GUIDED AND GUIDELESS MOUNTAINEERING
The question of climbing with or without guides is one of traditional
importance. But the long controversy has proceeded without taking
into account the change in modern conditions; and the terms ‘guided’
and ‘guideless’ are still used with a signification that now bears
little relation to actual circumstance. Consequently the discussion
for mountaineers has become profitless, for it is based upon definite
misconceptions.
[Sidenote: Old-time Errors.]
The great public, or that part of it which has reached the point of
accepting mountaineering as a legitimate background for sensational
magazine stories, cherishes one fixed idea on the subject of
climbing--that the guide is a providence who knows and shows and goes
the one sacred and impeccable ‘path’ which every genuine mountain
possesses: to go without him is to tempt destruction deliberately;
something like ejecting the engine-driver, starting the lever and
retiring to smoke in a first-class carriage. The importance of the
error is that its persistence permits it to dominate the minds of a
large number of men who ‘do mountains’ every year from the hotels.
To them, mountaineering means only the traditional route up in
the traditional way; and tradition demands the surrender of their
intelligence and personal inclinations for a day to the unimaginative
tyranny of any two chance peasants between whom they are advised to
suspend the exercise of their own finer faculties and the direction of
their very differently constituted frames. Their ambition is laudable,
but they are in no sense mountaineers, and they may never become so,
any more than those who cross the Channel in a steamboat are qualifying
as sailors. But they form a considerable portion of those who go among
the mountains, and include a large number of those who give the public
their experiences. In so far their patronage contributes to confirm and
perpetuate the long-lived error.
Among a large number, also, of climbers proper the error, though
different in kind, is as constant. The magnificent school of foreign
rock climbers which has of late years grown up in the regions of lesser
peaks north, east and south of the Alps, and which, with some notable
exceptions, has little conception of what independent mountaineering on
the great peaks means, accepts the performance and narration of these
tourists in the big Alps as typical of ‘guided climbing,’ and very
justly condemns it for its obvious lack of many of the features which
constitute the pleasure or merit of their own mountaineering. In so far
as they accept the popular and mistaken classification into guided and
guideless, these climbers help in continuing it. Our equally brilliant
school of British rock climbers, recognizing the absurdity of taking
guides on the short climbs of Scotland or the Lakes or Wales, often
adopts the same attitude. Only by slow experience, and in individual
cases, when they meet the problems and actual conditions of real
mountaineering in the great Western Alps, do they learn the magnitude
of the traditional fallacy. There is, therefore, excuse for the Press
and the lay public.
[Sidenote: The Guide of the Chronicles.]
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. But many of these notable
pioneers, or at least those whose personality is most permanent in
literature, were not mountaineers in the technical sense in which
we understand the word to-day. Mountaineering, as an art, has made
immense strides among amateurs and professionals alike since their
time, due largely to the force of their original impulse. What was true
of their time is no longer true; and while their writing will remain
the source of every climber’s inspiration until mountaineering may be
forgotten in the passion for winter sports and aviation, it is not in
the best interests of the sport that their pronouncements should be
considered as absolutely or, even on technical points, as relatively
true of modern conditions. They were undoubtedly fortunate in their
guides. When they were not, we do not hear of it, or only in a passing
sentence. The amateurs were themselves few in number, and the most
enterprising naturally attracted to themselves the few considerable
personalities among a race of as yet unspoiled mountain peasants and
hunters. They found them companions, men of intelligence, manners and
courage. The knowledge of mountaineering conditions was in its infancy,
and the peasant was accustomed from childhood to such knowledge as
existed. Relatively to the present day he was better physically
equipped than his employer, who was primarily an explorer or a walking
enthusiast. He was therefore not undeserving of the implicit confidence
placed in his judgment and skill.
[Sidenote: The Guide as he is.]
Conditions have changed. Guides have no longer the opportunity of
travelling up and down the Alps to secure the same wide basis of
experience. Only a few of them are taken beyond their own valleys;
and when they are, they are associated in most cases with local
experts, who relieve them of the necessity of exerting their brains
to discover the new conditions. Only in very rare cases among their
multiple employers do they ever get the same opportunity of long
contact with more active or educated intelligences, such as could
react upon their own appreciation of their own mountain problems.
The organized conditions for tourist life in the Alps, the separate
quarters in hotel and hut, the rapid succession of engagements with
men of different nationalities and divergent types, and their own
guide-schools, inculcating precise codes of manners to use with
‘Herren,’ forbid the old freedom of intercourse. The best and most
travelled of guides has a different manner on the mountain and in the
hotel. There is no authority so absolute as that of the hotel-keeper
in a small democratic Swiss community in all that affects the tourist
traffic. And the ideas of an average hotel-keeper as to the nature
of tourists and as to the proper behaviour towards them on the part
at least of his, the hotel-keeper’s, dependents or inferiors are not
unlike those of a head waiter in a city restaurant. The tradition that
the guide is a professional servant has become engrained. The stoutest
of mountaineering democrats has to accept its restrictions, once off
the mountains, if only to save his guide’s discomfort. And the average
guide on his side, dealing every summer with succeeding varieties of
incapable amateurs often ignorant of his language, and accustomed to
the passive acceptance of his service to hoist them up conventional
peaks, has grown up in a traditional atmosphere of aloofness and of
courteous disregard for his employers as mountaineers in his own
professional sense. A collective professional attitude has established
itself of which the early days knew little or nothing; the most
independent of guides, however well he may know his employer’s capacity
by experience, cannot but find the utmost difficulty in discarding
tradition and associating himself with the amateur’s judgment if it
happens to conflict with local hear-say or with the view of some
inferior professional using the familiar patois. And just in so far
as a collective opinion, in theatre or crowd or guild, is inferior to
the individual judgment of the majority of intelligent individuals
who compose it, and echoes, as if unanimously, the more blatant voice
of the more vulgar elements, in so far is the capacity, even of good
individual guides of the present day, inferior to that of their
predecessors in matters requiring the exercise of wider intelligence
upon unforeseen problems or new conditions. Just in so far, also, are
guides hampered by their body of tradition and prejudice from profiting
by their contact with more educated minds, or from learning to apply
new principles to the special circumstances of their profession. With
the formalizing, even in details, of the route up every regular peak,
the stimulus of romance and adventure has gone for them far more than
for the amateur. The new generation finds its only outlet in the autumn
chamois-hunting, if at all. Its mountaineering is just business.
