“ The boredom that may afflict a party on snow is peculiar to itself. The even glare and the winding line of diminishing tracks hypnotize the eye and mind, and produce a conviction of exhaustion which is often in great part self-suggested. The wader feels that he absolutely cannot take another step. If counting fails, and other wiles and conversational red-herrings shrivel up in the silent white monotony, rest is the only cure. Sleep follows easily in such states, and a few minutes’ slumber often restores a man or a party surprisingly. ”

“ A whole summer tour in a bad season of soft snow has been lightened by a large bag of acid drops reappearing each day at weary moments with a new delight. In the plains I am myself a small and careless eater. But among my mountaineering memories days of fierce sun-glare on interminable white passes still remain rosy with the recollection of ‘a raspberry-jam snow’ or golden with the cool glow of a tin of yellow plums scooped up with ice-splinters. ”

“ But beyond this, climbing down was discovered to have its own pleasure as motion. A good climber in training, and descending upon rock that gives continuous hold, enjoys a sense of swift restrained rhythm, and a rushing thrill through his own extremities, that has something of the pleasure of flying and a pleasure from quick light contacts that even flying does not possess. His hands and feet appear to adhere almost accidentally underneath him, like the spokes of a revolving rimless wheel. They move across a sound hold with his change of balance rather than check him at each contact. ”

“ Of course on easy slopes, if we are out of the rope, we go as we like, provided that we do not exhaust, by eccentric following, the energy which we should be reserving for our turn in the lead. But as the angle increases, or where the going gets more heavy, men of any experience fall into single file; and then to make missteps, to tread a step down at the heel, or to step outside the line, is to throw the whole march of those behind us out of gear, and to waste our own energy in repeating the leader’s work. It is impossible on snow not to be conscious of the leg swing of the man ahead. ”

“ Even the lower zigzag path to the valley is a danger in such a condition of mind. Safe as Rotten Row for the sure foot, it has a dozen times proved a fatal trap for the stumble of fatigue or the careless swing of over-confidence. Few men can look back on a long mountaineering record without remembering some such evenings of mountain madness; and while they blush (let us hope) even in memory at their folly, they may wish they had had some cool leader to call them, grumbling, to their senses. ”

“ A guide, until he is trained by a good manager, never unlearns the most deep-rooted tradition of his caste. For him all amateurs alike remain the amateur, that is, a thing to be watched over, so long as the mountain remains a mountain, that is, a thing up which the guide leads. For years after he has forgotten to bother about his amateur on difficult places, where he has other things to think about, a return to familiar ground will recall to him the familiar tradition, and he will begin again to coddle his employer exasperatingly. ”

“ I do not myself attach much value to mountaineering handbooks: an open-air pursuit can only be learned by practical attempt and from good example. I used to read them for the fun of surprising some hero of my youth as he strained his imagination to squeeze a grave principle out of a random holiday memory, and for the sympathetic pleasure of reconstructing for myself the real day of irresponsible adventure the recollection of which was bringing a thrill of forbidden joy to his mind before he composed his face to inflict it upon me in the form of an edifying three-line precept. ”

“ There is a fascination about the High Alps in winter that is unique. Never are the great peaks so icily aloof, the silences of the glaciers so inviolate. No moon compares with the full moon of January shining on some great glacier causeway; no views are clearer than the summit panorama of February. None the less, winter is not the proper season for ski tours in the High Alps. It is true that the rock ridges are usually free from snow in the winter and corniced in spring, so that for expeditions which combine ski-ing with more or less difficult rock climbing, winter is preferable to spring. ”

“ The more we can learn to see or to reconstruct of the mountain forms visible or invisible about us as we climb, the more vividly will memory interpret their meaning for our lives when we are no longer among them. If we are of a mood to use both sight and its interpretation as servants of our spirit as much as of our performance, we may discover a reflection from the mountains that will permanently colour our thought. ”

“ It is not necessary to repeat, to mountaineers, that most Englishmen who have climbed in Norway return again and again, to a country which has still much of the romance of exploration, and, for them, the sympathetic interest of an historical connection with their racial consciousness. I myself like to believe that we, who take our pleasures on the mountains—and the more grisly these mountains are the better we like them!—have inherited the passion from our ‘Norsk ancestry,’ who, as we gather from an old Saga, indulged in the sport of cliff climbing nearly one thousand years ago. ”

“ Early in the season the Southern Alps, from Savoy and Cogne almost down to the Mediterranean, make an exquisite wandering-ground, all too little visited. In May and June we can often enjoy among them flowers, clear climbing and free wandering, long before their big northern brothers have shaken off their winter coats of snow and storm. They retain much of the undiscovered charm of the great Alps in earlier days, and a variety of beauty that can challenge comparison with the impressiveness of greater heights. ”

“ If the rocks beyond are free from snow but glazed with ice, the skyline will remain undisturbed, but it will have a brilliant glistening appearance in strong sunlight, like a strip of polished blue steel. This last indication, if the eye can learn its significance, may often be of service on climbs where the unseen mountain structure is already known, but when there is uncertainty as to the actual condition of the rocks on the day. Many fruitless ascents might have been saved if the ice glazing on such unseen sections of a ridge could have been detected in time. ”

“ For a mountaineer who has to convert his observation of distant objects and signs, of a size altogether incommensurate with his own, into terms of a possible advance for his eight-foot reach or four-foot stride, no evidence is too big or too small;—and this especially because the big, in mountains, repeats itself in the small with timely consistency. A good mountaineer might almost claim to be able to construe a single favourable sky sign, under certain conditions, into the assurance of his atom-like advance up the infinite invisible detail of an unpromising-looking mountain giant. ”

