Beginners call for more careful consideration, though they may be the least likely to be tolerant of advice. For I include among beginners not only those who have had no experience of adverse alpine conditions, but also all prophets who are in the habit of asserting that alpine mountaineering only differs from crag climbing in degree, as well as all climbers who, because their modern balance technique has proved sufficient to carry them through a season or so of standard expeditions in fair weather, consider themselves fully qualified to exercise all the discretionary functions of management and leadership without first learning them. Men are all beginners who have never discovered what a lot there is that they do not know. There are men climbing in the Alps to-day who, finding that their first guide was inferior to themselves in pure cragsmanship, have dispensed with guides altogether; and a very slow progress in mountain craft and in achievement has been the result. There are also mountaineers, and good ones, whose competence appeared to justify them in doing without guides from the start, but whose brilliant performances are still marred by mountaineering errors which a more thorough grounding would have eliminated in time. Where the preparation has been deficient, management and leadership must remain voyages of unnecessarily slow discovery.
For beginners or ought-to-have-been beginners of these sorts I can only hope that the awakening may be as harmless, if not as prompt, as mine was in like case. Looking back from the summit of our second peak in our first season, I remarked to my single companion: “Look where that fool of a fox has run up our ridge all along the edge of the snow-cornice! And yet they say that animals——” And then I realized, with an amused horror that has never been forgotten, that we were looking at our own ascending tracks! Well; on the descent we found that, though we had ascended without a thought for cornices, we were equally in error on the summit in thinking we saw a cornice to the ridge over which our tracks passed! The next season we were content to take guides. So will any sage beginner in the Alps or other great range, if he is not fortunate enough, and few are, to be introduced to the science between two first-rate alpine amateurs.
If he is well advised, he will choose his first trainer as much for his knowledge of management—that is, his experience of amateurs, his power of estimating their potentiality and of encouraging their interest—as for his skill. Good second-class local guides in small centres, in contact with moderate but faithful local patrons, have often had more opportunities in this respect than more brilliant experts at large centres in constant engagement with changing employers. He should follow his trainer implicitly, note what he does and how he does it, and accept his judgments; but he should watch him persistently, and discover upon what he bases his actions or directions. Few peasants will be able to help him much by explanation. They act on instinct or experience; the reasons they may be induced to give are less likely to be correct than the conclusions which an intelligent amateur can draw for himself. They are also easily daunted. For this reason the amateur, even if he thinks he knows better on occasion, should hold his tongue. His object is to learn all he can, not to choke the possibly adulterated springs of wisdom. He will soon acquire a mass of small precedents, and out of them he will evolve a number of general principles such as will enable him to take an increasing share in the management of his climbs. A very small amount of principle, acquired and intelligently applied, will prove often of even more service than the local guide’s instinct, which, unless he be a really first-class man, is apt to prove faulty under novel conditions of weather or of the unforeseen.
During his novitiate he should keep off the big exacting ascents, where he will have little leisure to observe, and where the amount he can learn of the reasons for following accepted lines, for avoiding others and so on, is small compared to the mere physical exertion that is called for. He should confine himself to the less known regions where some route finding is necessary, and to the glaciers and near rock ridges, where points of technique can be studied in repetition and variety, and beginnings and endings and alternatives of route and all the other matters common to small and big peaks alike—and vital to his education—are to be found in far greater numbers in proportion to the ground that an active man can cover in the day. One helpful variety he should allow himself during his study under a single guide in a home region. He should take an occasional tour of two days or so to climb a big peak in a different valley. This is a rapid way to acquire experience of all that guides can teach. It will be advisable to take on a second and really good guide from the new district to help the permanent trainer, who will generally have been, if he works in a less important centre, a man of second-rate technical, and of intensive rather than wide, guiding experience. The contrast in their styles will be worth watching; and the expense is in any case less than that of engaging two regular guides for a longer period—an alternative which, if he climbs in his first season from a popular centre, he will be unable to avoid. In his second season he may, if he wish, attempt some guideless expeditions, in a suitable region, with friends of equal or greater competence. But he should not allow this or any subsequent season in his early experience to pass without spending at least some period under a good guide or a first-rate amateur. He has so much to learn that he should not try to rediscover it all for himself. A genius who devotes years to rediscovering the first propositions of Euclid merely wastes time.
