Chapter I: Management and Leadership (4)

A climber has also to remember the very active share that his will power must take in difficult or prolonged mountaineering. He depends upon his will to supply to a large extent the impulse, physical and moral, when nerves and muscles begin to show signs of unwilling service. Among some of the greatest of mountaineers, will has to a notable extent supplied the place of physique. They have climbed on their ‘vitality,’ as we say; on the success of their will in maintaining the impulse to movement long after the muscles have protested their inability to continue the rate of consumption of energy.

The impulses of the will are communicated physically. Their transmission exhausts nerve-fibre as materially as muscular action. As the muscles tire, the messages from the will quicken and increase. The nerve transmitters get irritated, and finally revolt. As a result, we have the frequent mountaineering symptoms of ennui, irritation, conscious fatigue and, in extreme cases, of complete nervous incapacity to resolve upon making another step. But the nerves call for a truce before the muscles are actually exhausted. The muscles, male fashion, invariably protect themselves by retaining some reserve of energy, if only a way can be found of exacting it. Some new interest or excitement may do this; the messages are then switched on to other nerve-lines, the congestion of monotony is relieved, and the will resumes control of the communications, to the extent of obtaining whole hours of further effort from the striking muscles.

But training offers us a surer way of postponing or avoiding these strikes. The body is animated in two fashions from the spinal nerves: by the messages that pass through the brain--I speak as a layman--and by those which serve that mysterious but autocratic regent of our habits, the ‘subconsciousness.’ Under the latter are grouped all our automatic actions, and the more actions we can qualify for admission to its extremely select group of well-ordered subjects, the fewer sequences of orders will the dictator-brain have to promulgate on their account, and the less congested will be the nerve-lines of communications. Walking, for instance, is, with most people, a subconscious action. Once the impulse to step out has been given, the legs will continue to walk automatically so long as the look or feel of the familiar smooth surface continues to suggest the familiar reflex. A change of surface may disturb and therefore make the effort conscious; otherwise the walking can be maintained without fatigue for a much longer time than the same group of muscles could have held out had they been performing some unfamiliar action, and therefore been under the direction of conscious impulses.

The human frame, in attaching itself at two, three or four points to any ordinary surface, is capable of only a limited number of positions. Holds upon rock or ice, suitable for use, not unnaturally recur frequently in similar groupings upon the same type of surface. Consequently, there are whole series of positions of the body and limbs which are constantly repeating themselves in climbing. The more of these subconscious associations which a climber can succeed, by practice, in establishing, as between familiar sequences of holds and automatic adjustments of his motions to their requirements, the fewer calls will he have to make upon nerves and will, and the greater, therefore, will be his endurance. It is largely on this account that a climber, as he gets experience, finds that he can climb with always decreasing effort. It is for this reason also that long, continuous rock ridges, with oft-recurring situations, form the best initial training for young mountaineers and the best annual reintroduction for their elders.

A climber who can get away, if only for a day or so, at frequent intervals, to rocks small or big behind his house or on convenient hills, secures the best training for his balance, his nerves and his muscles, not by attempting extravagant gymnastic problems, but by practising, and always adding to, the number of his sequences of familiar climbing movements. He must learn to perform these with such facility that, finally, their execution becomes subconscious. On a long climb ten out of every twelve situations will be familiar to experience. Suitable training will enable him to meet these ten with the right motions, without conscious effort, automatically. The nerves and the will-power are thus economically kept in reserve for the remaining two.

[Sidenote: Nerve.]

