Mountain Craft

by Unknown

Mountain Perversity

Besides the accidents which are produced by the classes of things which at times go away from us, such as holds, balance, or our common sense, there are other less evitable mishaps produced by the classes of things which at times come at us—stone falls, snow slides, or storms. Mountaineers are too sophisticated any longer to accept a naive statement, that our mishap has been due to one of these causes, as a complete exoneration.

Falling Stones.

Stones, indeed, form the most convincing excuse. Good mountaineers may use all their discretion to avoid lines where stones fall, but the casual stone, or the stone loosened by human agency, may yet overtake them.

A man hit by a stone falling from a height, even if he laughs it off, has nearly always received a greater shock than he realizes. His nerves will be vibrating for a time like strings, and we must be on the look out, especially if we are in exposed places, until we are certain that he is normal again. I have known a man grow faint ten minutes after a stone had struck him and left no apparent mark; and I have seen a guide slip half dazed from his steps a full minute after he had been hit by a spinning stone not the size of a button, which did not even cut through his hat.

But even the peril of irresponsible stone falls can be caged within narrower limits as our experience and our foresight increase. It is itself a small department of our science of reconnoitring to learn how to calculate their probability and recognize their signs. Couloirs and gullies are obvious funnels upon which wandering stones concentrate. In a snow or ice-backed couloir we must study the difference between the ominous furrows made by stones or those made by water. In a rock gully we have to look out not only for stones that may use it as a channel, but for all that its weathering walls may contribute on their own account, or that the changes of temperature, or even the disturbance of our own passage, may dislodge from the balanced accumulations. The surest signs are the absence or presence of stones on the glacier below a couloir, or the grey scars or bruises made by the cannonading stones on the rocks themselves. But these may only indicate stone fall at certain hours of the day. Big grooves in steep precipices and hollows between ribs, where stones may congregate, or featureless flat faces, where they may wander unconfined at their own wild will, are alike suspicious, and the bases of their cliffs must be inspected. Rock faces, corrugated with very shallow ribs and hollows, are particularly dangerous, as falling stones may ricochet unaccountably across the ribs,—stones harder to foresee and to dodge than direct falls. The edges of glaciers commanded by steep precipices are certain to be stone-shelled. Precipices commanded by glaciers—that is, by the small glaciers hanging high up on great peaks, which are often difficult to locate from below—have also their fixed hours; as soon as the ice feels the sun it begins to discharge its surface stones, and continues until the evening.

But without our own examination we need not condemn any face on general grounds or from hearsay. A number of fine mountain walls in the Alps have been unjustly condemned in their entirety for merely local weaknesses. Others offer salient ribs or lines sheltered by accidents of structure through the heart of suspected zones. Only inspection can say. We may presume steep faces to be more safe than those of easier inclination, because the rock should be sounder, and because chance stones ought to fall outside us if they do fall.

If we have been unfortunate in our reconnoitring, or if we have deliberately tempted fortune too far upon a suspected route, we may on occasion have to put our pride and our progress in our pocket and be content to sit out under a grateful rock screen until evening or shadow has chilled the vehemence of the stone barrage. It is better to risk a night out than persist in tackling a bad line at a bad time. An overhanging rock is a sure refuge. But we are also advised, if ever we see that sunlight is increasing the hostile fire upon some passage that we have to negotiate, to wait until a cloud has frozen up the ammunition sources. As I have never yet lighted upon a stagnant party while they were spending some portion of a climbing day in a pensive examination of the sky for this purpose, I must conclude either that clouds are as perverse as stone falls in the ill-timing of their arrival, or that men are as perverse as both in their pigheaded prosecution of a fair-weather programme.