There are some rare and notable exceptions--perhaps as many in
actual number as formed the chosen band of guides who led the early
mountaineers in their pleasant comradeship of triumph--but they are
attached in almost all cases for each season to affectionate and
jealous employers, and for the general mass of climbers there exists
only a general mass of guides of the limited and professional cast of
mind. In continuance of early pioneering tradition some great amateurs
of the old school still maintain that the guide’s word should be law in
all tactical and even strategical decisions. These are the fortunate
men, whose knowledge and reputation can command the services of the
surviving body of exceptions. If they were not so fortunate, they would
have to reconsider their view, or they would, at the present date, see
more of hotels than of huts, of pastures than of peaks.
[Sidenote: The Amateur as he may be.]
If guides have, as a whole, not progressed in the responsible and
sympathetic qualities essential for management, amateurs have improved
out of all proportion. Mountain craft, the mastery of the laws that
govern ice and rock and of their application, has become an exact
science, and the educated intelligence, under right guidance, is able
in a season or so to enter upon a whole inheritance of knowledge, of
detail and principle, which it took decades of tentative experiment to
discover. In the matter of purely technical skill also, of physical
performance, of balance, the use of the feet, of the axe, the rope
and the eyes, the phenomenon common to all sports has made itself
evident: each new generation of climbers appears to inherit, almost
as an instinct and without visible or conscious study, a greater
adaptability, an easier apprehension, as it were, of the necessary and
improving physical adjustments which had to be laboriously acquired by
the previous generation. Consequently the good amateur now brings to
the partnership a mountaineering qualification unimagined fifty years
ago, possessed of an accumulated knowledge of all varying and recorded
conditions and of a transmitted instinct for the novel athletic
requirements.
In stating this, I do not wish for a moment to be thought to undervalue
either the spirit or the skill of the few great early guideless
parties who first broke loose from the growing oppression of the
professional guiding traditions. They had to face a hostile criticism
of whose intensity we have now little conception. In the then condition
of mountaineering knowledge their independent action, undertaken
deliberately in the best interest of mountaineering as a great pursuit,
postulated a resolute courage and a readiness for responsibility that
proved to be as well justified by their record of performance as it
remains deserving of our wholehearted admiration. The relations of
amateur and guide would probably in any case have followed the same
line of development. But these pioneers did more than anticipate. They
first taught the amateur that it was safe for him, if he wished, to
prosecute the craft for himself, and that he possessed advantages that
could make him, if he followed them up independently, all but the equal
of the best guides.
A guide is, in fact, only a ‘guide’ in the sense that he belongs to a
professional class. The name can no longer be used to imply an inherent
supremacy in all fields of mountaineering. Similarly an amateur
possesses an inheritance and opportunities which make it possible for
him to make himself as good as a guide in many, and better than a guide
in several, important qualifications.
[Sidenote: The Composite Mountaineer.]
The title mountaineer can no longer be confined to the man of the
mountains. It connotes the perfect mastery of a difficult craft to
which guide and amateur alike aspire. This mountain science consists
of several departments of equal importance, in some of which the
amateur, in others the guide, starts with an initial advantage. In
relation to its absolute acquisition there are bad professionals and
medium professionals, and bad amateurs and moderate amateurs, according
to their personal and not their class values. If they develop their
experience and skill at an even rate, either will retain his initial
advantage over the other according as the degree of difficulty or
the special character of the climbing gives the greater opportunity
to the special qualities of the one or of the other. Ultimately,
in the highest flights of mountaineering, a point of difficulty is
reached which calls for the highest degree of efficiency in all
the departments; and since human endurance is limited and economy
is essential for emergencies, the ideal combination for swift and
secure progress in these ultimate expeditions is to be found in the
association of the qualities of the guide and the amateur, each
supremely qualified in his own department.
[Sidenote: The Guide as Mountaineer.]
A good guide is acclimatized, accustomed from his youth to the food,
heights and discomforts of sleep. The necessary muscles have been
hardened by years of practice. No average amateur, coming out for a few
weeks each year and unaccustomed to manual labour, whatever his skill
or talent, can hope to compare with him in endurance and consistent
pace, be it in step-cutting for long hours on an ice slope or in
facing struggle after struggle on an exhausting rock climb. The guide
is inured to snowstorms and cold winds, and his fingers can usually
outlast an amateur’s in clearing out and clinging to snowy holds or
iced rocks. He possesses thus more powerful reserves against unexpected
bad weather or against unforeseen difficulty or exertion continued for
an undue length of time. He has also another advantage. Amateurs who
attempt big climbs are accustomed only to climb with safe companions.
They have had, therefore, little practice in dealing with unexpected
slips in easy places. Even if they have trained their observation and
protective movement by leading beginners on British rock climbs, the
duration of the attention demanded has been short, and they have known
where to be on their guard, and with whom. 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. In his association even with a strong party this survives as
an instinct. He is not caught napping by the misstep into which even
fine amateurs or other guides in his party may be entrapped at the
end of a long day by fatigue, wind, darkness or over-confidence. A
good guide has, thus, special initial qualities which make him a sort
of insurance policy in certain very important respects. His gifts
reduce the percentage of accidental risk present on every climb, and
his consistency of pace and endurance ensures a larger margin of time
for emergencies. He can also carry more. He brings to the partnership
physique, endurance, professional technique and watchfulness, and a
local instinct for time or weather. His opinion in his own sphere is
invaluable; it has generally the additional weight of freedom from the
enticements of romance and enthusiasm. The amateur in control should
give it every consideration; but it does not relieve him of his own
responsibility. A first-class workman may make a very bad managing
director.
[Sidenote: The Amateur as Mountaineer.]
On his side the good amateur has antecedents and opportunities, such
as the guide cannot possess, for developing his initial advantages in
his own peculiar department. He has, or ought to have the superiority
of the educated mind over the uneducated, of the liberal intelligence
over the narrow, of contact with men, of reading, of the chance of
learning principle and precedent from books and men instead of from
small experience, and of the application of imagination and a trained
mind to the acquisition of all the details of mountain craft. He can
learn how to judge of the individual capacity of his amateur party and
of their condition on the day. He can estimate the guide’s ability
in his own line, by comparison, better than the guide can himself,
and from knowledge of his character he can judge of the value of the
guide’s opinion on technical points. In an important decision as to
advance or retreat he is, consequently, in a better position to weigh
the value of the party against the resistance of the mountain. In all
that may be called the human department of mountaineering, the judgment
and management of the men, the application of wider experience, of
accepted general principles, of imagination and reasoning powers to
the solution of particular problems, the good amateur is, _or can be_,
the good guide’s superior. He has also the advantage of being able to
make up rapidly, by means of reading, imitation and the progressive
adaptability already mentioned, much of his inferiority to the guide
in pure technique. In route finding and local knowledge he can run the
guide close by availing himself of previous records, of maps (always
a mystery to most guides), of local information, of the tracks or
presence of other parties, and of the admirable climbers’ guide-books
of all nations.
