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.
ICE CRAFT
For snow and ice as for rock we study primarily balance,—balance in motion, and above joints flexed as well as straight. The elementary movements and practice are identical. Rock is the substructure of mountains, and ice and snow are its accretions. Similarly, rock climbing is the groundwork of mountaineering technique; and for ice and snow we employ the same principles, availing ourselves of the mechanism of axe and claw and ski so as to render them equally applicable to new conditions of surface and texture.
For balance climbing, footwork is all-essential. On rock, only where angle or unsound texture makes footwork alone insufficient, do we help out with the hands. On ice or snow, only where angle or a texture too soft or too hard denies our feet their assurance, do we supplement them with ice-axe and ice-claw, or to a certain extent with ski. While a man remains a grip climber, he will never make an iceman; and he had better go back and learn first how to climb in balance on rocks, rather than set himself the twofold task of learning balance and axe or claw technique simultaneously and painfully on ice. Most of the early mountaineers learned what footwork they knew upon ice first, and it was therefore very natural that they should in their mountaineering precepts give the larger share of space and attention to elementary movements and exercises in stepping on ice and snow. These movements are now learned more easily and perfectly on rock, sound and unsound, and transferred, when we go to the Alps, to snow and ice, following a more logical and certainly more safe order of study. In recent years I have taken some of the very best of the new generation of ‘continuous’ rock climbers for their first climbs in the Alps, and have found that their balanced footwork took only a few hours to adapt itself to snow or ice surfaces, skipping all the elementary stages hallowed by tradition. Consequently they could start upon the more recondite branches of ice and snow craft with a rapid assurance that left the guides frankly interested.
Largely because it was the only type of mountaineering that they really studied as a craft, and consequently could fully enjoy when they mastered it, ice and snow craft came to be considered by many of our predecessors as the only true mountaineering, to the supersession of all other branches.
After the possibilities of rock surface began to be appreciated, and while rock climbing was working through its successive and isolated stages, the swing of the pendulum went all too far the other way. Ice and snow came to be regarded by all except the old alpine school as intrusions upon ascents, to be got over as best one could. Their study was proportionately neglected by guides and amateurs alike, who chose the ribs and rock faces for their routes, and were apt to be bothered if they had to come off them. The lack of any advanced technique became painfully apparent when mountaineering ambition progressed to the point of attempting great new alpine ridges and faces, where a knowledge of ice and snow craft is indispensable. Many a failure and even accident revealed what a large lacuna our rock climbers had been nourishing in their alpine understandings.