Besides their customary routes, which we avoid by experience or as the result of examination, there are occasions both of place and time when stones fall unaccountably. Stones of large mass will fall at night; the melted snow freezes into the cracks, levers the stones from their attachment, and their weight does the rest. Stones, of smaller size but in larger profusion, will fall in the morning, as the sun again melts the ice in the cracks, which has already detached these lighter stones but kept them for the night frozen in position. During these morning hours, therefore, stones must be looked for on rock faces where they need not be expected during the rest of the day.

During all the hours of hot sunlight, slopes of mixed rock and snow, even of easy angle and harmless aspect, may become operative. Rock extruding from ice is generally more disintegrated, and much of its freshly exposed surface, temporarily cemented by frost, is liable to discharge in sunshine. Any slope of ascent which drains a wide stone-shed of such mixed character must be approached with caution.

Again in hot seasons, after snowless winters, whole regions of rock, gradually disintegrated under their normal covering of ice or snow, become exposed; and in such seasons stones must be looked for on the most respectable peaks. Impeccable cliffs, of traditional mountaineering approach, will be cinctured at their base, and not only there, by bands of discharging rock, remote from and disregarding the time-honoured waste-shoots.

Bad weather, rain, and especially wind, will start volleys in unaccountable places at the most inconvenient times. After storm or heavy rain, even secure lower paths may be raked by a dropping fusillade. But such passing exuberances have also their comfortable aspect. The bruises that surprise us by their appearance on sheer hard crag, where no stone had any business to fall, or the intimidating fragments on the glacier below our firm and promising rib, may be merely such a single past morning’s effervescence or the excesses of a solitary thunderstorm.

Other surprise stones may be due to the passing of goats or chamois above—a rare case in the Western Alps—or more frequently to the presence of other parties. These are a very definite and constant danger, especially on loose faces like the Matterhorn ascent from Zermatt, where half a century of clumsy climbing seems only to have augmented the supply of mountain ammunition available for daily use. It can only be avoided by keeping off these routes, or by making sure of starting first. If we succeed in so doing, we must remember our mountain manners. On any route where stones are likely to fall, no party, however expert, has the right to increase the risk for others below by racing ahead. Unless our line takes us well out of range, we must wait, in ascending or descending, before crossing any passages where there is a prospect of our dislodging loose stones, until the party below is temporarily sheltered or near enough to suffer small damage from the event. We may expect the same consideration from our forerunners, or make ourselves clamorously audible until we secure it.

Stones loosened by the party upon itself, by rough grip climbing, by sitting while descending, by a rope carelessly managed, and so on, are matters for the correction of climbing technique, and cannot be rated, either mentally or vocally and emphatically, as risks from external causes.

But there is still always the familiar terror of the single stealthy stone, that shoots out for a solitary venture on the blandest of mixed rock and ice climbs, sliding soundlessly or skipping venomously on a sharp edge. It can only be countered by the warning of an alert leader and by prompt dodging.

The throwing of stones from the tops of peaks or cliffs is happily confined, apart from a few classical recorded cases, to tourists in our own islands. It is not done by mountaineers; and the method of impressing its serious dangers upon the offenders may be left to the emotional coefficient of the party imperilled to elaborate.

If, in spite of all precautions, a falling stone, or a fall of stones, threatens us, our position at the moment decides our action. In the case of a rock avalanche, whose minatory sound is unmistakable, we shall hear it before we see it; there is nothing to be done but to crouch and get what cover the rock will afford, especially for the head, without trying to locate it. If it is a single stone, or a few stones, sight and not sound will be giving us the warning (unless the risk is already past), and it is best to wait, with back or side turned towards the stone, and watch over our shoulder. A stone falls surprisingly slowly to the eye; its course can be followed, and dodged most effectively at the last second, if it is not in any case aimed to miss us. In dodging or taking cover from stones, the rope must not be forgotten. It is little less serious for the rope to be caught by a large stone falling than for one of the party. To run is often more dangerous, for other reasons, than to stand still. Most guides are terrified of falling stones. They are the one risk external and unaccountable which they cannot train themselves to meet, because no skill can foresee them. Some part of their allied dread of bad weather is due to the increased risk of stones it brings: “A terrible sound of stones cast down, or a running that could not be seen of skipping beasts, ... or a rebounding echo from the hollow mountains, these things made them swoon with fear.” The majority of guides will shout and start skipping indiscriminately in panic. Men who do this must be brought sharply to their senses. An effective, if possibly fallacious, argument is to point out that a stone by falling on a particular line has enormously reduced the chance that another will fall on the same line again.

