The history has been the same in every form of sport or of adventure which has had the movements of the body and their perfecting in skill as basis. The passion for the sport that the many may possess engenders in the few who are better physically or nervously gifted a desire to heighten and prolong the sensation and to exercise their improving skill upon always more difficult variations. To the love of wandering in the mountains, shared by all mountaineers, is added the enduring pleasure to any healthy man of finding occasion for a higher self-realization, a more vital physical consciousness.
The evolution has been continuous; the generations, of course, overlap, and the different phases of mountain enthusiasm can still find their several satisfaction. For the explorer there are still the untrodden ranges. For those with means and time sufficient to indulge their love of climbing among the great Alps, the old snow ways of the mountains still remain sufficient in number and in sensation. But for the ever-increasing number of men whom circumstances limited to the lesser hills of our own islands or to the lower alpine ranges, the grass and snow ways began to prove too unexciting as their novelty became exhausted, and the rock peaks and the sheer rock faces of the Lake Fells, Skye or the Dolomites offered a new temptation. Rock surface, unlike snow, proved to be almost infinite in its variety and inexhaustible in its offer of novel routes. Consequently the development of difficult rock climbing in snowless regions like our own proceeded at a pace somewhat out of proportion to the leisurely progress of the art among the British frequenters of the greater Alps. Even among the guides it was only the few, fired by emulation or educated by their employers, who maintained a rate of improvement at all commensurate with that which was taking place in the average standard of amateur home rock climbing; I am speaking here purely of difficulty and primarily of ascents. In the art of continuous climbing, and of climbing down, the comparison, as will appear later, was not equally to the home climber’s advantage.
The principal agent in the change has been the study of the possibilities of balance in motion, and the training successively of the foot, the hand and the eye to secure a complete rhythmic movement of the body while climbing. The primitive belief, if we may make a deduction from the practice and recitals of early mountaineers, was that the body could not be balanced with safety unless the width of the foot had firm standing. Snow was found to satisfy this condition once the study of snow craft had taught guides and amateurs how to fashion a level tread, no matter what the angle of the snow slope. When the period of the great ice climbs followed, in the historical order of exploration, it became merely a question of discovering how to fashion a corresponding security of step in ice. When the new impulse developed for the undertaking of routes upon the rock peaks, a similar breadth and comfort of tread were at first looked for. Consequently the rock ascents of former days were limited in number and character by this condition. Of the hands little account was taken. A walking balance was the only rhythm recognized. We might almost call this the ‘walking epoch.’ But the new generation, inheriting an always improving mountain craft, with a new goal in view, could not long remain at this point. The problem of finding sound routes up the rock angles of unexplored peaks and faces had to be faced.
The great gullies or rifts in the rock walls offered the first natural lines of temptation. The shelter of their enclosing walls promised a comfortable reassurance to nerve, and even more to the eye, as yet unaccustomed, as I have shown elsewhere, to the direct view into empty space, above, below and on either side, without its customary rest-point for the assurance of balance. So began what may be called the ‘gully epoch,’ a cul-de-sac which for a decade shut in, with a few exceptions, all the efforts of our rock climbers. Since the level tread could rarely be obtained in these gullies, body, shoulders and arms were all brought into the service, in order that the feet might still be able to jam against the requisite breadth of foothold, even though in such places tilted at an angle. At angles where these sloping footholds failed, the stemming of the shoulders and knees between the vertical rock walls on either side was discovered to be a means of bridging gaps on the climb that would before have passed for insurmountable. The substitute of this rough friction and purely muscular effort for the walking balance of the exploring age exercised for a time a restricting influence, although the freer use it made of the body in general prepared the way for a better tradition. Climbers got up steeper cliffs by their new methods at the sacrifice of their education as mountaineers. By specializing on a convenient accident of mountain architecture, one which cramped their outlook and left them little opportunity for achieving rhythm or perfecting balance, they even unlearned something of the general mountaineering knowledge which had been acquired by the wider, milder practice of their predecessors. It was this departure, with its somewhat clamorous record, that introduced the period of widest separation between the old school of classical alpine mountaineers and the commencing school of island rock climbers, and which brought upon the latter the blast of, not unmerited, ‘grease-polarized’ criticism, that still whispers spasmodically and archaically. It deepened the rift that during this epoch the greater number of first ascents of the cliffs in England and Wales were made by means of those enticing gullies. For the classical mountaineers, trained in the Alps, when they took an occasional holiday in the Lakes or Skye, looked chiefly for the class of climbing which most closely recalled the varied types of ridges to whose structure they had been accustomed in Switzerland. Their successors, the Fell climbers, lacking their alpine training, yielded to the temptation of unexplored gullies, and for years enclosed our home climbing in these uncomfortable channels. Wales, with less potent climbers, followed the example. But Wales, with fewer gullies wherein to win fame, would appear to have been the quarter where the first bid was made for freedom. Almost simultaneously a similar change of view was taking place among the rock peaks of the Eastern Alps. Gullies are the natural lines for the descent of stones, water and snow rather than for the ascent of human beings. Of their nature ‘faults’ in the sound structure of the cliffs, intrusions of softer rock whose weakness water has discovered, their surviving walls present an undue proportion of unsound rock. These objections, combined with the gradual exhaustion of their temptation as new ascents, eventually forced our climbers to escape from their sunless recesses and to adjust their methods to less restricting requirements.
