To the mountaineer, the real appeal of ski-ing is due to the fact that it halves the labour of his ascent to the upper snowfields, and converts a tedious descent into a succession of swift and fascinating runs. The ski-runner climbs on ski to the foot of the final rock and ice ridges, and then finishes the climb in the ordinary way. After rejoining his ski, his work is over, and his reward is all before him. If he were on foot, he would have to wade laboriously down to the valley. On ski, he can swoop down with ten times the speed, and a thousand times the enjoyment.
Ski were introduced into Central Europe in the early ’nineties. Dr. Paulcke’s classic traverse of the Oberland in 1895, which included the ascent of the Jungfrau, proved to mountaineers the possibilities of the new craft. Abroad, the lesson was soon learned. To-day, there are hundreds of ski-runners who make a regular practice of mountaineering in winter. The Alps have taken out a new lease of life. In summer, the huts are crowded, the fashionable peaks are festooned with parties of incompetent novices who are dragged and pushed upwards by their guides, but in winter the true mountain lover has the upper world to himself. The mere summit hunter naturally chooses the line of least resistance, and accumulates his list of first class expeditions in the summer months, when such a programme is easiest to compile. The winter mountaineer must be more or less independent of the professional element, for, though he will probably employ a guide to find the way and to act as a reserve of strength, he himself must at least be able to ski steadily, and at a fair speed.
Moreover, mountain craft as the winter mountaineer understands the term is a more subtle and more embracing science as far, at least, as snow conditions are concerned. It begins at the hôtel door. In summer, there is a mule path leading to the glacier line, a mule path which a man can climb with his mind asleep. But in winter the snow with its manifold problems sweeps down to the village. A man has been killed by an avalanche within a few yards of a great hôtel. From the moment a man buckles on his ski, he must exercise his knowledge of snow conditions. There are no paths save a few woodcutter’s tracks. From the valley upwards, he must learn to pick a good line, and to avoid the innocent-looking slopes that may at any moment resolve themselves into an irresistible avalanche. Many a man is piloted up a succession of great peaks without acquiring anything like the same intimate knowledge of snow that is possessed even by a ski-runner who has never crossed the summer snow-line. Even the humblest ski-runner must learn to diagnose the snow. He may follow his leader unthinkingly on the ascent; but once he starts down he must judge for himself. If he makes a mistake, he will be thrown violently on to his face when the snow suddenly sticks, and on to his back when it quickens. Even the most unobservant man will learn something of the effects of sun and wind on his running surface when the result of a faulty deduction may mean violent contact with Mother Earth.
Those who worship the Alps in their loveliest and loneliest moods, those who dislike the weary anti-climax of the descent through burning snowfields, and down dusty mule paths, will climb in the winter months, when to the joy of renewing old memories of the mountains in an unspoiled setting is added the rapture of the finest motion known to man.
In England mountaineering on ski has yet to find many adherents. We have little opportunity for learning to ski in these isles, and the ten thousand Englishmen that visit the Alps in winter prefer to ski on the lower hills. For every Englishman with a respectable list of glacier tours on ski to his credit, there are at least a hundred continental runners with a record many times more brilliant. The Alpine Ski Club, now in its sixth year, has done much to encourage this “new mountaineering,” and its journal contains a record of the finest expeditions by English and continental runners. But even in the pages of the Alpine Ski Club Annual, the proportion of foreign articles describing really fine tours is depressingly large. Of course, the continental runner lives nearer the Alps. So did the continental mountaineer of the early ’sixties; but that did not prevent us taking our fair share of virgin peaks.
The few Englishmen who are making a more or less regular habit of serious mountaineering on ski are not among the veterans of summer mountaineering, and the leaders of summer mountaineering have not yet learned to ski. Abroad, the leaders of summer mountaineering have welcomed ski-ing as a key to their mountains in winter; but the many leaders of English mountaineering still argue that skis should not be used in the High Alps, on the ground that they afford facility for venturing on slopes and into places where the risk of avalanches is extreme. On the Continent thousands of runners demonstrate in the most effective manner that mountaineering on ski has come to stay. It is consoling to reflect that English ski-runners are prepared to work out the peculiar problems of their craft with or without the help of summer mountaineers. Of course, both ski-ing and summer mountaineering would be strengthened by an alliance, and ski-runners can best learn the rules of the glacier world in winter from those mountaineers who combine a knowledge of the summer Alps with some experience of winter conditions and a mastery of ski-ing. For the moment, such teachers must be looked for in the ranks of continental mountaineers.
CHAPTER X
THE ALPS IN LITERATURE
The last chapter has brought the story of mountaineering up to modern times, but, before we close, there is another side of Alpine exploration on which we must touch. For Alpine exploration means something more than the discovery of new passes and the conquest of virgin peaks. That is the physical aspect of the sport, perhaps the side which the average climber best understands. But Alpine exploration is mental as well as physical, and concerns itself with the adventures of the mind in touch with the mountains as well as with the adventures of the body in contact with an unclimbed cliff. The story of the gradual discovery of high places as sources of inspiration has its place in the history of Alpine exploration, as well as the record of variation routes too often expressed in language of unvarying monotony.
The present writer once undertook to compile an anthology whose scope was defined by the title—The Englishman in the Alps. The limitations imposed by the series of which this anthology formed a part prevented him from including the Alpine literature of foreign authors, a fact which tended to obscure the real development of the Alpine literature. In the introduction he expressed the orthodox views which all good mountaineers accept without demur, explaining that mountaineers were the first to write fitly of the mountains, that English mountaineers had a peculiar talent in this direction, and that all the best mountain literature was written in the last half of the nineteenth century. These pious conclusions were shattered by some very radical criticism which appeared in leading articles of The Times and The Field. The former paper, in the course of some criticisms of Mr. Spender’s Alpine Anthology, remarked: “In the matter of prose, on the other hand, he has a striking predilection for the modern ‘Alpine books’ of commerce, though hardly a book among them except Whymper’s Scrambles in the Alps has any real literary vitality, or any interest apart from the story of adventure which it tells. Mummery, perhaps, has individuality enough to be made welcome in any gallery, and, of course, one is glad to meet Leslie Stephen. But what is C. E. Mathews doing there? Or Norman Neruda? Or Mr. Frederic Harrison? In an anthology which professed to be nothing more than a collection of stories of adventure, accidents, and narrow escapes, they would have their place along with Owen Glynne Jones, and Mr. Douglas Freshfield, and innumerable contributors to Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers and The Alpine Journal.”