It is in fact no longer possible to designate climbing done under these
conditions by amateurs of this class as ‘guideless’ climbing in the
sense that climbing fifty years ago was entitled ‘guideless’ and looked
upon as unjustifiable. It is therefore easily to be understood that
a large number of modern mountaineers, conscious of the amount of the
field that their own qualifications and those of their party can cover,
prefer to be free from any professional check upon their enjoyment of
the mountains.
[Sidenote: The Question for the Leader.]
If good leaders know the power of their companions, where they fall
short of those of a guide and how they can be supplemented, and if
they choose climbs within those powers so far as is personally or
climatically calculable, they have a right to decide whether the
balance of pleasure and efficiency is on the side of using or of not
using professional assistance, with its merits and demerits. There is
an immense area in mountaineering where the special superiority of a
guide in the directions I have indicated has no opportunity of making
itself apparent. For the majority of difficult rock peaks, which are
by nature short, for the ordinary route finding up big mountains,
for the endless variety of climbing on passes and in regions of the
lesser ranges, a first-rate amateur can make himself as effective as
a first-rate guide. He can climb exhausting rocks as brilliantly,
provided it is not for as long; he can cut steps on the steepest ice
only a little less fast, for a sufficient number of hours; he can be
as watchful on all but the most fatiguing expeditions. If the leader
and party are efficient and know and observe their limitations, no
mountaineer in more than name will now criticize them for going without
‘guides,’ even if the occasional accident, against which no knowledge
is security, may in the course of time select their ‘guideless’ party
for its undiscriminating attack. A mountaineer who has qualified
himself as a good leader of a party as well as a sound climber has
earned the right to weigh the social disadvantage of taking a guide
against the technical strengthening his presence will contribute, in
relation to the character of the climbing he intends to undertake, and
to make his own decision.
[Sidenote: The Social Consideration.]
The technical advantage of taking a guide has been explained; the
social objection may be shortly stated. There is an inherent restraint
upon the feeling of independence and holiday fun among a party of
friends in the presence of some one of foreign speech and of different
habits of thought and body; above all, of one who climbs with them for
pay and not for their common pleasure. The association is intimate in
climbing, and the atmosphere is inevitably affected, and the spirits
checked, if any one of the party is not in key with the rest, does not
use their shibboleths or is unable to laugh with their jokes. When
a party consists of more than one amateur, and often in the case of
only one, etiquette usually insists upon a second guide being taken.
If there is a second guide, a division into two camps is formed--one
felt if not expressed--which no geniality or linguistic ability can
dissolve. The second professional is nearly always, by the nature of
the case, an inferior, more bound by his caste and with less interest
in, because less responsibility for, the success of the party. He will
generally voice valley prejudices and professional doctrines which are
enemies to enterprise and individual achievement, and he will form
a sort of unreasoning counterpoise to any effect that less hampered
amateur opinions might otherwise have upon the views of the first
guide. Situations are thus created whose solution demands more tact and
attention than a man on holiday feels disposed to devote to his sport.
The possibility of their occurrence forces him to put a constraint
upon himself, in view of contingencies, which is antagonistic to the
complete comradeship of mountaineering. He cannot, as the leader of
such a party, merge his identity, and therefore his authority, in the
pleasant fluctuations of the common mood. The association of guides
also throws upon him many small additional details of daily management,
if he is going to get the best use out of them and keep them in
good temper. His attention to health, food, personal variations and
humour has to embrace a whole new and foreign group of traditions and
idiosyncrasies of which he has small experience. He has not only to
attend to these, but also to bring them into harmonious co-operation
during all the incidents of the day with the preferences, conditions
and peculiarities of his amateur members, and with their--to the
guides--incomprehensible ideals of adventure and fun. Other things
being equal, a leader who knows that his party is competent should be
free, on the ground of the extra call their presence puts upon his
management, to decide to do without guides.
[Sidenote: The Technical Compensation.]
But if he is not sure of himself, or if his party is unequal or
inexperienced, he has no right to risk the possibility of disaster
to his party and the certainty of premature grey hairs for himself
by omitting to take a good guide on this social ground alone. And
supposing him to be a man of conscience and competence, and not a
reckless ‘kraxler’ of no mountaineering claims, he will not allow his
decision to take a guide to be influenced by any fear that the credit
of his party will be diminished in any competent mountaineer’s eyes by
the fact that a prejudiced or a thoughtless modern virtuosity might
jeer at it as ‘guided.’
[Sidenote: Examples.]
[Sidenote: The Expert.]
In proportion as the collective efficiency of the amateur element
is less, the necessity of taking a guide on the technical grounds
described is emphasized. The good amateur, if he is alone in the Alps
with one beginner or with two beginners, should certainly always take
a guide. If he has one beginner and a man of second-rate skill or
experience, he should in most cases take a guide; but something then
depends upon the nature of the climbing he has in view. Similarly, if
he is alone with a second-rate amateur, he should take a guide for
glacier work and for all ‘mixed’ climbing, unless it be of a character
to be well within the second amateur’s powers as well as within his
own. If he is aiming only at what may be called ‘one-man climbs,’
such as short, difficult rock peaks, his own skill may be considered
adequate for the safe mastery of the difficulties, and the second
man need only be responsible and capable of following without undue
exertion to both. But in this case he must remember that he is making
no allowance for accident, injury or the unforeseen.
In all cases the first-class amateur remains the leader or manager of
any party. He is always supreme in his own department of management;
and the fact that the unequal or doubtful competence of his party,
technically speaking, or the difficulty of the climb in prospect, may
make it advisable to take a guide, and may render the party during the
day more dependent upon the guide’s single contribution than would
be the case in a party of more equal technical skill, should only be
considered to give the guide a rather larger share in the general
responsibility. The fact that a guide is taken does not justify the
leader in throwing the whole responsibility upon him or in allowing his
party to do so; and in the event of any unfortunate issue it will be no
defence for his surrender of his proper functions in the eyes of good
mountaineers that he is able to plead that he was technically ‘guided.’
On the descending scale of climbing competence, when parties are in
question which contain no first-class amateur, a guide is, of course,
essential; and in this case his supremacy in skill, accompanied by any
proportion of managing ability which he has acquired,--and which will
naturally be greater than that of such inexperienced amateurs,--entitle
him to all the control, and consequently to much of the responsibility
which in former days used to be considered his alone in every
department of mountaineering.
