PEGS AND AIDS
Artificial aids have never been popular with us. If a climber does not feel safe in descending, he ought to practise on rock which he can climb, not spoil rock which he cannot with blacksmith’s leavings. If a security greater than rock can afford him remains his object, it would be more consistent to fix up a ladder or windlass at once. I am told that a delightful contrivance—a pulley or block—has been advertised, which enables the climber to haul himself up or down without effort. As to how we may fix the pulley to draw ourselves up, or unfasten it after we have descended, we have clearly only to adopt the method followed by Baron Munchausen when he descended from the moon on a short rope—and the thing is done!
For those who cannot climb down in Britain there is always an easy way round. The only two pegs I can recall having seen in our hills were left by two foreigners, and were not needed.
In big mountaineering there may be more excuse. A descent may have really become more difficult, even unsafe, owing to the coming on of darkness or the glazing of rocks.
In such case, pegs to hammer in and anchor to are a remedy for our failures, our failure to carry on, to adjust the climb to the day-length, or to watch the weather. Their use then is corrective, not auxiliary. My party has taken pegs three times in all, as a precaution, and used one once (on a new descent where the precise ‘impossible’ passage had been previously located). Pegs taken for this purpose should be short and sharp, and sheathed for carriage in pocket or sack. They should be made with a ring or eye to pass the rope through. They are smitten in and out as convenience and the rock dictate.
Pegs should never be left as memorials. Prongs and rings poked permanently into popular routes are more harmful than helpful. The mountaineer will not need them, and they may mislead him, as they usually follow the best lowering rather than the best climbing line. Where fixed irons are placed with fixed ropes attached, as on the Matterhorn or the Dent du Géant, they spoil the climber and the climbing alike. They attract feckless folks on to the peaks, and torment them with the rock-barrages of pantechnicon parties or the stonier sharp-shooting of daft solitary scramblers.
On the rock peaks of the Eastern Alps, however, the peculiar character of the climbing has created a different tradition. Already a large literature has grown up on the subject of mechanical contrivances for descents. Pitons and ring-pegs and slings are taken and used to an extent that almost relieves a climber of the need of considering his descent at all. A practice which is sanctioned by many fine cragsmen who have developed their methods to suit their own type of rock, and not ours, must be respected in its own territory. But just as among our own countrymen the over-use of the rope and of belays has contributed towards a diminution in individual responsibility and to an increase in ill-chosen associations, so also the opinion suggests itself that the over-use of pegs and other contrivances by our colleagues abroad has led to a recklessness in leading and a disregard of what we mean by collective safety and power, which have proved even more fatal in result than our own error. Recently among the best continental experts there have been indications of a change of doctrine. They are finding, as we did, that the neglect of the art of climbing down is a definite bar to achieving success in greater mountaineering.
There would be no purpose in discussing the technicalities of a practice so little likely to be popular with us.
In ascending, a peg is no protection to a leader, although its insertion may tempt him perilously to go beyond what he should. His second man, 50 to 60 feet below him, can give him as much ‘safety’ with the rope as a rigid peg 10 to 20 feet down. If he has room to drive in a number of shorter-distance pegs, there should certainly be room for him to have up his second man. If he has got to run out more than the 50 to 60 feet before he can get a stance, it is useless to waste time driving in a peg; no rope light enough to run out in this way could be trusted to stand the jerk of a fall of any height upon a rigid bar or ring.
On long horizontal or diagonal traverses on very steep rock, pegs may have a purpose, as a moral support to the leader; although, if he is free to hammer in pegs and loop ropes, it would probably be better for him to get on with his leading and get it over. On such a traverse also a peg may serve to carry the rope, and relieve the waist of some of the drag from the lengthening run-out.
A peg is really only ‘sound,’ in our sense, for ascending or traversing, if the rope over it is being ‘played’ by a human being. Then it may become an extra anchor or belay where natural belays may be lacking; it can secure a second man while he is looking after the leader’s rope, and enable him to protect the party below against the consequences of the fall of the leader above. The occasions are so rare when a little ingenuity cannot find or contrive a better stance and anchor out of the natural features than out of a driven peg, that pegs are seldom worth taking on this chance, except for some known difficulty.
Any man who feels when he looks at a passage that he wants more protection behind him than the character of the rock allows his second man to give him, should not attempt the passage at all. If he decides to take the risk, he should do so only on his own account, and unrope from his party. He can send the rope down afterwards, or, in the case of a traverse, leave them one loose end to hold. As a protection to the party it is even better to unrope than to drive in pegs to carry the lengthening rope; and as a protection to more than the morale of the leader the peg is futile on such passages.
The times when it is justifiable to use pegs on a descent are the same as I have already mentioned in dealing with rope doubles: the intentional descent of that which has not or cannot be ascended, the retreats in worse conditions, or over glazed rock, and the races against time. The first is a praiseworthy exercise in gymnastics, for which rings, bars and poles may be taken and used according to taste; the last two allow of pegs or any other precautionary means we may have with us being used that may prevent defeat or miscalculation from becoming disaster.
I can imagine no other cases where a climber should not feel that he is confessing to incapacity or some misjudgment if he has to fall back upon pegs and aids to help him to come down what he, or some other man, has ascended. After one such experience, any conscientious climber would now set himself to practise climbing down, until he had remedied a very serious defect in his qualification to rank as a good mountaineer.
So long as a man depends upon his own hands and feet and his knowledge of the rock, he remains master of the situation. He has four chances always in his favour. Whereas, if he is swinging loose from an inserted artificial peg, he has only one chance; and that one neither so much under his physical control as his own fingers and toes, nor even as calculable in its efficiency as a natural rock-borne belay.