot possess, for developing his initial advantages in his own peculiar department. He has, or ought to have the superiority of the educated mind over the uneducated, of the liberal intelligence over the narrow, of contact with men, of reading, of the chance of learning principle and precedent from books and men instead of from small experience, and of the application of imagination and a trained mind to the acquisition of all the details of mountain craft. He can learn how to judge of the individual capacity of his amateur party and of their condition on the day. He can estimate the guide’s ability in his own line, by comparison, better than the guide can himself, and from knowledge of his character he can judge of the value of the guide’s opinion on technical points. In an important decision as to advance or retreat he is, consequently, in a better position to weigh the value of the party against the resistance of the mountain. In all that may be called the human department of mountaineering, the judgment and management of the men, the application of wider experience, of accepted general principles, of imagination and reasoning powers to the solution of particular problems, the good amateur is, or can be, the good guide’s superior. He has also the advantage of being able to make up rapidly, by means of reading, imitation and the progressive adaptability already mentioned, much of his inferiority to the guide in pure technique. In route finding and local knowledge he can run the guide close by availing himself of previous records, of maps (always a mystery to most guides), of local information, of the tracks or presence of other parties, and of the admirable climbers’ guide-books of all nations.
It is in fact no longer possible to designate climbing done under these conditions by amateurs of this class as ‘guideless’ climbing in the sense that climbing fifty years ago was entitled ‘guideless’ and looked upon as unjustifiable. It is therefore easily to be understood that a large number of modern mountaineers, conscious of the amount of the field that their own qualifications and those of their party can cover, prefer to be free from any professional check upon their enjoyment of the mountains.
The Question for the Leader.
If good leaders know the power of their companions, where they fall short of those of a guide and how they can be supplemented, and if they choose climbs within those powers so far as is personally or climatically calculable, they have a right to decide whether the balance of pleasure and efficiency is on the side of using or of not using professional assistance, with its merits and demerits. There is an immense area in mountaineering where the special superiority of a guide in the directions I have indicated has no opportunity of making itself apparent. For the majority of difficult rock peaks, which are by nature short, for the ordinary route finding up big mountains, for the endless variety of climbing on passes and in regions of the lesser ranges, a first-rate amateur can make himself as effective as a first-rate guide. He can climb exhausting rocks as brilliantly, provided it is not for as long; he can cut steps on the steepest ice only a little less fast, for a sufficient number of hours; he can be as watchful on all but the most fatiguing expeditions. If the leader and party are efficient and know and observe their limitations, no mountaineer in more than name will now criticize them for going without ‘guides,’ even if the occasional accident, against which no knowledge is security, may in the course of time select their ‘guideless’ party for its undiscriminating attack. A mountaineer who has qualified himself as a good leader of a party as well as a sound climber has earned the right to weigh the social disadvantage of taking a guide against the technical strengthening his presence will contribute, in relation to the character of the climbing he intends to undertake, and to make his own decision.
The Social Consideration.
The technical advantage of taking a guide has been explained; the social objection may be shortly stated. There is an inherent restraint upon the feeling of independence and holiday fun among a party of friends in the presence of some one of foreign speech and of different habits of thought and body; above all, of one who climbs with them for pay and not for their common pleasure. The association is intimate in climbing, and the atmosphere is inevitably affected, and the spirits checked, if any one of the party is not in key with the rest, does not use their shibboleths or is unable to laugh with their jokes. When a party consists of more than one amateur, and often in the case of only one, etiquette usually insists upon a second guide being taken. If there is a second guide, a division into two camps is formed—one felt if not expressed—which no geniality or linguistic ability can dissolve. The second professional is nearly always, by the nature of the case, an inferior, more bound by his caste and with less interest in, because less responsibility for, the success of the party. He will generally voice valley prejudices and professional doctrines which are enemies to enterprise and individual achievement, and he will form a sort of unreasoning counterpoise to any effect that less hampered amateur opinions might otherwise have upon the views of the first guide. Situations are thus created whose solution demands more tact and attention than a man on holiday feels disposed to devote to his sport. The possibility of their occurrence forces him to put a constraint upon himself, in view of contingencies, which is antagonistic to the complete comradeship of mountaineering. He cannot, as the leader of such a party, merge his identity, and therefore his authority, in the pleasant fluctuations of the common mood. The association of guides also throws upon him many small additional details of daily management, if he is going to get the best use out of them and keep them in good temper. His attention to health, food, personal variations and humour has to embrace a whole new and foreign group of traditions and idiosyncrasies of which he has small experience. He has not only to attend to these, but also to bring them into harmonious co-operation during all the incidents of the day with the preferences, conditions and peculiarities of his amateur members, and with their—to the guides—incomprehensible ideals of adventure and fun. Other things being equal, a leader who knows that his party is competent should be free, on the ground of the extra call their presence puts upon his management, to decide to do without guides.
