[17] See “Mountaineering on Ski,” p. [424]. This chapter should be consulted for the more detailed study of snow phenomena required for winter and spring ski-ing. In “Snow Craft” I have limited myself to the conditions that a climber may meet with in the ordinary alpine summer season.
CHAPTER VIII
RECONNOITRING
Reconnoitring precedes in action the exercise of mountain craft. But as an art it is the gold cup in the sack mouth of a mountaineer’s equipment. Its effective mastery must rest upon his previous accumulations of practical experience. It may therefore, fittingly, be put in last.
In the Alps and nearer European ranges, maps and guide-books relieve the mountaineer of almost all occasion to apply his powers of observation to the interpretation of the Seen or the reconstruction of the Unseen. The majority of men who climb in the Alps or Britain get no practice in making even elementary deductions from scenic details within sight; and a number more, whose experience and observation have been sufficient to enrich them with what they would call an instinctive feeling about the meaning of topographical details which they can see, or about the probabilities of those which are out of their sight, have never, for lack of opportunity, been forced to resolve this feeling into precise conclusions.
Nothing but actual necessity, the need of providing for safe progress or comfort, will induce most men on a holiday to exercise or educate their observation. The loss is considerable; not only because a developed faculty of observing, and of reasoning from the observations, is in itself a valuable permanent possession, but because the neglect involves the failure to see much that is beautiful. If we are accustomed to wait until beauty imposes itself upon the eye, as in the end it will, and almost flauntingly, in large mountain scenery, we shall have already missed the discovery of the relations of line and colour and mass to which the beautiful effect is due, and we are fated to overlook much that is lovely and much that is interesting in regions where there is grace and interest in the smallest detail, but where detail escapes unperceived among the broad and salient features of familiar magnificence.
MOUNTAIN ARCHITECTURE
C. F. MEADE
On a more material plane, a man who aspires to lead a party must be able to ‘see,’ in the sense in which an artist or natural scientist ‘sees,’ and he must be able to make the necessary mountaineering deductions from his sights. A mountaineer who wishes to conduct an expedition efficiently in unexplored ranges must be able to do more: he must be practised in the art of confirming conjecture as to what is beyond his sight from ‘signs’ within view. For an expert of this sort it is fortunately sufficient to indicate what he can discover and how to set about it; fortunately, because ‘signs’ in practice are so modified by place, climate and season that no rules could be laid down without a page of exceptions to prove each one. One day of practical demonstration under guidance will reveal more of what we ought to see and how to see it than much tabulation. We may write of a ‘snow sky’ and an ‘ice sky,’ and a mountaineer who had them pointed out to him would recognize the difference; but we cannot with truth say “a snow sky is a whitish-blue, or shows as a white underside on a cloud,” or “an ice sky is a greyish-blue, and reflects in a shade of grey from a cloud,” because a different climate or region might anywhere contradict our colour definitions. But the distinction between the two would remain as a constant difference of tone under all identical conditions, and it would be perceptible to a trained eye.
Somewhat the same difficulty interferes with any accurate summary of more elementary signs to be looked for in reconnoitring,—signs whose discovery is, or should be, part of our daily alpine routine. Every mountaineer should know at a glance, in the right conditions of light, new snow from old snow, ice from crusted snow surface, open glacier from firn or névé. But who could learn to recognize the differences, under continually changing conditions of light, from his recollections of a written classification? The suggestions here made must be understood, therefore, only to affirm that between certain groups of surface appearances there are certain constant relative differences, whose presence, or absence, can always be ascertained in the right weather and light. They are intended to indicate a few lines of less obvious investigation, which the trained eye can pursue in examining aspects and details of mountains that are visible to everybody but not equally intelligible to everybody; and further, to outline a province of yet more difficult discovery—the collection of information as to aspects and details which are not even in sight.