The Moderate Mountaineer.
The last case is that of mountaineers of some standing, who either on account of marriage, or of years and a comfortable habit, or from the philosophical attitude of mind which succeeds the enthusiasm of youth and smiles at its ambitions while it still enjoys a measured indulgence in its pleasures, prefer to be relieved of any kind of responsibility. These men take guides as a matter of course, and leave to them from choice the management even in those departments which their own experience would entitle them to direct. Their interest in mountaineering is a personal one, as an occasion for healthful exercise, for air and refreshing views. They pursue it for its distraction from other more worldly interests, not simply for its own sake. They are not concerned with its higher developments as a fine art, and as much from a modest appreciation of their own powers as from a deliberate depreciation of its possibilities, they renounce on their own behalf all the further opportunities which it offers for self-discovery and self-training, in the management of men and the progressive mastery of physical difficulty. The attitude has our sympathy. Those whose graver appreciation of the mountains, whose less tutored spirit of romance and adventure impel them to accept labour, responsibility, hardship, danger and sorrow as integral parts of their mountain service, and as a high discipline for body and spirit such as no other outlet from the enervating oppression of civilized life now affords, will recognize in this gentler manifestation of their own impulse a grateful proof of the fascination which mountaineering can still exercise upon every variety of civilized brain and character, upon men of finer intellect, wider opportunities for usefulness, and perhaps more balanced temperament than their own.
This considerable and often distinguished body needs no advice with regard to the conduct of its guided climbing; but it may not be superfluous to remind it of an obligation which it owes to mountaineering as an institution. If only because of their number and their more frequent meetings in centres—for the minority of wholehearted devotees are generally isolated, and guideless parties are independent and migratory by choice—these somewhat temperate mountaineers form the central body of alpine opinion. Whatever their desire to make their climbing merely a personal pleasure trip and to avoid the more strenuous currents, yet in so far as they use many guides and make with them the large majority of the guided ascents made in any year, they must be held responsible for the training of the guides, mentally and morally, while in their pay. They are assisting to create a considerable amount of abstract alpine doctrine both for the present and the future, and are establishing many more particular conventions affecting the attitude of guides towards amateurs, and of amateurs towards guides, and of the public towards both. But the attitude of mind in which they prefer to approach the pursuit makes them too often neglectful of the charge and of the lasting effect of their participation. Some from mere passive acceptance of the treatment as part of the game, others with an amused inward detachment, encourage young guides and old guides alike to manage every moment and movement of their day; satisfied that they themselves are getting all the profit in health and safety which is their limited holiday object. They are like genial uncles who join in a game and submit with an interior smile to the hectoring of their nephews, retiring when they please to make criticisms for their own and their neighbours’ amusement in the pavilion. But in mountaineering the rigour of the game is essential to its good conduct. A guide indulged is a guide spoiled. An amateur indolently criticized may mean a position permanently falsified. Our small public opinion is not easily corrected. From the start, a right reputation is as essential for our social influence with the guides as it is vital for our mutual climbing safety. In the Alps we have a large number of professionals whose living depends upon their maintaining a satisfying relationship with their employers, and a small number of amateurs whose pleasure in their holiday depends upon maintaining a suitable influence with their guides. The balance is difficult to preserve, and there is no room for dilettantism. Irresponsible handling of guides may in any decade result in a mass of amateurs speeding, by preference, guideless and insecurely uphill in a mountain sense, and in a mass of vocationless guides speeding surely downhill in a financial sense.
Summary.
A first-rate amateur, therefore, will take guides without hesitation, whenever he considers the powers of his friends too weak in general for absolute safety on the technical side, or the particular climbs they desire on occasion to attempt too exacting for their normal collective efficiency. His own concern with guides is to learn how to manage them and to get the best use out of their special qualifications.
Responsible, but less expert mountaineers, who wish to be independent, will nevertheless take first-rate guides for the same reason on occasions when their experience advises them of the advantage of their particular services to the party. They have to learn how to reconcile the retention of their own proper share of management with the greater share of responsibility in all departments which in this case falls to the first-rate guide.