economies of - Climb Magazine

economies of
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OVER A CENTURY AGO, THE FIRST ASCENT SAGA OF THE CELEBRATED DENT DU Géant IN
THE MONT BLANC MASSIF FEATURED ROCKET-PROPELLED ROPES AND THE LIBERAL USE OF
FIXED GEAR, after ONE OF THE LEADING ALPINISTS OF THAT ERA HAD DECLARED THE PEAK
TO BE ‘INACCESSIBLE BY FAIR MEANS’. TODAY, INCREASING NUMBERS OF CLIMBERS QUEUE
TO CLIP JUMARS INTO INSITU ROPES ON THE WORLD’S MOST SOUGHT-AFTER MOUNTAINS.
Ed Douglas investigates what our approach to prestige peaks says about the
social economics of mountaineering, and about the reasons we climb.
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n the summer of 1880, a 25 year-old tannery
owner from Dover scrawled five words on
a calling card and left it at the foot of a vast
tooth of granite on the elevated frontier
between Italy and France, close to Mont Blanc.
The young Englishman was Fred Mummery - the
best alpinist Britain produced before the 1950s and the location was the Dent du Géant. At that
time, this peak was just about the most lustedafter mountaineering challenge in the Alps.
Mummery and his guide Alexander Burgener
had traversed out onto the Géant’s Southwest
Face and made a little progress up the cliff despite
the dizzying exposure. Do the same now in nailed
boots with no hardware and a hemp rope round
your waist, and only then will you properly
understand why they were soon scuttling back to
the foot of the tower. The message Mummery left
was simple: ‘absolutely inaccessible by fair means.’
He wasn’t the first to attempt the Géant. In
1876, Jean Charlet soloed part way up the peak’s
North Face before jamming a pole into a crack
to mark his high point. After that, things turned
a little weird. In 1877, Lord Wentworth (whose
mother Ada Lovelace – often credited as the first
computer programmer – was the daughter of Lord
Byron) hired an Italian munitions expert called
Bertinetti.
His job was to fire a series of rockets attached
to cord from the base of the North Face between
the Géant’s twin summits to where Wentworth
was waiting with his guide on the other side. The
plan was to then haul up the rocket-propelled
rope to the top - a tactic that puts clip-sticks
in perspective. The third rocket fired landed at
Wentworth’s feet and success seemed at hand –
but the wind took the rope away and all further
attempts failed.
The Géant was finally climbed in 1882, and
in the process Mummery’s point was proved. At
the end of July, the guide Jean-Joseph Maquignaz
with his son Battiste and nephew Daniel spent
days hammering, chipping and fixing a route up
the same face Mummery had tried. (The North
Face looked easier, but the weather was poor and
it was covered in ice.) When the route was ready,
scions of the illustrious Sella family, movers and
shakers in newly independent Italy, joined their
guides for the procession to the summit.
Climbing ethics in the late nineteenth century
were still emerging. The Austrian alpinist Eugen
Guido Lammer soon became an advocate of no
fixed gear in the Alps, but at the time nobody
was too appalled by what the Maquignaz family
had done. Even the Alpine Club, which would
very soon start decrying the use of pitons, wasn’t
minded to criticise. Only Mummery recognised
what the game was all about. In his view, by using
rocket-propelled ropes, insitu gear, and miles
of fixed rope a climber became merely a soldier
in pursuit of a fortune already spent. Using a
visionary logic almost a century ahead of its time,
Mummery understood that climbing a mountain
by any means is based on a social economics of
acquisition sharing no common ground with
the process of climbing, nor with the mountains
themselves.
The ascent of the Dent du Géant had some
interesting consequences. First of all, it became
instantly popular. Within days, the Maquignaz
family were doing a roaring trade in leading
clients to the top. News of the ascent spread
throughout the Alps, reaching a young English
law student, William Woodman Graham, in
Zermatt: ‘I determined to make use of M. Sella’s
staircase, as it was somewhat unkindly termed,
the report being that he had festooned the peak
with rope, not to mention iron stanchions and
other aids to climbing.’
Rather like Cesare Maestri’s dubious ‘ascent’
of Cerro Torre in 1970, the ironmongery installed
brought climbers swarming round the Dent du
Géant, turning it into a honey pot. Very quickly,
it became a common highlight on the route lists
of ambitious mountaineers. Nothing like the Dent
du Géant had been climbed before; it looked so
improbable. Now there was a line of fixed rope up
it, the route was brought within reach of anyone
determined to try. More than a century later,
and thanks to its 4,000-metre status, those fixed
ropes – renewed once or twice since – still draw
the crowds.