The Technical Compensation.
But if he is not sure of himself, or if his party is unequal or inexperienced, he has no right to risk the possibility of disaster to his party and the certainty of premature grey hairs for himself by omitting to take a good guide on this social ground alone. And supposing him to be a man of conscience and competence, and not a reckless ‘kraxler’ of no mountaineering claims, he will not allow his decision to take a guide to be influenced by any fear that the credit of his party will be diminished in any competent mountaineer’s eyes by the fact that a prejudiced or a thoughtless modern virtuosity might jeer at it as ‘guided.’
Examples.
The Expert.
In proportion as the collective efficiency of the amateur element is less, the necessity of taking a guide on the technical grounds described is emphasized. The good amateur, if he is alone in the Alps with one beginner or with two beginners, should certainly always take a guide. If he has one beginner and a man of second-rate skill or experience, he should in most cases take a guide; but something then depends upon the nature of the climbing he has in view. Similarly, if he is alone with a second-rate amateur, he should take a guide for glacier work and for all ‘mixed’ climbing, unless it be of a character to be well within the second amateur’s powers as well as within his own. If he is aiming only at what may be called ‘one-man climbs,’ such as short, difficult rock peaks, his own skill may be considered adequate for the safe mastery of the difficulties, and the second man need only be responsible and capable of following without undue exertion to both. But in this case he must remember that he is making no allowance for accident, injury or the unforeseen.
In all cases the first-class amateur remains the leader or manager of any party. He is always supreme in his own department of management; and the fact that the unequal or doubtful competence of his party, technically speaking, or the difficulty of the climb in prospect, may make it advisable to take a guide, and may render the party during the day more dependent upon the guide’s single contribution than would be the case in a party of more equal technical skill, should only be considered to give the guide a rather larger share in the general responsibility. The fact that a guide is taken does not justify the leader in throwing the whole responsibility upon him or in allowing his party to do so; and in the event of any unfortunate issue it will be no defence for his surrender of his proper functions in the eyes of good mountaineers that he is able to plead that he was technically ‘guided.’
On the descending scale of climbing competence, when parties are in question which contain no first-class amateur, a guide is, of course, essential; and in this case his supremacy in skill, accompanied by any proportion of managing ability which he has acquired,—and which will naturally be greater than that of such inexperienced amateurs,—entitle him to all the control, and consequently to much of the responsibility which in former days used to be considered his alone in every department of mountaineering.
Such parties may be of three kinds: moderate mountaineers of some experience, who by choice confine themselves to modest climbs and wish to do them with the utmost security and the least personal exertion; beginners, who have still to learn all their business; and those tourists already mentioned, who merely wish to ‘do a mountain.’
The Tourist.
