Mountaineers who wish to be free of all responsibility will take guides because they choose to. They have to learn how not to spoil them, and how to prevent the example of their own voluntary surrender of their heritage from biasing their own and the public view of such of their contemporaries as may attempt to enjoy a different form of independence.
Novices will take guides as soon as they have discovered that there is anything they themselves do not know. They have to learn from guides all they can, so as to earn the right to do without them later if they desire.
Tourists, or experimentalists, intent to ‘do a mountain,’ will take guides.
It will be seen that the question of taking guides is no longer to be decided on the traditional single issue, whether the guide is ‘better’ than the amateur. The question has now two aspects, even as ‘leadership’ has now developed two main divisions.
In the earliest stages of amateur accomplishment, while the beginner has no qualifications, the guide is taken because he is technically better qualified and has also, by local knowledge, instinct, etc., a larger proportion of the qualities necessary for management. The guide enjoys in this case his historic position of single responsibility.
In the second stage, where the climber may be only a novice in the alpine sense, the guide may possibly be technically inferior to his employer as a rock climber, a pace maker and so on; but in the absence of the amateur’s alpine experience the guide deserves to retain his ‘leadership’ when his qualifications in both mountaineering fields are considered together.
As we move up the scale of experience, and the amateur is found to have developed more and more his initial advantages in the qualities necessary for management, the decision to employ or not to employ a guide depends more and more upon how far it may be thought advisable to supplement the technique of the party. Again, in proportion as the amateur and his party continue to remedy their technical inferiority, while they improve their experience in management, pari passu the need of a guide, in either department, diminishes. If he is employed, however, his general responsibility is proportionately decreased.
In these later stages the relation of guide and employer is one of expert with expert, and the guide’s position, if he is employed at all, corresponds to that of a professional in a team, who is selected for some individual qualification which he is able to supply. It would be as ludicrous nowadays to rate the performances of such climbing combinations as praiseworthy or censurable, according as they were ‘guided’ or ‘guideless,’ in the old sense of the term, as it would be for us to assume that any cricket team which contained a professional must be ipso facto captained by him, or to refuse our recognition to any team which did not contain professionals among its members.
When, therefore, we are considering the case of a party of finished amateurs, men who are first rate in both divisions of mountain craft, as climbers and as leaders in management, and who have no need of guides as a technical complement, we must be prepared to concede that for them there is now no rule. The matter becomes purely a question of personal preference and of personal discretion in the choice of the climb.
A Supreme Example.