Many of us take a day or two at the beginning of the season to get back our ‘nerve.’ We boggle at a bold reach, or feel inclined to crawl where we know we should stride. This is not due to any fine new sensitiveness to mountain danger, acquired during our civilized sojourn in the plains; it has nothing to do with vertigo or effect of height. It is simply lack of condition. By inaction we have allowed sets of automatic motions to become unfamiliar. The will has, therefore, to take charge, and does so tentatively, like a professor of metaphysics left in charge of a class of elementary school-children. The nerve communications are sluggish from disuse; the muscles are out of control, and distrustful of what the arbitrary will may ask of them. We become ‘nervous,’ and potter. This can all be avoided by reasonable and light practice. Regular exercise of the heart, the lungs, the muscles and the nerve-lines of communications, with occasional repetitions of our groups of familiar subconscious motions, will maintain a general level of fitness even out of training. If the machinery is kept working smoothly, we can soon get it going at high pressure again, and can return to top condition without any local strikes or nerve signals. The final tuning up to meet the call of the mountain holiday will then proceed easily, of itself, in action. For a man whose system is set, and who practises a consistent habit of living, the amount of actual exercise required during the intervals to preserve his elasticity is usually small, and tends to diminish. This is one of the compensations of advancing years.

[Sidenote: Height and Reach.]

No man by any pleasing afterthought can add to his height; although by suppling his shoulders and lengthening by exercise his trunk muscles he can extend his apparent upward reach. The stride of the tall man before us over soft snow; the long-armed man’s careless caress of a salvation hold well beyond our reach; the inimitable and perpetual rhythm maintained by the Agile Gibbon of the Zoological Gardens, on the security of his four whiplash limbs,--these are natural advantages, whose injustice we may challenge but not compete with. Their regretful contemplation suggests, however, the possible usefulness of a warning, and some consolations.

A man of great reach, whose span from toe to upstretched finger approaches or exceeds eight feet, has one undoubted advantage on difficult rocks, where holds are rare and precious. If his legs are long enough to allow him to sit across the smooth sheer walls of a chimney or to straddle it on small footholds, he has yet another. But he must expect to suffer from the drawbacks incidental to height. A tall man may be weak in the body muscles, with less suppleness and ease of balance, or, if he is muscularly developed all over, his weight is apt to increase with time out of all proportion to the suspensory power of his fingers on small holds. If he is tall, slight and sinewy, his strength of arm and hand is rarely proportionate to his greater weight, or equal to the greater expenditure on leverage which height requires of arms in balance climbing. If he is tall, muscular and heavy, this weakness pursues him in the same ratio. If chimneys are narrow, he is too long to ‘bridge’ them securely; if the holds are tricky and slight, he finds greater difficulty and effort in ‘folding up’ so as to use them, and in keeping his centre of balance well in and above his feet. It is a consolation for a short or slight man that great experts in climbing are to be found among men of every build, with a preponderance in favour of those of medium height and of sinewy and supple rather than of big muscular development. The outside feats of rock climbing, the abnormal climbs made by a few men in recent years, undoubtedly require abnormal strength of finger and arm, not seldom accompanied by great size of hand. But these men have also possessed an equal development of strength and rhythm in body and leg; their all-round design has been abnormal. When, as in one or two cases, their exceptional physical development has been assisted by great height or great reach, without loss to rhythm or balance or to the sterling quality of supple sinews, the perfection of the climbing machine has been attained.

For the normal climber to imitate the performance of these men is to incur a proportion of danger, the measure of the interval between their abnormal reach and power and his own, expressed in terms of all too distant or too indefinite rock holds, such as no sane man has the right to risk from any emulative or competitive feeling.

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

By a pleasing accident in rock structure, rock is either utterly impossible, smooth or stratified at gigantic intervals, or its cleavages and intrusions, and consequently its holds, occur at intervals within the average man’s reach. While a tall man has, therefore, a greater choice of holds, qualified in his case by a greater effort in using them, a shorter man has only to perfect his skill, and to profit by his lightness and balance, to be able to keep level with him in performance on all normal rock. Again I except the superman climbs, which are climbs made by exceptional men upon exceptional accidents in rock structure.

As a further compensation, peculiar to advancing years, a lightly built man who lives healthily finds less difficulty in recovering a condition of hard training and in keeping up his standard of achievement. Failure in wind or increase in weight may make the process of recovery longer each year by a few days, but he has not the handicap to contend with which threatens the big or heavily muscled man, who requires constant and intensive exercise to check the local degenerations which increase with time.