Ironically, Maquignaz hadn’t quite appreciated
that the Northeast Summit was in fact higher by
a few metres than the one he had reached, and
it was left to William Graham to claim the first
ascent of the peak. On the summit, he found ‘a
splendid crystal,’ and pocketed it, thus making
back some of the cost of his Alpine season. The
following year he became the first person to climb
in the Himalaya purely for the sake of it and then
disappeared to America.
Mummery and Graham had one thing in
common, despite the philosophical gulf in their
climbing styles: the Alpine Club rejected both
of them. In Graham’s case it was for his use of
ironmongery. For Mummery, the reasons remain
obscure. Some historians say it was outright
snobbery on the part of the Alpine Club, because
Mummery was ‘in trade’. In fact, he had a half
previous page: ‘Branded’ peaks aren’t just the domain of the guided masses. The West Face of Makalu - the ‘alpine style brainchild’ of the leading British alpinist of the 1970’s, Alex MacIntyre - has seen
attempts by the likes of Jeff Lowe, Steve House and Marko Prezelj but remains an elusive tick for numerous generations of the mountain world’s elite. david pickford
this page top: Climbers on the infamous fixed ropes of the Dent du Geant. Rob Jarvis
this page lower: A pioneer of ‘fair means’ in the mountains, Albert Mummery is seen here free climbing the ‘Mummery Crack’ on the Grepon. lily bristow/alpine club library
facing Page: Climbers on the West Buttress of Denali in the Central Alaskan Range. In 2010 Denali saw attempts by 1222 climbers, with 1135 of them on the West Buttress. Foraker, the Range’s 2nd highest
peak, saw 9 climbers. ian parnell
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‘Climbing is a process that serves as an example for both business and life.
Many people don’t understand that how you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.’
- YVONNE CHOUINARD,
let my people go surfing
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share in a substantial business, which allowed
him to do as he pleased. He was a gentleman
of leisure. Edward Whymper and the brilliant
scientist John Tyndall came from much humbler
origins – and they let them in.
The Alpine Club’s problem with Mummery
was a mixture of jealousy and fear of his political
ideas. The more establishment types in the Club
must have thought him far too leftwing. For
Mummery wasn’t just a tannery owner: he was
also a political economist, and a pretty good one.
In 1889, he published the Physiology of
Industry, co-written with John Hobson. The
central theme of the book, written during the deep
recession of the mid 1880s, was the theory of
under-consumption. Essentially, they argued that
far from cutting back in a recession, governments
should spend to aid recovery. It’s what Gordon
Brown was up to before he lost the 2010 general
election. Hobson and Mummery’s book influenced
John Maynard Keynes as he developed his own
ideas about regulating economies.
I’m not claiming Mummery as a major figure
in the history of economics, but the fact that he
thought like an economist is compelling. Histories
of climbing often look at class and sometimes
gender but rarely consider economics – and the
human motivations behind economics. Why do
we choose the things we do? But these questions
fascinated Mummery and Hobson. Both men
would have been familiar with the ideas of
another member of the Alpine Club, Francis
Edgeworth, who was a brilliant statistician and
an economist with an interest in psychology. He
developed a kind of proto-game theory.
Had he lived long enough to get his head round
it, Mummery would have loved game theory
– putting human behaviour in neat equations.
Using game theory, you can construct a complex
equation that will answer the question of how
popular a mountain will be: where it is, what it
looks like, how safe it is, how famous it is and
so forth. The x-factor in all this is fixed gear. The
more fixed gear you have, the more popular the
climb will be.
Take, for example, Ama Dablam: the
Matterhorn of Nepal. First climbed in 1961 by the
New Zealanders Mike Gill and Wally Romanes,
Barry Bishop from the USA, and the British doctor
Mike Ward via the Southwest Ridge, this peak is
now commonly offered by commercial expedition
outfitters who maintain a line of fixed rope that
clients can jumar up, then abseil back down.