Such parties may be of three kinds: moderate mountaineers of some
experience, who by choice confine themselves to modest climbs and wish
to do them with the utmost security and the least personal exertion;
beginners, who have still to learn all their business; and those
tourists already mentioned, who merely wish to ‘do a mountain.’
[Sidenote: The Tourist.]
To take the last first, that of the tourists (and there are many of
them), whose ambition it is to be taken up a big peak with a big name,
without concerning themselves with learning anything of the craft. In
such cases they do well to tie themselves between the strongest and
most highly recommended peasants they can secure and leave everything
to them. After the experience they will either desire to become
mountaineers, when they will join the class of beginners, or they will
desist. I should be the last to depreciate any manifestation of the
spirit that has brought us all to the hills, but in this chrysalis
condition their performance is not titularly mountaineering, and--it
is bad for the guides! An occasion comes back to mind--an ascent of
the Matterhorn on one of the two days upon which it was climbable
in a bad season. Nine members of a far-western gymnastic club chose
the same day for the one ascent of their lives. Each was led on a
short rope by a more or less competent peasant. They climbed with
a magnificent output of muscle. On reaching the summit, with its
incomparable view and terrific memories, they looked neither down nor
round, but joined hands in a circle facing inwards, and gave nine
fearful and prolonged college yells. The bear-leaders, each gravely
holding his separate radiating rope, stood contemplating them in a
silent outer circle. The simple ceremony accomplished, each guide
gave a solemn twitch to his spoke, or rather to his rope. The hub of
the universe obediently dissolved itself, and the descent began. One
wonders what passed through the guides’ minds. If any of these men
had been killed on the descent,--and it was a miracle in view of the
condition of the mountain and of the way they climbed that they all
escaped, with nothing worse than a night out on the rocks for seven
of the couples,--popular censure would have spared their memories:
they were not guideless. Whereas, if any one of our experienced and
cautious guideless party had been hit by one of the countless stones
with which the athletes converted the mountain side for long hours into
an active volcano, there would have followed the inevitable outcry
over “reckless guideless climbing”; not only from Press and public but
even, I fear, from some of the guardians of ancient mountaineering
tradition in our climbing associations. To the chance of this absurdity
does the perpetuation of the outworn distinction between ‘guided’ and
‘guideless’ condemn any modern mountaineer of enterprise.
[Sidenote: The Beginner.]
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.
[Sidenote: 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.
[Sidenote: 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.
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.
[Sidenote: A Supreme Example.]
I have left to the last the consideration of the one exceptional case
where, for want of sufficient material as a basis for judgment, no
clear crystal of modern mountaineering opinion has had opportunity
to fashion itself, and where the old debate as between ‘guided’ and
‘guideless’ still survives with something of its old vivacity. This
is the case of the highest flights possible in mountaineering, the
ascent of the limited number of really great ridges and faces in
the Alps and in less explored ranges. These climbs provide the most
magnificent exercise of strength, endurance, nerve and spirit, all
acting in harmony and all at their utmost tension, that human daring
or ingenuity has yet discovered or invented. If they do not represent
the limit of possible human achievement, they represent the limit of
achievement possible with security in a single day of human effort.
They are the ambition of every wholehearted mountaineer, but they fall
to the lot of only the few. Many of them are seldom repeated; on others
the conditions vary greatly between the rare ascents. Even among the
fortunate few who succeed, it will be still fewer who can honestly
say that they remained sufficiently masters of themselves and of the
situation throughout the long day of extraordinary effort, sufficiently
in command of muscle and nerve to meet all the physical demands
unassisted and with a critical judgment, sufficiently conscious of all
the tactical, human and technical manœuvres by which the success was
finally won, to be able to recover from memory a detached opinion as to
the relative difficulty of the climb, or to be able to estimate fairly
their own ability to repeat the day ‘unguided’ in all its problems
for leadership as well as in its tests of pure skill and endurance.
It is a common failing among even the best of mountaineers to forget
how much they have been ‘morally’ assisted by their company, or how
little they may have personally contributed to the actual carrying
through of a great climb, in the afterglow of its success. The more we
allow for the unusual physical and emotional reaction of these great
ascents, the less security we feel in applying standards of common
judgment to the opinions and narratives of their few conquerors. The
body of ordinary expert mountaineering opinion is of little assistance.
Mountaineers whose experience is limited to normal ascents, or who
may even have ‘done’ some of these greater climbs between two expert
professionals with their bodies and their judgments equally in a
condition of suspense, are only a few degrees better qualified than
the climbing public to judge of the combination of human faculties
required for leadership and management in their secure conquest. We
are forced, therefore, to take as our basis for comparison in forming
our opinion the few records of such supreme ascents as have been
performed by both guided and guideless parties. If, then, we examine
these dispassionately, and allow for the golden spectacles of a natural
exaltation, the greater where it is the less professional and the more
personal, we may decide that the sum of purely dangerous incident, of
benightments, races with darkness, breakages of cornice, etc., which
they narrate, adds up to the disadvantage of the guideless ascents. The
proportion of danger incurred is the one absolute standard by which all
mountaineering can be judged. Between danger and difficulty there is a
clear line of demarcation, which shifts according to our ability, but
which is always perceptible. In doing without guides, these gallant
parties, from their own accounts, while they triumphed equally over
the difficulties, skirted more closely and more continuously along the
border-line of danger.
Reason would bring us to the same conclusion. When we are estimating
the limit of what is humanly safe in mountaineering, we are considering
not what is securely possible for a single individual, a comparatively
low standard, but that which it may be possible for an ideal
combination of mountaineering qualities to achieve in one day. Up to
the present time we find in certain of the best of the guides the
highest development yet attained in one of the two groups of necessary
qualifications; in certain of the best of the amateurs we find the
highest development in the other. Until guides are enabled to enjoy
all the advantages of the amateur’s education and mental training
while they still retain their own natural conditions of life, or until
amateurs can live the lives of guides and yet remain all that wider
circumstance and opportunity assist to make them as amateurs, the
finest mountaineering combination will and must still remain that of
the associated group-qualities of guide and amateur, each group in its
highest degree of individual development.
If a small but concrete proof were needed that neither the combination
of the best of guides alone nor of the best of amateurs alone
represents the most efficient type of mountaineering machine, it might
be found in the history of the conquest of a number of great alpine
climbs, which for years defeated alike good guides in association and
good amateurs in association, but finally yielded in almost all cases
to the combination of good guides and good amateurs.