The first impulse came from a few individuals whose exceptional physical advantages led to their discovery that they could trust to their fingers as securely as to the full tread of their feet or the jam of their bodies. The discovery enabled them to attempt places where there were no containing walls to be relied upon as support for the body if the feet failed—problems such as wide-angled corners and even what would now be called slab climbs. Finger and hand holds in their turn became everything; footwork was neglected. To some exponents the feet were useful only as auxiliaries, scraped downward indiscriminately upon the rocks to give some extra propulsion. It was the epoch of ‘grip’-climbing. Its merit, apart from fine individual achievements, was that, in its turn, it set the succeeding generation free to trust itself more confidently on to the open ribs and exposed rock faces. Bare slabs which had hardly been looked at were then found to be covered with firm holds, upon which the toe or the side of the boot could stand as firmly and advance far more rapidly; while hands and eyes were free to assist them to an extent unknown before. The balance of the body in continuous motion above the feet was, as it were, rediscovered, and an upright position became again possible. The hands returned to their proper function of aids to the balance, and the feet, climbing in natural positions, became again of principal importance. With the discovery that the underlying principle of all climbing movement is rhythm,—a rhythm of the whole body and not only of the legs, as in walking,—and that the basis of such rhythm is balance, and not grip or stride or struggle, rock craft moved into its proper place in the forefront of mountaineering qualifications.
Such in rough outline is the history of the last eighty years of climbing technique. We must allow for much overlapping of the epochs in so short a period, and for many notable individual exceptions; but in the main this summary represents where we were and where we are, and what happened on the way.
In classifying the stages of our climbing progress into epochs or compartments, I am doing no injustice to the achievements of the past. A chronicler must always face the dilemma whether to say that the great man by his example produces the general change of practice in the next generation, or whether to class him as the conspicuous anticipatory ripple of a general current of coming change. Very young climbers may be often only human in their criticisms of their contemporaries and in their faint patronage of the collective past; for no really enthusiastic mountain-lover ever in his heart believes that anyone else has ever owned the hills and discovered climbing quite in the sense that he has. But every climber who is on the way to becoming a permanent mountaineer is a keen student of mountain history, and the services rendered to the world’s mountaineering by the conservation of a body of central alpine tradition are never likely to be underrated. A good house rises higher than its foundations, but it rests upon them. The men who first ventured on the discouraging angles of buttress and gully and cleared the grass and earth from small holds performed greater feats technical and moral than the most outside variations which may remain to be done on the same rocks by their present-day successors. They had everything against them, even the atmosphere of their generation. They not only led the way to the steep rocks; they started the assault upon degrees and varieties of difficulty that forced upon their successors the cultivation of the superior technique which they now enjoy. The mountaineering world has a tenacious memory; we cherish the names and exploits of the heroic age; the feet of our gods were solidly shod, and we will admit no clay to be visible about them but that which was honourably collected in their stout tramping.
Balance Climbing.
The change in style from epoch to epoch was a considerable one, and it has not been brought to perfection in several climbing generations. To acquire a balance rhythm in motion the whole body has to learn a habit of continuous simultaneous adjustments. Both feet and hands must develop a very fine sensitiveness of touch, so as to inform us not only of the exact amount of security each is contributing at the moment, but also—a different matter—of the value of their leverage for initiating a fresh movement upwards. According to these messages the balance is continuously adjusted, so as to relieve or compensate any extremity that may require it. The feet need only a sufficiency of hold to carry the weight of the body at whatever angle it is being held in balance by the hands. The hands need only that amount of hold which will enable them to keep the body balanced while the weight is being thrust upward by the feet. The feet learn to move inevitably on to holds no longer seen, but previously selected by the eye. Simultaneously, the eyes are already occupied in choosing the next holds for hand and feet, guided in their choice not only by the compensating quality of the hold which the balance at the instant may demand for one or other of the four extremities, but also by the direction in which the next movement can most securely be made. A system of continuous compensations, partly drawn from the rhythmic balance of the moving body, partly from a corrective choice of succeeding holds, means a great saving of effort for the feet and hands.
The walking rhythm, of the first period, called for large, flat holds, and therefore for long strides between them. Between each hold the centre of gravity was thus forced out insecurely. The hands, when used, had the extra labour of dragging the weight inward against the outward thrust of the legs. The effort and the insecurity set a low limit to the angle of rock which could be conveniently ascended. The grip habit, of the middle period, demanded for its assurance sharp-edged cling holds, such as would enable the whole lifting movement to be executed by the hands alone. The body in suspension was thus wrenched inwards continuously, and sight and balance were interrupted. Rhythm on either method became impossible. On the other hand, a foot climber who climbs by balance or compensation appears to creep easily and continuously up the most severe slabs on an even line. His moving foot rarely lifts above the knee of his stationary leg, for he has his balance first to consider, and as he only needs small footholds at any angle to sustain it, he can find them at shorter intervals in greater abundance. His hands feel the almost imperceptible rugosities of surface with sensitive fingers, that press as often as they cling. His body moves upward, swinging out or in on a curve of balance with astonishing freedom, as the messages from hand, eye and feet are collated and complied with.