This argument does not apply to the case of stones which converge from wider areas above, to fall through a particular gully or couloir. A mountaineer, if he finds himself in such a conduit, had certainly better get out of it as quickly as may be safely possible.

If it is absolutely necessary to cross a couloir where falling stones may be expected, or heard, it is best for the party to cross singly, unroped. But if crossing unroped involves a more immediate risk than the chance of a stone striking, not more than two men should remain on the same rope together. One man should cross the couloir alone, with plenty of rope loose for a spring forward or backward to safety, while the other anchors under shelter. If there are three men on the rope, the two end men should cross first, each with plenty of rope; the middle man follows last, with the same allowance. This reduces the danger for the middle man. To be caught by stones in a couloir on the middle of a rope held at both ends is to be trapped. There is no time for the man at either end to release his rope, or, even were that possible, to discover towards which side the middle man intends to escape.

On the whole, considering the amount of stones that fall in the Alps, especially on frequented peaks, the amount of stones that are dislodged by inexperienced climbers on one another on our own cliffs, and the amount of recent stones that litter all mountain bases, and that must have fallen some time, it is astonishing how few and how slight have been the injuries they have caused.

Snow Slides.

Snow slides or avalanches are restricted in summer to more definite danger-zones than are the errant stones. But when they come they are less evitable and more overwhelming in action. Snow falls not only according to the accident of its position, which is ascertainable, but also according to the chance of its condition; and this is susceptible to influences more numerous and more volatile than the comparatively better delimited and more violent forces that produce the loosening and fall of stones.

Again, if we are forced to cross danger-areas of stones or snow, we have the better chance in the case of stones. Each falling stone only occupies in its fall a fraction of the area of danger, and may be eluded; but every inch of snow in an area of avalanche risk is alike pregnant with danger. It is no longer a question of artful dodging individually, but of an escape in time by the whole party, possibly over a considerable extent of slope, all of it equally treacherous.

But snow makes these concessions to the skilful leader: its presence can be located; its condition can be tested in advance. Experienced reconnoitring beforehand may advise us to avoid a snow passage altogether: precaution on the spot, a thorough testing of its holding quality, gives us a second chance of eluding an unpleasing surprise. But these safeguards are precautionary rather than corrective, and belong properly to the province of prevention, that is of snow craft.

Correction becomes needful when we have been deceived in our craft, and find ourselves by error, or perhaps by chance, on a risky snow passage. The snow threatens to slide or to avalanche, because it is either powdery and superficially slithery, or water-logged, or crusted and detached below, or bedded deceitfully upon ice. Now, to continue to trough horizontally across suspicious snow is equivalent to sawing through a high branch, on which you are seated, between yourself and the trunk. We must turn vertically up, or down, or follow as steep a diagonal as we may. We make steps as far as possible apart, and we tread exactly and lightly in each other’s. If there is firmer snow below, we drive the axe to the head at each step, and loop the rope. In extreme cases we may turn face inward, as the toe is less disturbing than the heel or side-boot. Or we may have to clear away the snow and make steps in the ice below. All as our craft dictates. On positively dangerous snow there is much to be said for unroping, should we have to continue long in equal insecurity. The rope can be little protection; concerted action once a slide starts is impossible, and if the slide embraces the footing of all the party, the individual chances of survival are greater without it. But while admitting that there is a case for unroping, I have never known a party do it.