To take the last first, that of the tourists (and there are many of them), whose ambition it is to be taken up a big peak with a big name, without concerning themselves with learning anything of the craft. In such cases they do well to tie themselves between the strongest and most highly recommended peasants they can secure and leave everything to them. After the experience they will either desire to become mountaineers, when they will join the class of beginners, or they will desist. I should be the last to depreciate any manifestation of the spirit that has brought us all to the hills, but in this chrysalis condition their performance is not titularly mountaineering, and—it is bad for the guides! An occasion comes back to mind—an ascent of the Matterhorn on one of the two days upon which it was climbable in a bad season. Nine members of a far-western gymnastic club chose the same day for the one ascent of their lives. Each was led on a short rope by a more or less competent peasant. They climbed with a magnificent output of muscle. On reaching the summit, with its incomparable view and terrific memories, they looked neither down nor round, but joined hands in a circle facing inwards, and gave nine fearful and prolonged college yells. The bear-leaders, each gravely holding his separate radiating rope, stood contemplating them in a silent outer circle. The simple ceremony accomplished, each guide gave a solemn twitch to his spoke, or rather to his rope. The hub of the universe obediently dissolved itself, and the descent began. One wonders what passed through the guides’ minds. If any of these men had been killed on the descent,—and it was a miracle in view of the condition of the mountain and of the way they climbed that they all escaped, with nothing worse than a night out on the rocks for seven of the couples,—popular censure would have spared their memories: they were not guideless. Whereas, if any one of our experienced and cautious guideless party had been hit by one of the countless stones with which the athletes converted the mountain side for long hours into an active volcano, there would have followed the inevitable outcry over “reckless guideless climbing”; not only from Press and public but even, I fear, from some of the guardians of ancient mountaineering tradition in our climbing associations. To the chance of this absurdity does the perpetuation of the outworn distinction between ‘guided’ and ‘guideless’ condemn any modern mountaineer of enterprise.
The Beginner.
Beginners call for more careful consideration, though they may be the least likely to be tolerant of advice. For I include among beginners not only those who have had no experience of adverse alpine conditions, but also all prophets who are in the habit of asserting that alpine mountaineering only differs from crag climbing in degree, as well as all climbers who, because their modern balance technique has proved sufficient to carry them through a season or so of standard expeditions in fair weather, consider themselves fully qualified to exercise all the discretionary functions of management and leadership without first learning them. Men are all beginners who have never discovered what a lot there is that they do not know. There are men climbing in the Alps to-day who, finding that their first guide was inferior to themselves in pure cragsmanship, have dispensed with guides altogether; and a very slow progress in mountain craft and in achievement has been the result. There are also mountaineers, and good ones, whose competence appeared to justify them in doing without guides from the start, but whose brilliant performances are still marred by mountaineering errors which a more thorough grounding would have eliminated in time. Where the preparation has been deficient, management and leadership must remain voyages of unnecessarily slow discovery.
For beginners or ought-to-have-been beginners of these sorts I can only hope that the awakening may be as harmless, if not as prompt, as mine was in like case. Looking back from the summit of our second peak in our first season, I remarked to my single companion: “Look where that fool of a fox has run up our ridge all along the edge of the snow-cornice! And yet they say that animals——” And then I realized, with an amused horror that has never been forgotten, that we were looking at our own ascending tracks! Well; on the descent we found that, though we had ascended without a thought for cornices, we were equally in error on the summit in thinking we saw a cornice to the ridge over which our tracks passed! The next season we were content to take guides. So will any sage beginner in the Alps or other great range, if he is not fortunate enough, and few are, to be introduced to the science between two first-rate alpine amateurs.
If he is well advised, he will choose his first trainer as much for his knowledge of management—that is, his experience of amateurs, his power of estimating their potentiality and of encouraging their interest—as for his skill. Good second-class local guides in small centres, in contact with moderate but faithful local patrons, have often had more opportunities in this respect than more brilliant experts at large centres in constant engagement with changing employers. He should follow his trainer implicitly, note what he does and how he does it, and accept his judgments; but he should watch him persistently, and discover upon what he bases his actions or directions. Few peasants will be able to help him much by explanation. They act on instinct or experience; the reasons they may be induced to give are less likely to be correct than the conclusions which an intelligent amateur can draw for himself. They are also easily daunted. For this reason the amateur, even if he thinks he knows better on occasion, should hold his tongue. His object is to learn all he can, not to choke the possibly adulterated springs of wisdom. He will soon acquire a mass of small precedents, and out of them he will evolve a number of general principles such as will enable him to take an increasing share in the management of his climbs. A very small amount of principle, acquired and intelligently applied, will prove often of even more service than the local guide’s instinct, which, unless he be a really first-class man, is apt to prove faulty under novel conditions of weather or of the unforeseen.