Climbing is one of the few exercises that can be continued well into what used to be deemed old age. Trained nerve, tough sinew, supple muscle, experience in adjustments, in balance, in foresight and in economy of strength, compensate for the loss of youth, for its fire and spring. An old climber of the balance school can mountaineer in the front rank until the last, and, by a happy compensation which no other interest enjoys, when the deterioration of the body finally begins and the natural powers fail, the desire for the fiercer emotions of difficult climbing contentedly diminishes. In their place the inexhaustible mountains discover a whole range of subtler sensations; returning for our feet the echo of lost rhythmic movements perfected by complacent memory, and using even the shadows of our sunset years to throw into relief treasures both of human and picturesque interest, which were unnoticed or hurried over in the daylit enthusiasm of athletic youth.

PACE

Pace is a matter of vital importance in mountaineering of any magnitude. Unfortunately, guide-books of recent years, by recording the ‘best times’ taken on ascents for future guidance, have given a certain amount of encouragement to racing for records and so to competitive climbing. A confusion has thus been produced between pace and racing in the minds of many sound mountaineers. The mere mention of the word ‘pace’ provokes them to a protest against record-breaking. A natural, but equally dangerous, reaction has followed, which condemns consideration of ‘times’ altogether, and advocates “idling on the great ridges” as the peculiar joy of the guideless or the true-hearted mountaineer.

[Sidenote: Adjustment of Time.]

Pace does not mean racing. It means the adjustment of the length of the climb to the length of the day, and the adjustment of the progress of the of climber to the length of the climb. A certain amount of ground must be covered in all great ascents, and there are only certain hours of daylight in which to cover it. No mountaineer is competent who cannot relate in advance the measure of daylight at his disposal to the measure of the distance to be traversed, and keep to that measure in action. Only the men who know how to save time upon this calculation have it to spend upon hours of luxurious rest and interval. There is nothing more fatal to pleasure or to safety than to realize, perhaps too late, that the race with darkness and benightment has begun. Those who are loudest in the valley in their protest against climbing by the watch are the most often challenged or beaten by night in this, the most dangerous form of racing.

[Sidenote: Benightment.]

Getting benighted is not a pleasure, and it is rarely necessary. It has been given a false halo of romance by the practice and the picturesque descriptions of a number of guideless mountaineers, who first render it inevitable by attempting what is beyond them, or by carrying great weights, and then seek to convince themselves and the world that the consequent night out on a lofty ledge or glacier forms an essential and agreeable part of mountaineering. It is neither. On a rare occasion it may be unavoidable, as the result of unforeseen circumstances, bad weather or altered conditions coming on too late to allow of the proper alternative, which is to turn back in time. If benightment is frequently incurred, it is a sign of some grave defect in mountaineering judgment. As a habit it is folly.

By daylight the climber has the hundred chances of activity, warmth and sight in his favour. At night he is the passive and blinded recipient of any evil chance that storm, cold, wind, illness or accident may bring him. To be on a mountain unprepared at night is to increase the percentage of danger incalculably; and stars, sunrise and sunset can be enjoyed without its unaccountable risk.

Most European mountains are of a height to be climbed, with a reasonable calculation of pace, in a single day. When they are beyond this range, huts are to be found, or a bivouac can be contrived. The night out by intention at the beginning of an ascent has more than the romantic pleasure, because none of the dangerous discomfort, of the night out by miscalculation at its end. This reasonable anticipation presupposes a precise estimate in advance of the pace required, as well as of the length of the climb. Such an estimate does not mean fixing such and such hours for so much of the ridge, and so much time for every halt, which is slavery; but it implies a general preconsideration of what ground must be covered and within what general divisions of time certain fixed points should be reached in order to allow of a safe return by daylight.