If, in spite of all our discretion, the snow slide or avalanche starts, any further chance of corrective action passes out of our hands with the loss of our footing. A good deal has been written about what we ought to do in an avalanche: cut the rope, adopt a swimming attitude, roll sideways and so on. To anyone who has ever bathed in broken surf, or felt the weight of even a thin film of snow sliding about his ankles or on to his shoulders, all such nostrums will seem about as practical as that delightful recommendation that we should all wear a red appendage of trailing string, as a signal to those who search for us in an avalanche. The vision of a line of sturdy mountaineers tripping intricately across a snowfield like embarrassed macaws in pursuit of each other’s scarlet tails may give us some pleasurable moments. Possibly coloured air-balloons, to keep the string-tails floating archly above our heads, might add to their picturesque efficacy.

A man in an avalanche can only act by instinct; and he will instinctively struggle. If he keeps, or ends, upon the surface, it will be due to the shallowness of the slide or the depth of his good fortune. It is well to remember that a man, by an accident of compression, may live for some time although overwhelmed and out of sight under the snow; the survivors therefore must take the risk of further snow falling and attempt the rescue work at once. The chances of survival will always be greater in a slide of powdery snow than in one of wet snow.

Ice Fragments.

Ice falls in fashions more fathomable than snow, over more limited areas and by more discoverable rules. We may find ourselves forced to pass below séracs on glaciers. A sérac may fall; but séracs are very obvious as well as beautiful, and the really capable eye is at fault if it cannot foretell when one is likely to fall, within an hour or two, and hurry out of its track. Even if it is too far above us for inspection, there is plenty to guide us in the condition of the ice near us and in the feel of the atmosphere. Séracs are usually safer than they look; and it is wiser, if we find ourselves unwittingly under fire, to glide out of it quietly and competently than to rush into the real frying-pan of a panicky flight. If there is opportunity, we get rid of the rope; a man on claws, without the rope, has a much better chance of dodging the sérac that topples. Heavy step-cutting just below a poised column had better be avoided; but I am half sorry to record that the hallowed myth that it is dangerous to talk or breathe loudly on such passages is not borne out by latter-day séracs. I have shouted very loudly and clearly into the ear of a number of very promising ones—of course from safe positions on their shoulders, and not, like Lauener, from their ‘dangerous’ heads—without eliciting even a nod of response.

Only one other case suggests itself where falling ice might be classed as an external or objective risk; and that more because the extent of its danger-zone is undiscoverable than because its position, or the probability of its fall, is concealed from ordinary foresight. In a snowy season, with alternates of melting sun and freezing wind, the day comes when the rocks of a peak or ridge are armoured with ice plates or ice spears. If we traverse unsuspectingly below such walls, an hour’s sunlight may expose us, in the middle of our enjoyment of our postponed fine day, to a raking and dangerous fire. The missiles may come shooting over the edge of any innocent, black jut or buttress far above us. The only course is to watch, and dodge, and make carefully for open country. That what has fallen once cannot fall again in the same place is even more true of these ice plates than of stones. For our mischance, also, we may have to blame ourselves as much as the mountain. Rocks in such a state generally betray some gleam of their ice armour to a heedful examination, and as the chance of such a condition occurring should have been suggested to us by the kind of weather that produced it, we ought to have been able approximately to locate the peril beforehand, and avoid its zone.

Evil Weather.

Thunderstorms or blizzards may produce direct catastrophe. Of a blizzard we should have had premonitory signs; and if we are caught in it, we must just fight through it, and we may not afterwards justly blame the mountains. It is a foolish pride which thinks to show hardihood by persisting wilfully, among big mountains, against the threat or oncoming of evil weather.

