Mountain guide

“ Should climbers desire to make ascents in seldom explored parts of the world, such as the Caucasus, the Andes, or the Himalayas, they must take Alpine guides with them, for mountains everywhere have many characteristics in common, and as a good rider will go over a country unknown to him better than a bad horseman to whom it is familiar, so will a skilful guide find perhaps an easy way up a mountain previously unexplored, while the natives of the district declare the undertaking an impossible one. ”

“ The brave actions of guides are so many in number that it would be impossible to tell of them all, and many noble deeds have never found their way into print. The following, however, is related of a guide with whom I have made many ascents, and is furthermore 150 referred to in The Alpine Journal as "an act of bravery for which it would be hard to find a parallel in the annals of mountaineering." ”

“ He has heard all about this bit of the climb since his boyhood, and he tells his traveller that, once on the top of the rock, all difficulty will be over, and the final slope to the summit will be found a gentle one. So it comes to pass that the party reaches the highest pinnacle of the great mountain without once diverging from the best route. Occasionally the leading guide may take with him as second guide a man from the locality, but most climbers will prefer to keep with them the two guides they are used to. ”

“ MOUNTAINEERING. A good deal of interesting mountaineering can be done in the British Isles if you know where to go; and it is grand sport, and brings out into practice all your scout-craft to enable you to find your way, and to make yourself comfortable in camp.
You are, of course, continually losing your direction because, moving up and down in the deep gullies of the mountain side, you lose sight of the landmarks which usually guide you, so that you have to watch your direction by the sun, and by your compass, and keep on estimating in what direction your proper line of travel lies. ”

“ Experience every good guide must have. Here is an anecdote showing how one member of the profession acquired it. This guide, now well known and in the first rank, began his career with two Germans as his victims. The party were bound for, I believe, the Cima di Jazzi, and when the ice of the Gorner Glacier gave place to snow, the moment came for putting on the rope. The guide felt greatly puzzled; and he was slow of thought. Meanwhile the two gentlemen, as ignorant of mountain-craft as their guardian, stood by and watched the cord being slowly uncoiled. ”

“ Provided with a congenial friend, and secure in the company of at least one first-rate guide possessed of the skill and knowledge necessary to encounter every obstacle of the snowy Alps, the English mountaineer runs a tilt at half the mountain-tops which lie in his erratic course, meeting on the whole with wonderfully few falls or failures on the way. He dashes from peak to peak, from group to group, even from one end of the Alps to 183 the other, in the course of a short summer holiday. ”

“ The demand is so prodigiously great now that the second-class guide, or the young fully qualified guide who has made some little reputation for brilliancy, is often employed as leader on work which may easily overtax his powers. There is no more pressing question at the present time in connection with mountaineering, than the proper training of young guides."
The dust of an Avalanche falling from the Matterhorn Glacier may be seen to the right. ”

“ Of this work I have seen a good deal, since in Arctic Norway my Swiss guides and I have ascended more than twenty hitherto-unclimbed peaks, and were never once unable to reach the summit. Of course, the first thing is to see the mountains, and, to do this, it is wise to ascend something which you are sure, from its appearance, is easy, and then prospect for others, inspecting others again from them, and so on, ad infinitum. You cannot always see the whole of a route, and, perhaps, your leading guide will observe: "We can reach that upper glacier by the gully in the rocks." ”

“ It seems strange to lay aside our daily companions, the map and the guide-book, and tarn our backs wholly on the mountain land, for the level and busy plains of England, with their "daily round and common task." But I know that the bright and beautiful mountain-scenes will often come again before the mental eye—"long-vanished" beauty that "refines and paints in brighter hues;" ”

“ In the early days of mountaineering guides were frequently drawn from the chamois hunters of a district, a sport requiring, perhaps, rather the quickness and agility of the born climber and gymnast than the qualities of calculation and prudence needed in addition by the guide. ”

“ There is yet further justification to be found for them in the only literature accessible to them—the famous alpine classics, and the original relationship of amateur and guide therein set forth. We mountaineers owe so much to these early explorers and to their inspiring records, which first set our feet on the mountain way and which remain our most cherished and revered companions, that it is an ungrateful task to have to forsake them for a moment in the interests of veracity and of our modern mountain craft. ”

“ In the Alps and nearer European ranges, maps and guide-books relieve the mountaineer of almost all occasion to apply his powers of observation to the interpretation of the Seen or the reconstruction of the Unseen. The majority of men who climb in the Alps or Britain get no practice in making even elementary deductions from scenic details within sight ”

“ The amateur can then relax much of his attention even on a severe climb, enjoy the fun and [Pg 133] attend to the lighter problems of mere climbing. A day comes back to mind, the occasion of a first ascent of the snow slopes of a famous peak, when weather and evening company had alike contributed to oppress the wayward spirits of a peasant guide. Every form of inducement, ‘exploration,’ ‘a nearer view for the next day,’ had had to be employed in turn in order to coax a gloomy morning progress up the glacier, over the bergschrund and up the initial ridges. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But in the Alps the larger part of the day is spent in traversing comparatively easy ground well within the power of the party, but where the height and position may always convert an inattentive stumble into a fatal accident. A guide has been accustomed to looking after the unaccountable vagaries of beginners and incompetents over long days on easy and difficult ground alike. ”

“ The mountaineer’s instinct on rock and ice is an art quite as subtle and complex as the art of the seaman or the horseman. The senses all awake, the eye clear, the heart strong, the limbs steady yet flexible, with power of recovery in store and ready [Pg 374] for instant action should the footing give way, such is the discipline which these terrible ascents impose. The mountain guides are not ignorant, they are licensed only after severe examination. They are obliged to take courses of study ”