During his novitiate he should keep off the big exacting ascents, where he will have little leisure to observe, and where the amount he can learn of the reasons for following accepted lines, for avoiding others and so on, is small compared to the mere physical exertion that is called for. He should confine himself to the less known regions where some route finding is necessary, and to the glaciers and near rock ridges, where points of technique can be studied in repetition and variety, and beginnings and endings and alternatives of route and all the other matters common to small and big peaks alike—and vital to his education—are to be found in far greater numbers in proportion to the ground that an active man can cover in the day. One helpful variety he should allow himself during his study under a single guide in a home region. He should take an occasional tour of two days or so to climb a big peak in a different valley. This is a rapid way to acquire experience of all that guides can teach. It will be advisable to take on a second and really good guide from the new district to help the permanent trainer, who will generally have been, if he works in a less important centre, a man of second-rate technical, and of intensive rather than wide, guiding experience. The contrast in their styles will be worth watching; and the expense is in any case less than that of engaging two regular guides for a longer period—an alternative which, if he climbs in his first season from a popular centre, he will be unable to avoid. In his second season he may, if he wish, attempt some guideless expeditions, in a suitable region, with friends of equal or greater competence. But he should not allow this or any subsequent season in his early experience to pass without spending at least some period under a good guide or a first-rate amateur. He has so much to learn that he should not try to rediscover it all for himself. A genius who devotes years to rediscovering the first propositions of Euclid merely wastes time.
The Moderate Mountaineer.
The last case is that of mountaineers of some standing, who either on account of marriage, or of years and a comfortable habit, or from the philosophical attitude of mind which succeeds the enthusiasm of youth and smiles at its ambitions while it still enjoys a measured indulgence in its pleasures, prefer to be relieved of any kind of responsibility. These men take guides as a matter of course, and leave to them from choice the management even in those departments which their own experience would entitle them to direct. Their interest in mountaineering is a personal one, as an occasion for healthful exercise, for air and refreshing views. They pursue it for its distraction from other more worldly interests, not simply for its own sake. They are not concerned with its higher developments as a fine art, and as much from a modest appreciation of their own powers as from a deliberate depreciation of its possibilities, they renounce on their own behalf all the further opportunities which it offers for self-discovery and self-training, in the management of men and the progressive mastery of physical difficulty. The attitude has our sympathy. Those whose graver appreciation of the mountains, whose less tutored spirit of romance and adventure impel them to accept labour, responsibility, hardship, danger and sorrow as integral parts of their mountain service, and as a high discipline for body and spirit such as no other outlet from the enervating oppression of civilized life now affords, will recognize in this gentler manifestation of their own impulse a grateful proof of the fascination which mountaineering can still exercise upon every variety of civilized brain and character, upon men of finer intellect, wider opportunities for usefulness, and perhaps more balanced temperament than their own.
This considerable and often distinguished body needs no advice with regard to the conduct of its guided climbing; but it may not be superfluous to remind it of an obligation which it owes to mountaineering as an institution. If only because of their number and their more frequent meetings in centres—for the minority of wholehearted devotees are generally isolated, and guideless parties are independent and migratory by choice—these somewhat temperate mountaineers form the central body of alpine opinion. Whatever their desire to make their climbing merely a personal pleasure trip and to avoid the more strenuous currents, yet in so far as they use many guides and make with them the large majority of the guided ascents made in any year, they must be held responsible for the training of the guides, mentally and morally, while in their pay. They are assisting to create a considerable amount of abstract alpine doctrine both for the present and the future, and are establishing many more particular conventions affecting the attitude of guides towards amateurs, and of amateurs towards guides, and of the public towards both. But the attitude of mind in which they prefer to approach the pursuit makes them too often neglectful of the charge and of the lasting effect of their participation. Some from mere passive acceptance of the treatment as part of the game, others with an amused inward detachment, encourage young guides and old guides alike to manage every moment and movement of their day; satisfied that they themselves are getting all the profit in health and safety which is their limited holiday object. They are like genial uncles who join in a game and submit with an interior smile to the hectoring of their nephews, retiring when they please to make criticisms for their own and their neighbours’ amusement in the pavilion. But in mountaineering the rigour of the game is essential to its good conduct. A guide indulged is a guide spoiled. An amateur indolently criticized may mean a position permanently falsified. Our small public opinion is not easily corrected. From the start, a right reputation is as essential for our social influence with the guides as it is vital for our mutual climbing safety. In the Alps we have a large number of professionals whose living depends upon their maintaining a satisfying relationship with their employers, and a small number of amateurs whose pleasure in their holiday depends upon maintaining a suitable influence with their guides. The balance is difficult to preserve, and there is no room for dilettantism. Irresponsible handling of guides may in any decade result in a mass of amateurs speeding, by preference, guideless and insecurely uphill in a mountain sense, and in a mass of vocationless guides speeding surely downhill in a financial sense.