But thunderstorms may take us unawares; and then our only refuge is retreat. Their chief menace lies along the edges of ridges and on outstanding points. If a storm threatens, we must get off the ridges and away from pinnacles as quickly as possible, even if it may mean cutting down an ice slope. Sometimes our first warning may be an electric shock, coming out of a dark and windless silence or through a warm oppression of slow-falling and separate snow-flakes, and thrilling us helplessly from heel to hair. If there is no other sign, and in the heart of the worst storms there is no flash and no thunder, the singing of our axes and the hissing crackle of the discharge from every point of the ridge will give warning that it is well to go elsewhere. We are generally advised to get rid of our axes. If we are on a big peak, this will mean our seeking scanty shelter not very far below the ridge where the storm caught us. Personally, I prefer to keep my axe, and use it to climb well down one of the flanking walls. While we remain on the ridge or near it, all points, including ourselves, are potential conductors, and it is awkward to get far down without an axe. We once came on a whole grove of axes abandoned on a summit. When we saw, later, the angle and the condition of the snow slopes that this party had been driven to descend without their axes, to escape from the storm, we realized what frightening things men can do if they are only frightened enough.

Thunderstorms apart, the perils of bad weather are indirect, and give us time to use precautionary rather than corrective skill. A very strong wind may of course blow us right out of our steps. I have only seen this actually happen once, to a light-limbed mountaineer, who pitched very neatly on the ice steps ten feet lower down. Ordinarily we cling on as we can, and evade the direct blast by moving on to the other side of a ridge. Wind will also pelt us with stones and icicles in unexpected places, or lacerate our faces with snow particles. But its principal effect is usually upon men’s nerves, who get ‘rattled’ and lose their collective rhythm. Continuous loud noise always interrupts communications, and breeds flurry or confusion. It is worth while taking shelter behind rocks, if only for a minute or two at intervals, to steady the nerves again.

Mist and fog can only harm us if our craft fails. We meet them by compass and the sense of direction. Wind can make a gracious exception to its usual offensiveness, and help us in mist. If we have noted its direction, and have observed that it is a constant and not a gusty or spinning wind, we can keep a straight course by keeping it always on the same cheek. Again, when he is approaching the crest of a ridge or a pass, what mountaineer has not had cause, in mist, or even in sun, to welcome the little rushes or breaths of wind that tell him the edge is near and assure him of his direction? After a weary plough up foggy snow terraces or a harsh struggle on mist-wet rocks, these soughs seem like the mountain, too, sighing with our relief, or like the end of our travail surprising our mournful faces with a kindly but derisive ‘pooh!’

Earthquakes are natural perversities outside the sphere of ordinary mountaineering prevision. Among mountains their danger is indirect or subsequent. They injure a number of good rock routes, and after a series of shocks we may expect some grievous deterioration in the condition of rock pinnacles and faces. Large masses will have been precariously loosened, and our ledges will be littered with poised blocks and cranky rubble. The peaks affected may require markedly cautious climbing for some seasons, until time and weather shall have tidied down the surfaces again. Some years ago certain of the Chamonix Aiguilles had to be left unvisited for a time on this account. As to how we should meet the uproar of the eruptive moments, it is difficult to suggest an approved method. A mountaineer of reputation relates how an earthquake caught him on the precipitous north face of the Dent du Géant; and how that proud pinnacle rocked so portentously that his feet were flung free, and he only saved himself by swinging perilously, like a pendulum, from his handholds. It is reassuring to feel that such exceptional circumstance does generally select the exceptional man, and that it invariably finds him inspired to deal with its crises imaginatively. For upon such natural inspiration it would be difficult to improve by devising any more formal code.

CHAPTER VII
ICE AND SNOW CRAFT

The Age for Glaciers.

