[6] See also pp. [206], [292].
[7] See “Pegs and Aids,” p. [200].
[8] See also “The Himalaya” and “Mountaineering in the Tropics.”
[9] For further medical outfit, see “Mountaineering in the Tropics.”
CHAPTER III
GUIDED AND GUIDELESS MOUNTAINEERING
The question of climbing with or without guides is one of traditional importance. But the long controversy has proceeded without taking into account the change in modern conditions; and the terms ‘guided’ and ‘guideless’ are still used with a signification that now bears little relation to actual circumstance. Consequently the discussion for mountaineers has become profitless, for it is based upon definite misconceptions.
Old-time Errors.
The great public, or that part of it which has reached the point of accepting mountaineering as a legitimate background for sensational magazine stories, cherishes one fixed idea on the subject of climbing—that the guide is a providence who knows and shows and goes the one sacred and impeccable ‘path’ which every genuine mountain possesses: to go without him is to tempt destruction deliberately; something like ejecting the engine-driver, starting the lever and retiring to smoke in a first-class carriage. The importance of the error is that its persistence permits it to dominate the minds of a large number of men who ‘do mountains’ every year from the hotels. To them, mountaineering means only the traditional route up in the traditional way; and tradition demands the surrender of their intelligence and personal inclinations for a day to the unimaginative tyranny of any two chance peasants between whom they are advised to suspend the exercise of their own finer faculties and the direction of their very differently constituted frames. Their ambition is laudable, but they are in no sense mountaineers, and they may never become so, any more than those who cross the Channel in a steamboat are qualifying as sailors. But they form a considerable portion of those who go among the mountains, and include a large number of those who give the public their experiences. In so far their patronage contributes to confirm and perpetuate the long-lived error.
Among a large number, also, of climbers proper the error, though different in kind, is as constant. The magnificent school of foreign rock climbers which has of late years grown up in the regions of lesser peaks north, east and south of the Alps, and which, with some notable exceptions, has little conception of what independent mountaineering on the great peaks means, accepts the performance and narration of these tourists in the big Alps as typical of ‘guided climbing,’ and very justly condemns it for its obvious lack of many of the features which constitute the pleasure or merit of their own mountaineering. In so far as they accept the popular and mistaken classification into guided and guideless, these climbers help in continuing it. Our equally brilliant school of British rock climbers, recognizing the absurdity of taking guides on the short climbs of Scotland or the Lakes or Wales, often adopts the same attitude. Only by slow experience, and in individual cases, when they meet the problems and actual conditions of real mountaineering in the great Western Alps, do they learn the magnitude of the traditional fallacy. There is, therefore, excuse for the Press and the lay public.
The Guide of the Chronicles.