Summary.
A first-rate amateur, therefore, will take guides without hesitation, whenever he considers the powers of his friends too weak in general for absolute safety on the technical side, or the particular climbs they desire on occasion to attempt too exacting for their normal collective efficiency. His own concern with guides is to learn how to manage them and to get the best use out of their special qualifications.
Responsible, but less expert mountaineers, who wish to be independent, will nevertheless take first-rate guides for the same reason on occasions when their experience advises them of the advantage of their particular services to the party. They have to learn how to reconcile the retention of their own proper share of management with the greater share of responsibility in all departments which in this case falls to the first-rate guide.
Mountaineers who wish to be free of all responsibility will take guides because they choose to. They have to learn how not to spoil them, and how to prevent the example of their own voluntary surrender of their heritage from biasing their own and the public view of such of their contemporaries as may attempt to enjoy a different form of independence.
Novices will take guides as soon as they have discovered that there is anything they themselves do not know. They have to learn from guides all they can, so as to earn the right to do without them later if they desire.
Tourists, or experimentalists, intent to ‘do a mountain,’ will take guides.
It will be seen that the question of taking guides is no longer to be decided on the traditional single issue, whether the guide is ‘better’ than the amateur. The question has now two aspects, even as ‘leadership’ has now developed two main divisions.
In the earliest stages of amateur accomplishment, while the beginner has no qualifications, the guide is taken because he is technically better qualified and has also, by local knowledge, instinct, etc., a larger proportion of the qualities necessary for management. The guide enjoys in this case his historic position of single responsibility.
In the second stage, where the climber may be only a novice in the alpine sense, the guide may possibly be technically inferior to his employer as a rock climber, a pace maker and so on; but in the absence of the amateur’s alpine experience the guide deserves to retain his ‘leadership’ when his qualifications in both mountaineering fields are considered together.
As we move up the scale of experience, and the amateur is found to have developed more and more his initial advantages in the qualities necessary for management, the decision to employ or not to employ a guide depends more and more upon how far it may be thought advisable to supplement the technique of the party. Again, in proportion as the amateur and his party continue to remedy their technical inferiority, while they improve their experience in management, pari passu the need of a guide, in either department, diminishes. If he is employed, however, his general responsibility is proportionately decreased.
In these later stages the relation of guide and employer is one of expert with expert, and the guide’s position, if he is employed at all, corresponds to that of a professional in a team, who is selected for some individual qualification which he is able to supply. It would be as ludicrous nowadays to rate the performances of such climbing combinations as praiseworthy or censurable, according as they were ‘guided’ or ‘guideless,’ in the old sense of the term, as it would be for us to assume that any cricket team which contained a professional must be ipso facto captained by him, or to refuse our recognition to any team which did not contain professionals among its members.
When, therefore, we are considering the case of a party of finished amateurs, men who are first rate in both divisions of mountain craft, as climbers and as leaders in management, and who have no need of guides as a technical complement, we must be prepared to concede that for them there is now no rule. The matter becomes purely a question of personal preference and of personal discretion in the choice of the climb.
A Supreme Example.