But it is dangerous to dogmatize. When we are talking of exceptional
ascents we are dealing with exceptional men; and if we say that for
the safe performance of these exceptional ascents the best amateur
parties will be strengthened by the addition of the best of guides,
it is with the knowledge that amateur climbing has made extraordinary
strides of recent years, and that in any season the conjunction of
two or more hitherto unimagined amateur stars may yet further raise
the recognized limits of the safely possible in guideless climbing.
In such case, the time-honoured discussion as to what degree of
difficulty makes a guide indispensable to an expert amateur party, in
order to minimize its dangers, with all its heartburnings and rash
intrusions, will be removed into an even more remote sphere than the
already rarefied atmosphere of exceptional climbs in which alone it is
still permissible. The matter may then be for super-mountaineers to
debate. The discussion is now, in all but these extreme cases, dead.
Sentiment or ignorance may still return to the old war-cries ‘guided’
and ‘guideless,’ used with the old significance, in fireside journals;
in safe print moonshine may yet confuse the climbing ways which troops
of stars have illuminated; but in the mountains new developments have
established new doctrine, and a mountaineer is safe from criticism
worthy of the name if he regulates his practice according to modern
interpretation.
THE MANAGEMENT OF GUIDES
If or when a leader decides to take guides, he has to know how to
manage them. I have already said that he is not now entitled merely to
engage the best guides available, and then leave all the direction and
responsibility to them. Few modern guides expect or deserve this. His
abdication will be followed by starts on wrong days, amazing meals,
more visits to huts than mountains, unaccountable retreats, and final
disgust with guides altogether. His party, at the close, will have
attained no harmony and have lived divided into two camps. The amateur
members will have been the least considered; they will either have been
dry-nursed or oppressed. The surrender of their leader’s functions to
the guides will have left them with no authoritative channel through
which to secure their proper share of responsibility and independence.
They will have become discontented and adopted the conventional
language of the lower criticism, abusing the guides for their tobacco,
their peaty clothes, their drinking and want of enterprise; much as is
still set forth in accredited climbing books of the ‘picture-me-then!’
class. The guides for their part, undirected and uninspired, will
have fallen back upon their professional traditions and caution,
meeting the unsympathetic atmosphere, which they do not understand,
with taciturnity, aggravating interference or childish assertiveness.
The whole blame will have lain with the leader. Just for a handful of
silver he left them, renouncing his entire responsibilities because one
or two of his party were to receive certain shillings in return for
their skilled companionship. The party has had no leader, no focus for
authority and opinion, and it could attain no success.
[Sidenote: Guide Nature.]
A guide is as much a human being as any amateur in the party. If it
is necessary for the manager to have constant care of the health and
_morale_ of his friends, it is doubly so in the case of his guides. The
_average_ guide is a peasant, with the limitations that frame peasant
virtues. His guiding motive is the struggle for existence under hard
conditions. His winters are spent in wood chopping, hard work and
keeping warm, with cards, wine and village gossip for distraction.
His public is preponderatingly masculine: in many mountain villages
the proportion of boys to girls is five to three. His winter society
consists of a fluctuating population, crudely packed for the cold
months, and dispersed in parasitic occupations during the summer; it
has therefore not even a parochial sense of responsibility in the
creation of its prejudices. All talk circulates round ‘francs.’ His
short summer season is a succession of conflicts with varying degrees
of incompetence, in a business in which his conscious superiority
is seldom challenged. It is impressed upon him that his most paying
accomplishments are an obliging manner and a smattering of spoken
tongues. He has small occasion to measure himself against other men or
get an idea of his own personal value, because the world comes to him
in its most artificial form, and plays him only at his own game with a
fantastic handicap. He is a child, with a precocious development on a
special line which gives him his one standard for manhood in general.
Outside his valley he has to fear the antagonism, even the petty
violence, of any local trade union; inside it he has all a schoolboy’s
fear of outraging some point of rigid local etiquette. There is no
more of William Tell and the edelweiss post card in the material life
of a Swiss valley than there is of Robin Hood and Merrie England in
an agricultural village. If the guide turns back on an ascent, after
hearing some incomprehensible patois from a fellow-villager the evening
before in a hut, or if he refrains from bullying a surly official on
our behalf, on whose good offices he may be dependent, or if he shows
no active sympathy in our condemnation of a recalcitrant porter,
who may be his wife’s cousin, we have no right to expect anything
different. If after a gorgeous sunset and a romantic ascent he still
cares more for our francs than our fellowship, it is perfectly natural.
We should look for nothing else, if we had not fashioned our typical
guide in youth from the narrative of the great literary pioneers, who
still found here and there a sympathetic village unspoiled by hotels
and tourists, or a natural son of the hills whose responsive courtesy
could reflect, if it did not comprehend, the symbolical attributes,
born of the realization of romantic success and physical well-being,
with which the imagination of the contented employer invested his
guide’s leadership. We too find a few such men. But we recognize them
as exceptions, or as beings who visit us in their full splendour only
in the roseate hours of reminiscence following on a great climb.
The guide as we know him is hill-born, hill-bred,--that is, a child,
with a child’s capacity for becoming much what we make him,--a
companion, a valet or a machine,--and with a child’s suspicion and
shyness, which he hides under an appearance of professional reserve or
a formal politeness.
[Sidenote: The Right Footing.]
A leader must not be content with either the polite manner or the
professional aloofness. He must first get to know his man thoroughly,
watch his reactions on a climb, and notice his weak and strong points,
where he is confident from knowledge and where he is merely bluffing.
From his movements or silences he will soon be able to deduce more than
from his speech. He should avoid direct opposition or discussion during
the actual climbing. The guide is as sensitive and as inarticulate
as any other uneducated handicraftsman on points that touch his
professional skill or caste pride, and ill-timed interference will
drive him to the polite manner for his protection. It is a mistake,
also, to allow the relationship to become too personal, to expect a
guide to act as valet or to perform small menial services in bivouac
or hotel. There are many offices which a guide performs as part of his
business,--cooking and carrying and the care of the party’s comfort as
a whole. But when an amateur has been indebted to his guide for putting
on his putties in peace-time, it is impossible for him to resent
being treated as equally dependent when the crises of battle take
place. The relationship cannot be changed in a moment, much less in a
crucial moment. The footing established in the valley, in the hut or
on the long tramp, will remain the footing on the mountain side. Small
hardships and small comforts have to be shared equally, that there may
be an equal sharing of the big responsibilities of the campaign and in
the decisions that go to meet difficulty or danger.