Rock is the framework of mountains, and for those who discover their enthusiasm or train their activity among our western hills, rock craft must always remain the basis of mountaineering. Many of us would not be dissatisfied if the chances of time and leisure offered us no wider field. For our performance, there is more than a lifetime could hope even to examine between the precipices of our mounting uplands and the descending cliffs of our long sea coasts; and for our æsthetic pleasure, nature, through the medium of a soft and variable atmosphere, shrouds the settled lines of our hills with a delicacy of interrupted and changing colour, and a grave reticence of shadow, sun-break and mist, that leave nothing incomplete for the fulfilment of that sense of power and wonder whose realization gives something of the quality of religion to our feeling for great mountains. These ancient hills are at peace with their neighbours the fields, and rest tranquilly among them; content to contribute with their waters and pasture to the fertility, and with their mists and rocks and seclusion to the holiday pleasure of the land which in youth they were wont to cumber with the fragments of each fiery insurgence, or bury under the white burden of their glacial defeats.

In other lands, to modify the harshness and to order the exuberance of younger ranges, whose ambition would yet challenge the stars, nature has still to avail itself of the sterner and more primitive discipline of ice and perpetual snow. With this veil, constant but always renewing, it subdues the barrenness and the aggressive angularity proper to their period of immaturity and change, and preserves for them the aloofness that is at once the protection and the charm of free-growing childhood. It is a mistake to think of the Alps or the Himalaya as venerable because their heads are white: theirs are all the irrepressible impulse, the uneven humour, the unconscious cruelty and the overflowing vitality of froward but jolly children.

A mountaineer may be satisfied to nurse his athletic infancy upon home rocks, and he may be happy to pass the later years of his experience among the more elusive impressions and more subtle romance of our old and quiet hills. But in the storm years of his strength he should test his powers, learn his craft and earn his triumphs in conflict with the abrupt youth and warlike habit of great glacial ranges.

Snow and ice are permanent upon the high hills, and consequently ice and snow craft are essential departments of greater mountaineering. To treat them as decorative adjuncts, cultivated by a certain set of rather old-fashioned folk, or to say, as I have heard more than one promising climber say in effect, “Rock is good enough for me: snow and ice only mess it up; I shan’t bother with that sort of Alp!” and then rush off to the Dolomites as a relief from the Fells, is equivalent to refusing to exchange the foil play of practice for the rapier play of real contest with the best champions of the mountain realm: it means the repudiation of the better half of mountain knowledge, and the renunciation of almost all its rewards.

The higher craft of mountaineering begins above the line of perpetual snow. A rock climber who leaves his rocks at that level can never discover even all that rocks may offer of difficulty and variety. The refinements of climbing develop out of the modifications that rock and ice and snow produce in one another. It is among the elastic extensions, the frequent exceptions, which their combination imposes upon our grammar rules for rock or snow, that the mountaineer is evolved out of the climber.

ROCK AND ICE
SYDNEY SPENCER

Our strong years are the years in which to learn the complete craft of greater mountaineering. And it is also in these years, while the senses are keen and the imagination undimmed, that the entries and illustrations most worthy of assembling in our book of memory can be collected from among the daring sights and hazardous incidents of high mountaineering as from no other region of adventure. Never to have broken too soon with sleep, and issued up on to the grey coldness of night-frozen glaciers; never to have felt rather than seen the loneliness of frosted grey peaks, oppressed with a sanctity of reluctant seclusion; never to have endured the enchantment of solitary space, an intimate but hostile fascination that is found elsewhere only in the desert and among arctic silences; never to have almost heard the strange expectancy that fills great snow fields before dawn with questions never uttered and never answered, and whose insistence is only veiled under a livelier and more visible remoteness at the inquisitive approach of light; never to have watched the night widen and the edges of the world draw closer round, as the peaks begin to darken and the glaciers to pale, and the vague shadows of mystery and of elusive presence shrink and harden into form and line and colour with the nearing of sunrise; and, at the moment when the first rose ray quickens the first high summit and day pours in about us, never to have known the lassitude of odd illusion vanish and the summons to good sunlit action thrill every fibre, from toe to finger-tip, with a rush of human mastery in each stout blow of the axe and each fresh shock of the driving heel;—never to have known something of only this one hour of an alpine morning would have been to have missed the most vivid moments of living, and to have deprived our working and our evening hours of their most faithful comrade memories.