It’s commonly stated in mainstream media
that commercial expeditions are bringing a new
level of risk to the Himalaya as they compete for
business. Reinhold Messner blamed this process
for the tragedy on K2 in 2008, even though there
were no commercial expeditions on the mountain
that year. The rather inconvenient truth for
those who like to imagine a lost golden age of
innocent co-operation is that 8,000 metre peaks
become safer under the influence of commercial
expeditions. As Russell Brice told me: ‘for
‘The x-factor in all this is fixed gear.
The more fixed gear you have, the more popular the climb will be.’
Mustagh Tower (7273m)
Ama Dablam (6812m)
14,800 Google hits
288,000 Google hits
commercial operators to be successful, they need
to have a good summit success rate and a low
fatality rate.’
Of course, Ama Dablam is not without its
dangers. In 2006, Camp III was hit when part
of the prominent serac that overhangs the route
collapsed. Six climbers - three Europeans and
three Sherpas - were killed. But that’s the game.
Climbing can still be a dangerous business, even
on well-managed, commercialised routes. But
the camp on Ama Dablam has been relocated to
protect future clients. The Matterhorn itself has
a far higher death toll, although climbing it is
obviously more popular too.
Yet Ama Dablam is still comfortably one of the
most popular mountains in the entire Himalaya.
Why? Why do we climb the things that we do?
It’s not that commercial expeditions have made
it desirable; they’re just meeting a demand. Ama
Dablam was already a popular mountain before
the fixed ropes appeared. It’s been a magnet
for some of the leading climbers of the past
half-century, from Martin Boysen and Michael
Kennedy, to Tomaz Humar and Jules Cartwright.
They didn’t use fixed ropes. So what was driving
them?
Answering that question could take forever, and
the answer depends on whom you ask. But for
brevity’s sake, let’s agree it’s a mixture of aesthetic
appeal, accessibility, difficulty – or the appearance
of it – and kudos. The latter quality can almost
be considered in the same way we look at brand
names. Climbers can be as snobbish as readers
of Vogue or GQ about that. Hands up everyone
who’s become a bit sniffy about an outdoor
clothing brand that’s suddenly started appearing
on the high street? And consequently bought a
jacket from a manufacturer that still sees climbers
as its core market?
So it is with mountains. We make similar
judgements about what we climb as we do about
the gear we wear. It’s called heuristics – gut
instincts based on experience. The public have
heard of Everest, and it’s the biggest, so it has
obvious appeal. For many climbers, however, it’s
too well known, too busy, too expensive for what
it is, too high or too technically easy. A peak like
Ama Dablam has a very different cachet, a bit
more insider-appeal. It’s like baby bear’s porridge
– just right.
Compare it to a peak like Muztagh Tower in
Pakistan. The two are equally compelling visually,
quite close in height, and Muztagh Tower was
actually climbed first, by a British expedition in
1956, when Joe Brown and Ian McNaught-Davis
reached the summit. But Muztagh Tower is more
remote, stuck way up the Baltoro Glacier in the
wilds of the Pakistan Karakorum, not a day’s walk
or so from Tengpoche monastery in easy-going
Khumbu. It’s also less well known. Ama Dablam
gets almost a quarter of a million hits on Google,
while Muztagh Tower gets less than a tenth of
that. (Island Peak, 700 metres lower, with great
views of Lhotse’s South Face and a line of fixed
rope to the summit, scores 352,000 hits.)
For someone like Mummery, the value of a
peak was its novelty. ‘The true mountaineer is a
wanderer,’ he wrote at the end of his book My
this page left: Mustagh Tower (7273m) one of Pakistan’s hidden jems has seen less than 10 climbers reach its summit. tom richardson
this page right: Nepal’s Ama Dablam, the “jewel of the Khumbu’, is a lower peak at 6812m but still highly technical in places but with its HVS rock difficulties now bypassed by fixed ropes its South West Ridge
has seen hundreds of ascents. Kenton Cool
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Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus. ‘And by a wanderer I do not mean a man
who expends his whole time in travelling to and fro in the mountains on
the exact tracks of his predecessors – much as a bicyclist rushes along the
turnpike roads of England – but I mean a man who loves to be where no
human being has been before, who delights in gripping rocks that previously
never felt the touch of human fingers… In other words, the true mountaineer
is the man who attempts new ascents.’
This argument is a bit too elitist for me. Novelty can mean very little.
I’ve met celebrated alpinists who don’t have remotely the same feeling for
mountains as someone who is quietly ticking off the list of 4,000ers in the
Alps. And anyway, the elite also have their branded mountains, objectives
that carry a high value in the rarefied circles in which they move – the West
Face of Makalu, Latok I, Kalanka, Gasherbrum IV or Changabang. Nameless
Tower is most definitely no longer nameless.