Start with your guide on a right footing, so that he sees that you
recognize your duties towards him as much as his towards you. See that
he gets decent food in the hotels; some head-waiters, portly with that
authority which a tourist traffic inevitably confers, never learn
to handle a guide as anything but a servant in your employment and
something less in their own; but the guide is generally too loyal or
too aloof in spirit to tell you so. Let him have what wine he desires:
he will have to carry it himself. No good guide drinks to excess,
some not at all. But fine-drawn men, not regularly nourished on meat,
will frankly admit that failing such reserves the extra stimulus is
occasionally really needed if some feat calling upon all their strength
or endurance has to be carried through. A well-trained body, under
primitive conditions, knows by instinct what particular nourishment it
needs, and responds to its stimulus with startling suddenness. A good
guide, on serious work, will never take more than nature tells him
is required, whatever your opinion of that amount may be. Of course
if he is a regular or irregular sipper in idle moments it is best to
get rid of him. Be careful that he has not too much to carry; when
there are several of a party, and each adds some trifle of personal
luggage without knowing that the others may have done the same, the
load often gets far beyond what the leader intended in selecting
the provisions. His own food--he generally prefers his own of its
kind--should be unrolled and seen to with the other packages. Sleepy
hotel-porters, under the heading of “provisions for guide,” are apt to
stuff in mosaics of strange meats; and again the guide is too polite to
tell you: it is not manners to worry the gentlemen. This is just the
distinction which on all accounts you have got to break down. Consider
his comfort as that of any other member of the party during the day,
without seeming to fuss or to be condescending. It is hopeless to try
and make him ‘one of yourselves’; he has his own pride, and would shrug
his shoulders over premature familiarity. But quiet consideration will
gradually convert the relations into a pleasant mutual understanding.
Take his sack as well as your own if he is leading and you judge
the extra weight is taxing him unduly. Take your turn at leading in
deep, soft snow. This is the only task of sheer endurance in which I
believe good amateurs can outlast good guides. Look after his getting
his food and a proper place to sleep in, unobtrusively, when you get
down from a big climb to new quarters, no matter how tired you are.
It is in your own interest for the morrow. If possible, laugh him out
of the common trick of dropping behind and making a sort of tail to
your triumph as you return into the village or meet another party. He
is taught that this is good manners and will please your touristship;
but it is really insulting to both, if a man has been your companion
or leader during a great climb of united effort, to accept this mock
tribute to your poor dignity when there is no longer any chance of
going a step wrong. The transparent imposition impresses nobody you
meet, and least of all yourself or him. In the valley let the guide
see that, as between yourselves, you consider that the fellowship
remains unaltered, that you do not barter your right to be treated as
his equal as a mountaineer for the sake of posturing as his ‘Herr.’
At the same time accept, for the sake of his comfort and his opinion
of your tact, the outward appearance of differentiation which his
training has taught him to consider consistent with his position and
yours in this valley and hotel life. You will soon find out what you
can or cannot do. You cannot traditionally invite him to dinner at the
same table with other strangers in a large hotel, but he will join
you for coffee at your separate table. Let him pay for you as you go.
The confidence will make him feel of the party, and has the advantage
of getting you large reductions through his local knowledge! Once he
recognizes you as a human being and you have found the way through
the crust of his professional suspicion and local upbringing, you
will know him to be very human also, with a temperament as easy as a
child’s to understand and as difficult as a child’s to manage; loyal,
sympathetic, often sensitive, and naturally honest. He enters more into
your aspirations than he ventures to show. Without sentiment, without
sharing your thoughts or being able to exchange a word about all the
varied interests that make up your own different outlook, without even
understanding your motives, you may yet, if you are fortunate, find
him a man who will become your close friend, with whom you can share
silence and danger and sorrow in a community of feeling that needs
no speech. In contact with elemental realities, it is the essential
personalities, not their different decorations of race or education,
that count and that make contact.
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. Ask a platoon-leader or good company-officer what
proportion of time he gave to the study and training of his men before
an offensive. And then be assured that mountaineering is a pursuit in
which, just as there is no limit to the ascending scale of pleasures
which it offers, æsthetic and physical, so also there is no end to
the progressive study and preparation it demands from those who would
follow its higher walks.
The better a man knows his child-guide, the more he will know how to
manage him, so as to get the best out of his mountaineering precocity.
The happiest arrangement is no doubt to keep a careful eye open, during
your preliminary years of training under the first professional, so
as to mark down any enterprising young guides or porters. The young
guide need not yet be an expert; it is for the amateur to give him the
opportunity for developing his technical skill in their seasons of
progressive climbing, while _pari passu_ the amateur is establishing
his own position in the partnership and perfecting himself in his own
department.
The companionship of amateur and guide as friends is the ideal
combination for great mountaineering wherever the ground permits of it.
So soon as a second professional is added the amateur is in a minority;
and no matter how close his personal association with his first guide,
the professional comradeship, recalling the atmosphere of youth, may
always override his influence for the day. A single amateur, therefore
when he finds it necessary to take on extra help for a season or
for some expedition, will do well to choose some young man, the most
athletic possible, who has his name to make and is still only thinly
crusted with professional tradition. His inexperience may keep him at
least silent in the discussion of important decisions.
[Sidenote: Before the Ascent.]
The principles of management are the same, whether the amateur is alone
or with friends, and whether the guides are old friends or comparative
strangers taken on for the season or even the day. Your concern is
primarily with the guide’s state of mind, so that he may make the
best use of his skill. If your object is merely an ordinary ascent,
it is still important that the leading guide should be kept in the
right mood, both because of the greater contribution to the social
pleasure of your party if things go rightly, and because, if checks of
weather or of circumstance arise, as they always may, you have then
neglected nothing that can contribute to a successful continuance of
your climb. If your intention is something beyond the ordinary, your
task of preparation is more difficult. For the greater the technical
difficulties of a climb, the larger must be the technical expert’s (or
guide’s) share in deciding whether they can or cannot be overcome.
The idea of the ascent has generally first to be made the guide’s
own by subtle suggestion at convenient moments. If you have got him
up out of the valley in good health and spirits, you have still the
danger of the hut to meet, where the patois of local guides, should
your plan leak out, will affect his next day’s humour fatally, even
if it does not turn you back at once. In view of this danger it is
sometimes best to treat your attempt as an ‘exploration’ only, until
you are safely off on to the lower glaciers, otherwise you may find,
when you wake in the hut, that the ‘wrong rope’ has been brought or
‘the weather’ is miraculously portentous. A mountaineer may hear these
and similar whispered euphuisms, which are the preliminary to retreat,
passing between a ‘prompted’ guide and his expostulating employer any
night in any full hut. He will not feel it his business to intervene
on behalf of another employer unless he is very sure of his ground.