“ To the keenest climber mountaineering in these great ranges is more of the character of mountain travel than of a climbing expedition, such as could be planned in Switzerland, and at present it must be so, unless the traveller is content to march direct to some group and stay there. ”

“ Every year, officers of the Indian Army and others in search of game wander through the valleys which come down from the great ranges, but up to the present time only a few mountaineering expeditions have been made to this marvellous mountain land. ”

“ The Alpine traveler knows that he will meet many a rugged steep, that he must cross many a mountain torrent on slender footing, make his way through many a gloomy valley. He does not give up, but presses forward with eagerness and courage, until he reaches the summit and gazes as a victor on the glorious scenes around. ”

“ When every mountain has been climbed by every conceivable route, the material at the disposal of the objective writer is fortunately exhausted. There are few great Alpine routes that remain unexplored. There are a thousand byways in the psychology of mountaineering that have never been touched, and an excellent book might have been written on this subject alone. Every mountaineer brings to the mountains the tribute of a new worshipper with his own different emotions. “Obtain an account of the same expedition from three points on the same rope, and you will see how different. ”

“ When a traveler, overcome by the long and painful ascent of a mountain, finally reaches the summit, he finds it pleasant to him to sit on a rock and, while recovering from his fatigue, contemplate the plain which he has crossed, the river whose windings he has followed and which at this moment spreads out below him, and also the difficult, even dangerous, ground, the sand, the marshes, over which he has come with great exertion. ”

“ Away we went, up the steep but excellent roads for an eight-mile trip to the top of one of the mountains. My horse proved a good roadster, sometimes trotting and then galloping, and in one and a half hours we reached our destination, and looked upon a great range of snow-covered mountains; Everest, the monarch of all, was among them, but much to our disappointment, clouds settled about the tops of the range and we did not see the greatest mountain in the world. ”

“ Hence the explorers of such ranges, of the Caucasus, the Himalayas, the peaks of Central Africa, South America, and New Zealand, have been called upon to describe the peaks they have climbed, the valleys and glaciers they have traversed, and the scenery of the regions and ranges they have explored, in a way that would have been unintelligible [43] two generations ago. What we now demand of a mountain explorer is not merely to tell us the adventures of his route, but to explain to us wherein the quality of the mountain scenery differs from that which is familiar nearer home. ”

“ Probably most mountaineers would agree that the charm of mountain scenery is to be found in every step taken in the upper world. The strange interfolding of the snows, the gaunt, weird crags of the ridges, the vast, blue, icicle-fringed crevasse, or the great smooth slabs sloping-downwards through apparently bottomless space, are each and all no less lovely than the boundless horizon of the summit view. ”

“ The novice, also, who has spent a few summers behind guides in the Alps will discover that one season of guideless climbing in the Pyrenees will infinitely increase his knowledge of mountaineering in the larger sense of the word; he will have experience of route-finding both in the valleys and on rock and glacier, of step-cutting, of using aneroid and compass and of camping, and he will return to the greater peaks with a heightened capacity for appreciating the mountains and their craft. ”

“ From the summit, at an altitude of seventy-four hundred feet, we had a vast panorama of lake, forest, and mountain—but I might be accused of48 monotonous repetition were I to endeavor to describe even a few of the scenes that enchanted us. Every hilltop, every bend in the road, and every opening through the forests that lined our way presented views which, taken alone, might well delight the beholder for hours—only their frequent recurrence tended to make them almost commonplace to us. ”

“ The first four miles are merely toilsome. It is only when emerging upon the bare crags above the woods that the wonders of the ascent begin, and the succession of views, dimly seen through my eyes in this chapter, challenges the attention at every step. There is one exception. About a mile up, the road issues upon a jutting spur of the mountain, from which the summit, with the house on the highest point, is seen in clear weather.
Suddenly I came out of the low firs, the scrubby growth of birches, upon the fear-inspiring desolation of the bared and wintry summit. ”

“ On all sides mountains rise to an altitude of from 11,000 to 15,000 feet, their skirts shaggy with pitch-pine forests, and scarred by deep canyons, wooded and boulder strewn, opening upon the mountain pasture previously mentioned. ”

“ As the traveller rises from one side of a mountain to a corner of the road, where it hurries perpendicularly down the other side, his eye may fathom a valley several thousand feet beneath, rich in vegetation, and surrounded on all points by rugged mountains covered with illimitable forests of fir, through the branches of which, here and there, the grey rocks glare, like skulls scattered over a green field ”

“ The stupendous heights are at times absolutely shrouded in smoke; the climb of twenty-seven hundred feet in thirty miles around the mountain shelves and through vast snow sheds (most expensive in their construction) , to emerge again into the light for a glance down the gorges into the glaciers, over and above to the lofty summits, is all the imagination can picture, and the traveler feels like a "mighty atom" in the midst thereof. ”

“ When we at length had gained the summit, where the hill seemed to lose itself in the rock, my guide placed me where I could stand firm, and told me to stay there quietly. In the meantime he himself went down the hill with his candle, and left me alone. ”

“ He was climbing yonder range of mountain peaks—peaks which, though built of unsubstantial cloud, were more beautiful than any show-place of the tourist’s seeking—peaks upon whose shining summit the soul might stand and look out upon the infinite—peaks which might be climbed by the fancy of those whose fortune it might never be to see an Alpine height. ”