“ In a snowy season, with alternates of melting sun and freezing wind, the day comes when the rocks of a peak or ridge are armoured with ice plates or ice spears. If we traverse unsuspectingly below such walls, an hour’s sunlight may expose us, in the middle of our enjoyment of our postponed fine day, to a raking and dangerous fire. The missiles may come shooting over the edge of any innocent, black jut or buttress far above us. The only course is to watch, and dodge, and make carefully for open country. ”

“ But where a glacier reaches the sea, and especially a great glacier perhaps seven miles in width, it has to terminate, of course, in a splendid cliff, and this cliff is, as it were, made of towering séracs, blue in the hollows and white on the crown, in height perhaps 100 feet above the water-level, and these séracs are continually falling into the sea and breaking up into little icebergs, causing a great commotion in the waters as they plunge in their fall and jostle against one another till they come to rest. ”

“ There are few things more pleasing to watch than the co-operation of a good rope on a stiff rock climb. To the untutored eye the party may all appear to be doing different things—some pausing, some turning, some climbing. Only the expert may discover the continuity of motion passing from one end to the other of the rope through the separate actions of each climber. Like the progress of a snake, seen in a slow cinema film, the sinuous connection is only apparent to the eye that can read in each apparently stationary phase its relation to the phase which precedes and follows it. ”

“ When we read in a guide’s book, returning like an echo from the records we wrote in our own earlier and romantic days, that ‘there is no greater rock climber in the present generation, a born iceman, an intuitive route-finder, a delightful companion and an unrivalled cook,’ we turn on hastily to another reference, with yet a half-sigh of good cheer and thankfulness for the assurance that one more very young climber has started wholeheartedly on our pleasant mountain ways. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The risk is very subtle. A leader has no defence against it except to keep its possibility constantly in mind. He must acquire the habit of challenging, mentally, his own opinions of the moment, and of confronting them, detachedly, with the sternest of mountain precepts and rules of thumb. The habit will stand him in good stead in moments of more dangerous decision, of excitement, and, therefore of more probable collective infection. It will at least check him from joining, even in his most ecstatic moments, in an unroped glacier stampede or in a ‘go-as-you-please’ skelter down a buttress ”

“ There is a type of climber to whom the merely gymnastic or, we will say, athletic side of climbing is not the sole aim and object of the sport. He is an enthusiastic lover of the marvellous beauties of the mountain recesses, and wishes to take home impressions of the peaks and glaciers as he himself has seen them; for climbers know well that the mountains are ever changing in aspect from one year to another, or even from season to season. He sees and desires to record atmospheric effects which may never be repeated during his climbing experience. ”

“ Running water is always beautiful, but there is no music in all the harmonies of Nature to compare with mountain torrents in spring after days among the dead silence of the upper snows. Such are the contrasts that reward the mountaineer in May. ”

“ He must have no false pride, and be prepared to get up himself as best and quickest he can, using the rope to save time. He must be always patient, ready to stand and shiver in his steps without complaint while the difficulties are solved. He must take the inevitable loosened stones, flying ice-chips and cleared-off snow incidental to his lower position with a hardened heart and, if possible, on a hard head, with no more than reasonable protest, and be able to see the humour of snow melting down his neck with the cheerfulness that it will afterwards he found to have caused to his friends. ”

“ If a storm threatens, we must get off the ridges and away from pinnacles as quickly as possible, even if it may mean cutting down an ice slope. Sometimes our first warning may be an electric shock, coming out of a dark and windless silence or through a warm oppression of slow-falling and separate snow-flakes, and thrilling us helplessly from heel to hair. ”

“ Precisely because even the most casual ski-runner is bound to learn from the past experience of nasty falls, ski-ing inevitably teaches even the most unobservant some knowledge of snow craft. A ski-runner cannot hand over the whole strategy of the day’s campaign to a guide. He must think for himself and study for himself. In summer the real business of climbing usually begins when the glacier or the summer snowline is reached, but in winter a ski-runner can kill himself in an avalanche within an hour of the hotel. ”

“ Anyone who has followed me so far will probably be yawning, and asking, “Is this really all necessary in order to enjoy a mountain holiday?” It is not. If you want to follow a hunt, you have only to learn to stick on; if your object is to cross the Atlantic, you can do it in a liner; if you want just to do mountains, you can engage guides, behave like a gentleman, and you will have got your desire. But if you ever wish to realize the incomparably greater pleasures of hunting your own pack or sailing your own boat, you will have to set about it in a different fashion. ”

“ Ice upon rock is apparent, either as a grey-blue, bottle-glass bordering to the stippling and nestling of old snow, or in the refrozen festoons of new ice, exquisite and evil, that complete the Gothic character of granite pinnacles. ”

“ Every climber has to recognize that there is an absolute upper limit to that which it is physically possible for a body of his design, when developed to its utmost, to perform. If he concentrates upon an even and efficient training of his own measure of power, and climbs always well within his confident capacity, he will have the gratification, as time goes on, of finding that his improving knowledge of himself, added to his increasing experience, enables him, little by little, to reduce the margin between his own achievements and the humanly impossible. ”

“ A man light of foot and supple of joint can let his feet drift, as it were, over even large rolling stones, letting them adjust themselves to the varying resistances without checking his pace. A man who judges his scree not by its size but by its angle, its shape and the way it sits on the surface, can continue his glissade often well beyond the point where the less expert begin to fall or crawl. ”