After all, the guide may have good reason to mistrust his employer’s
competence, and have chosen this polite way of saving his life or
comfort in anticipation. But the leader will be wise if he takes
good note of the machinations, and of all their meanings, for his own
protection in like case. Of course this kind of excuse may, in cases,
be dictated by actual cowardice and not only by hut talk. My disregard
of this possibility lost me one of the finest climbs I have planned.
After all the gambits of hut excuses, ‘weather’ and ‘rope,’ had been
countered, and we were actually on the mountain, my single guide, of
fine reputation and great name, at the first sight of our formidable
final ridge developed a ‘sprained wrist.’ It was a forlorn hope, which
put an end to our association, and proved the downward turning-point in
a promising career.
I must instance one other weakness that comes into special prominence
in the bivouac or hut under the influence of other guides or of those
fluctuations in mood to which the peasant is very subject in the
prospect of some formidable climb. Very few guides know anything about
‘weather’ except a few local signs. But they will make use of their
supposed instinctive knowledge to the utmost if they feel lazy in the
morning or nervous of the undertaking. Possibly the ‘head-shaking’ is
half genuine, as a guide has a child’s fear of two things chiefly: a
cloud and a falling stone. But the leader must not be imposed upon, and
must use his own judgment about starting. I remember once in a bivouac,
literally under a huge stone, beside the Mer de Glace, twice sending
out quite a decent guide to see if his ‘cloud-bank’ was thinning. On
the third occasion, when I asked if there were really no stars visible,
he murmured drowsily, “Only two now,” and snuggled down to sleep again.
It is unnecessary to add that the guide and the party were wafted out
of the gîte on the wind of the unspoken and ate their breakfast on the
run.
I recall these instances only to emphasize the necessity of a close
observation of character, so that flaws may be discovered in time,
as well as the weak points shielded past the times of contact with
external influences.
[Sidenote: On the Mountain.]
Once the climb is begun the task of shepherding is simpler; there
are only the effects of untoward or premature mountain incident upon
mood to guard against. But even so, occasionally, the effect of other
parties on the same climb may have to be reckoned with. Their presence
often extends the debilitating effect of ‘hut’ promptings to the
mountain side. If the feeblest of several parties on a mountain turns
back, it requires a serious effort to prevent panic, and the fear of
later valley criticism, from inducing a general retreat. To relieve
your guide of this chance you may have to make it very audibly apparent
to the other parties that it is you, and not he, who are insisting upon
the advance.
Similarly, a guided party ahead of you, which may happen to take even
an obviously wrong route, will exercise a paralysing attraction upon
your leading guide’s mind. It is overpowering if the two guides are
acquainted. Once on a famous ridge of the greatest of Swiss peaks,
when the guide of the party ahead of us chose the traditional but, on
the day, the more dangerous of two lines, I had to say firmly that I
should retreat rather than take the risk, before my own admirable guide
could shake off the spell and consent to try the demonstrably better
alternative route. Incidentally I may add that we had the satisfaction
of sitting and watching from a secure ledge the sensational struggles
of the other party for fully half an hour before they caught us up
again. On the other hand, if the party ahead is led by a ‘foreigner’
or enemy guide, you may have to look out for the repellent effect upon
your own guide, who will be only too ready to break off on any freakish
alternative line which may give him the chance of cutting out his rival
in front.
These cases illustrate a particular danger; but as a rule once the
climbing commences the good guide is best left as much as possible
to his free devices. Your authority must encourage the idea that in
tactics the technical expert’s responsibility becomes greater, and that
in details the leading guide conducts the operations without question
or dissent.
[Sidenote: Fine Shades.]
If he has been judiciously nursed on to his mountain, a good leading
guide will be equal, unaided, to all ordinary situations and to
exceptional ones according to his ability. But if your climb proves
to belong throughout to the exceptional class, you must remain on the
watch, ready to employ in time those fine shades of management to
which alone nerves and muscles working near their limit respond. A
good first man on the rope, guide or amateur, is always an emotional
subject, though his self-control may conceal his inward fluctuations.
The leading guide’s mood in the early morning hours of climbing will
frequently be clouded by his sense of the serious work before him and
the threat of responsibility it shadows for him. If difficult problems
present themselves before he has warmed to his work, as they are apt
to do on a severe climb, or before he has realized the support of the
harmonious working of the party behind him, his mood will exaggerate
their difficulty and the discouraging prospect of a long day of such
problems. If you can then lift him over the crucial point without risk
to your party, your pains and study will have been well justified. You
must not give direct orders. A guide who will hurl himself against
anything because he is told to, against his judgment, is a bad guide,
or at least one whose temper and discretion are spoiled for the day.
Nor must you abuse the power of indirect suggestion which your study of
your man will have given you. A guide’s instinct on technical points
is an invaluable asset, and it may be harmed if it is tampered with
tactlessly. You must first make up your own mind whether his objection
to proceed is really based on genuine instinct or is only the outcome
of a depressed and cumulative mood. And here your knowledge of the
man and your observation of his condition before the crisis will help
you even more than your examination of the obstacle which is checking
him. Once you have decided that his objection is only due to mood, it
is your business to bring him into the right key again; to make him
feel that, while you realize the seriousness of the problem, yet your
judgment, unbiased by the infection of gloom, is cheerfully confident
that his skill can surmount it. Undue cheerfulness or obviously
pretended confidence will defeat your object by merely making him think
that you are out of touch with the situation or unaware of the gravity
of the decision. Both words and tone, therefore, need very delicate
choosing. The clouds must be given both time and a constant gentle
impulse to clear off. Once the black hour is past, as it passes with
most men as they warm to their work, the point comes, sooner or later,
when every good guide catches fire. The amateur can then relax much
of his attention even on a severe climb, enjoy the fun and 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. And then suddenly, and
fully a third of the way up the ascent, a Napoleonic attitude with
outstretched arm appeared in silhouette against the snow wall above
us. We heard a cheerful shout, “Who follows me to-day will reach the
summit!” And we knew that all need for nursing on our part had ended
for the day.