I have left to the last the consideration of the one exceptional case where, for want of sufficient material as a basis for judgment, no clear crystal of modern mountaineering opinion has had opportunity to fashion itself, and where the old debate as between ‘guided’ and ‘guideless’ still survives with something of its old vivacity. This is the case of the highest flights possible in mountaineering, the ascent of the limited number of really great ridges and faces in the Alps and in less explored ranges. These climbs provide the most magnificent exercise of strength, endurance, nerve and spirit, all acting in harmony and all at their utmost tension, that human daring or ingenuity has yet discovered or invented. If they do not represent the limit of possible human achievement, they represent the limit of achievement possible with security in a single day of human effort. They are the ambition of every wholehearted mountaineer, but they fall to the lot of only the few. Many of them are seldom repeated; on others the conditions vary greatly between the rare ascents. Even among the fortunate few who succeed, it will be still fewer who can honestly say that they remained sufficiently masters of themselves and of the situation throughout the long day of extraordinary effort, sufficiently in command of muscle and nerve to meet all the physical demands unassisted and with a critical judgment, sufficiently conscious of all the tactical, human and technical manœuvres by which the success was finally won, to be able to recover from memory a detached opinion as to the relative difficulty of the climb, or to be able to estimate fairly their own ability to repeat the day ‘unguided’ in all its problems for leadership as well as in its tests of pure skill and endurance. It is a common failing among even the best of mountaineers to forget how much they have been ‘morally’ assisted by their company, or how little they may have personally contributed to the actual carrying through of a great climb, in the afterglow of its success. The more we allow for the unusual physical and emotional reaction of these great ascents, the less security we feel in applying standards of common judgment to the opinions and narratives of their few conquerors. The body of ordinary expert mountaineering opinion is of little assistance. Mountaineers whose experience is limited to normal ascents, or who may even have ‘done’ some of these greater climbs between two expert professionals with their bodies and their judgments equally in a condition of suspense, are only a few degrees better qualified than the climbing public to judge of the combination of human faculties required for leadership and management in their secure conquest. We are forced, therefore, to take as our basis for comparison in forming our opinion the few records of such supreme ascents as have been performed by both guided and guideless parties. If, then, we examine these dispassionately, and allow for the golden spectacles of a natural exaltation, the greater where it is the less professional and the more personal, we may decide that the sum of purely dangerous incident, of benightments, races with darkness, breakages of cornice, etc., which they narrate, adds up to the disadvantage of the guideless ascents. The proportion of danger incurred is the one absolute standard by which all mountaineering can be judged. Between danger and difficulty there is a clear line of demarcation, which shifts according to our ability, but which is always perceptible. In doing without guides, these gallant parties, from their own accounts, while they triumphed equally over the difficulties, skirted more closely and more continuously along the border-line of danger.
Reason would bring us to the same conclusion. When we are estimating the limit of what is humanly safe in mountaineering, we are considering not what is securely possible for a single individual, a comparatively low standard, but that which it may be possible for an ideal combination of mountaineering qualities to achieve in one day. Up to the present time we find in certain of the best of the guides the highest development yet attained in one of the two groups of necessary qualifications; in certain of the best of the amateurs we find the highest development in the other. Until guides are enabled to enjoy all the advantages of the amateur’s education and mental training while they still retain their own natural conditions of life, or until amateurs can live the lives of guides and yet remain all that wider circumstance and opportunity assist to make them as amateurs, the finest mountaineering combination will and must still remain that of the associated group-qualities of guide and amateur, each group in its highest degree of individual development.
If a small but concrete proof were needed that neither the combination of the best of guides alone nor of the best of amateurs alone represents the most efficient type of mountaineering machine, it might be found in the history of the conquest of a number of great alpine climbs, which for years defeated alike good guides in association and good amateurs in association, but finally yielded in almost all cases to the combination of good guides and good amateurs.
But it is dangerous to dogmatize. When we are talking of exceptional ascents we are dealing with exceptional men; and if we say that for the safe performance of these exceptional ascents the best amateur parties will be strengthened by the addition of the best of guides, it is with the knowledge that amateur climbing has made extraordinary strides of recent years, and that in any season the conjunction of two or more hitherto unimagined amateur stars may yet further raise the recognized limits of the safely possible in guideless climbing. In such case, the time-honoured discussion as to what degree of difficulty makes a guide indispensable to an expert amateur party, in order to minimize its dangers, with all its heartburnings and rash intrusions, will be removed into an even more remote sphere than the already rarefied atmosphere of exceptional climbs in which alone it is still permissible. The matter may then be for super-mountaineers to debate. The discussion is now, in all but these extreme cases, dead. Sentiment or ignorance may still return to the old war-cries ‘guided’ and ‘guideless,’ used with the old significance, in fireside journals; in safe print moonshine may yet confuse the climbing ways which troops of stars have illuminated; but in the mountains new developments have established new doctrine, and a mountaineer is safe from criticism worthy of the name if he regulates his practice according to modern interpretation.