However, the idea of ‘discovery’ being an intrinsic part of mountaineering
has to be right. And I think you can do that by following someone else’s
route. Figuring out moves, finding the line, placing protection, sorting out
your head - these are all acts of discovery. Take all that away and climbing
becomes what Mummery calls ‘exercise amongst noble scenery’.
That’s essentially what’s happened in parts of Austrian, Germany and
Switzerland, where large numbers of established routes have been smothered
in fixed gear to the apparent indifference of those countries’ alpine clubs. But
convenience brings numbers, and that suits commercial interests. A hundred
years ago, the German Alpine Club faced the same criticisms, that its love of
infrastructure was changing the sport.
In the early twentieth century it was Guido Lammer, an extreme
nationalist, who led the complaints. His modern equivalent is much more
benign. Alex Huber, a brilliant sport climber who knows the value of bolts as
well as a top mountaineer, has publicly criticised the clubs for their abdication
of responsibility: ‘Instead of alpine clubs using the full weight and respect of
their authority to offer a clear policy in their various publications and media
campaigns, we have a bunch of contentious local factions.’
Will the Himalaya go the same way? And would it necessarily matter?
Alpine countries have made a lot of money attracting tourists who don’t care
about the finer points of mountaineering ethics. Why shouldn’t Himalayan
people benefit too? On the final point, I feel bound to agree. Tourism has its
problems, but earning a living in remote mountain valleys has never been
easy. In the Himalaya, young men can choose between tourism and migrating
to the Gulf to toil as migrant workers, often in appalling conditions. I know
which I’d prefer.
And yet, the instinctive compulsion most of us have to climb peaks we
recognise has become a hindrance to economic development in the Himalaya.
There are enough climbers and walkers in the Alps for some of their cash to
end up in the quietest places. In the Himalaya, on the other hand, climbers
are far less numerous and they visit less frequently. It’s not surprising, after
travelling so far, that they often end up on the same objectives. However, this
has consequences.
Liz Hawley is an American journalist who has recorded expeditions based
out of Kathmandu for half a century. She has witnessed a definite swing over
the decades away from exploration and new routes to a narrow focus on a
few peaks. Most of the climbing in Nepal now happens on perhaps a dozen
mountains, even including popular trekking peaks, which don’t appear in
Hawley’s data.
Most climbers heading for the Himalaya will now most likely join a
commercial expedition. Host countries have made it so complex and timeconsuming, that the extra difficulties of organising your own trip no longer
seem worth the effort. There are no real guidebooks to the Himalaya to make
it easier. So why not get an expert to deal with the hassle? The moment you
do that, of course, you’re obliged to climb an objective that someone else has
selected for you, but with so many to choose from and no experience of what
is and isn’t worthwhile, why not?
If you’re running a business, whether it’s selling guidebooks or guiding
services, then it makes sense to market peaks that the public already knows.
In Britain, books about the Mont Blanc Range outsell those about the
Bernina in the eastern Alps. Yet the people who sell those ‘products’ rarely
share their clients’ fixation. For most guides, their ideal client is one who
wants to get off the beaten track. Himalayan commercial outfitters are in a
similar bind. Do they try something new and risk a failure or stick to what
they know will sell?
A few guides have made a speciality of exploration, and I hope they
prosper. Martin Moran has spent years leading clients on expeditions where
new routes are a routine part of what he offers. Pat Littlejohn has done
the same with his ISM groups, most recently doing exploratory climbing in
Kyrgyzstan. It might not have all the thrill of organising your own pioneering
expedition, but it seems to me an ingenious idea, and one that brings
tourism to corners of the Greater Ranges that need it far more than the busy
Khumbu. You’re no longer buying an iconic brand name, but an exceptional
experience, and often for a lower price. So go on – just go exploring. You
know it makes sense. n
this page left: A bolt being placed on Everest to secure fixed ropes. ’There are many different views regarding the use of fixed ropes, commercial expeditions’ says Veteren Everest guide Willie Benegas, ‘but
for me at least, the bottom line is the mountain is safer, and it’s a safer place for the Sherpas to work’. Adrian ballinger
this page right: David Bingham on the summit of Himachal (6184m), a rare ascent made during a guided trip. robin thomas
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