Remember that however well things are going, unforeseen circumstances
may always upset humour, and that you must be always looking out for
its effects. You have to bring your party up, for each round with the
unforeseen, at the top of its climbing form. A guide in the lead must
be relieved of all anxiety about the performance of the rest of the
party; his judgment of the succeeding problems must be kept clear of
bias from extraneous considerations. He must feel that the whole party
is in tune behind him, and is confident in him, or he will not be free
to put out his best powers.
Mood or circumstance may, however, on occasion prove too much for
your management, and then you need not hesitate to take over the lead
yourself for a while. It is well for this, and for many other reasons,
to have accustomed your guides to the idea of your leading. When this
extreme course is taken, it should be done quietly and, if possible,
under pretext of trying some alternative line of your own. So soon as
the guide’s humour readjusts itself, as it will all the quicker for
watching your mistakes, the lead can be as quietly surrendered again.
I remember a new ascent we made upon a formidable rock peak. Our
excellent guides, overawed by the terrific threat of the sections far
above us, tried prematurely to prove the whole climb impossible, by
taking a fancy line early in the day which obviously led to a hopeless
impasse. As it is the huntsman’s privilege and duty, when scent is
overrun, to make the cast and lift the pack on to the right line again,
we exercised it from the tail-end of the rope. Our ultimate success
helped us to a mutual forgetfulness of the incident.
[Sidenote: The Terms of the Association.]
If you are climbing alone with a guide, of course either goes first
as may be convenient at the moment. This should be taken for granted.
Whether the your party contains guides or not, you should always insist
on taking your share of leading and encourage other amateurs to take
theirs. It is good for your climbing to do so, it is far the best
fun, and it promotes a proper footing with the guides. A guide has no
prescriptive right to the pleasantest place. Only where the climbing is
difficult, or danger is involved, the best man must lead; and this may
mean more usually the guide. It is a mistake for an amateur, however
brilliant, to let himself appear to be competing with a guide on his
own ground. The guide will always be politely admiring of brilliance,
but he is really only concerned to know that an amateur climbs safely,
and equally safely all the day. The common good is better served by
your appearing to take his superiority in the technical field for
granted, and confining your attention to deserving the command you
intend to exercise in the field of general responsibility. It is a
sign that you are beginning to take your proper position, in your own
sphere, when your guides cease to assure you that you are climbing,
like a ‘chamois’ or a ‘devil.’ But a young mountaineer is apt to feel
injured that guides take so much longer in learning to pay him the
first _real_ compliment, the admission by their acts and not their
speech that he has learned to go ‘safely.’ I remember in early days
bitterly resenting being coddled on a short rope down an ice slope by
two guides with whom I had just been sharing a sensational day, during
at least four hours of which, if I had slipped, no effort of theirs
could have saved the party. 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. And for seasons after he has unlearned this habit,
a guide will continue to prefer the ‘backing up,’ in a bad place, of
a second-rate professional to that of the best amateurs in the Alps.
Perhaps this is natural; the two natives can calculate on each other’s
actions and reactions more closely their co-operation must always be
more instinctive and consequently more reassuring to one another.
An amateur must be content first to study the trade-winds of
mountaineering, and then gradually try his wings on the more
complicated cross-currents of its direction. Once he is qualified for
his duties as manager, his old guides by habit, and any new guides
by instinct or discovery, will soon concede him his full authority.
With this as his fulcrum he will find it, in due time, easy to secure
that both he and other amateurs of his party shall be left free to do
their own share of the climbing on their own climbing merits, and only
receive assistance (or what is intended for it) when they ask for it.
When these terms are established it is happier for the party, and far
happier as a permanent teaching for the guides. I was puzzled once
to read in a hut book a notice that for the third year in succession
the same gentleman had been forced to turn back by ‘wind’ at the same
point of an easy ascent, although the book showed that on the same day
other climbs on the mountain had gone well. Then we remarked that he
had employed the same two guides on each occasion. They were earning
their money, apparently, without undue exertion or interference in a
permanent engagement. Possibly they may even have discovered that there
is a humorous value in repetition! A few years later I heard of them
as men of ‘unmanageable stiff-neckedness,’ and out of employment. But
climbers will know of countless instances; and we must all have seen
the village street tragedies of once famous guides drifting downward
to chance engagements, trading on their names, irascible with their
few patrons, still efficient, but spoiled, arrogant and accomplishing
nothing.
[Sidenote: The Rare Crisis.]
No matter how well the guide’s temperament is analysed and his moods
managed, every guide’s nervous system has a snapping point, when
self-control may be momentarily lost. As I have said when speaking of
amateurs, to some it comes sooner, to others later; but to the best
guides, as to men of little or less education, it will come sooner
than to the best amateurs. The crisis is a disagreeable one, and very
rare. A thunderstorm, with its dangers that cannot be met by any
skill, may produce it; a sudden fall of rocks or ice where they had
no right to fall; or the shock of a realization of imminent peril.
It will be always the unexpected. The amateur is then happy who has
never weakened his influence by making mistakes outside his province
or by exhibitions of his own temper or lack of self-control. If he has
never given himself away under pressure of shock or disappointment or
fatigue, then the greater the crisis the more effective will be his
personal intervention. A few sharp words, startling but not angry,
will prove with all good guides sufficient restorative. I have had
occasion even to pay off an hysterical shouting guide on a mountain
side before his frenzy,--the result of an uncontrolled temper and
sudden panic,--yielding then to the fear of a solitary descent, died
down sufficiently to make it safe to take him on the rope again. He
was a bad guide, and dismissed on that account. But for the case of a
good guide who has been tried too highly, the momentary correction will
suffice, and the incident should not afterwards be recalled. I know of
no other occasion which should justifiably tempt us into sharp speech
or the exhibition of direct authority during an actual climb. The
secret of maintaining control is never to appear to claim it.
[Sidenote: The Reward.]
In effect, an amateur is free now to take or not to take guides in
accordance with circumstances and not with tradition. If he engages
them, except as a beginner, it must be on the terms of mountaineer
with mountaineer and not tourist with professional. He should get to
know them as human beings, make friends of them if he keeps them, and
treat them with the same tact as his other friends. In addition he
has to give them the increased study and supervision which primitive
temperaments, unknown antecedents, probable prejudices and possible
personal value to his party deserve. His reward will be to find
that his guided party remains free from many of the anxieties and
disappointments with which other guided and guideless parties have
to put up. He will find that the modern guide, if he has little of
the demigod of last-century tradition, has the potentialities of any
wholesome, hill-bred human being. He will also, if he has deserved
it, discover that the better a man, guide or amateur, becomes as a
mountaineer, the closer he grows as a companion; until a point is
reached, in the fellowship of great ascents, when the distinction
altogether disappears.