Pace is the regulation of the progress, and of the halts, of the party in relation to these general fixed points.

[Sidenote: Weight Handicaps.]

To carry unnecessarily heavy loads as a precaution against cold or hunger in case of benightment--a very common custom--is to increase the actual probability of the event by further checking the rate of progress. It is better to go as light as possible, with the minimum of portable protection sufficient to preserve life in case of ill-fortune, and to concentrate all the energy upon a timely conquest of difficulty, such as will ensure a return before night. The muscles, not unduly weighted, must see to it that there is always a margin of time in hand upon the estimate, to allow for unforeseen checks.

With regard to this there is another common error. Those who confuse pace with racing, picture a party rushing breathlessly over easy and difficult alike, and panting at their rest-points watch in hand. As a reaction from the picture, they themselves make the long, easy passages that constitute the major part of most ascents the occasion for a relenting rather than a quickening of pace; with the result that they have no margin of time for the unforeseen or the unexpectedly difficult passages.

A party that does good times takes each passage at the maximum pace consistent with comfort, allowing for its degree of difficulty. It has consequently always time in hand to allow of leisurely exploration, when found expedient, and of a more careful overcoming of the real problems when they occur.

[Sidenote: Continuous Going.]

Pace means the continuous progress of a party over the whole length of a climb, allowing reasonable variations for more complicated passages or for halts. It will be found that a party that does good times rarely hurries. It is, after all, human, and it dislikes being pressed. Nor has it any need to be. An experienced party starts slowly--more slowly, usually, than less expert climbers. It knows that pace to be good must be effortless, and must become mechanical, and that the muscles must be given time to get warm and work up to their automatic rhythm. Once this rhythm is attained it will, for the sake of good progress, avoid alike both hurrying and frequent halting. To hurry will interfere with the bodily functions, and react upon heart and lungs and will; and to halt will disturb the rhythm and chill the muscles. It will aim at continuous steady going, and save its seconds and minutes over ground of easy movement, ready to spend time freely again so as to economize effort on more difficult passages.

[Sidenote: Combination.]

Combination is the secret of saving seconds. Consider for a moment the case of a roped party that has not learned the secret of pace, and is moving all together on easy rock. Inattentive to a common rate, one man lags, one goes unevenly, there is constant check or turning round to talk, each with its break of continuity of rhythm. On a three hours’ traverse of broken ridge half an hour will have been lost only in disentangling the rope on such interrupted, uneven going. The leader, at the end, will be vexed at the shorter time given in the guide-book, and expostulate, with justice, “Why, I was hurrying all the time!”

Or again, watch a party of average amateurs moving one at a time on steep rock. The first man reaches his ledge, preens his plumes for a second or two in the sun of his success, possibly discusses it in detail with his second man below, looks round for a hold or belay, takes a position, alters it, and shouts, “Come along.” The second calls, “Are you all right?” The first man is disturbed, readjusts his body, gets back to the old position, and says “Yes,” or “Half a moment.” Thirty seconds or more will be gone before the second man can start. He reaches the ledge, does not take note of the first man’s position for holding before it is surrendered to him, and has to rediscover it anew, all with the same delay; and another half-minute is gone. If this performance is repeated, as it will be, several hundred times in the day, by one or more of a party, two invaluable hours at least will have dropped completely out of the allowance of time for the climb! The party will remember that they did their actual climbing fast; on their return they will look up the better ‘times’ of the book, and abuse their predecessors for ‘racing,’ for ‘dangerous pace,’ etc., whereas the only difference has been that their predecessors saved, while they wasted, innumerable, all-important, intervening seconds.

[Sidenote: Halts.]

Continuous progress is the essence of pace. While a party is in motion, the effort should be directed at keeping the pace constant, not at hurrying it. There will then be larger margins for completer rests at the proper halting times and places. Time can also be saved during halts. It is a great mistake to hurry men over their food; a due allowance of time should be made both for food and rest. But the time of rest should be used for resting. Too much of it is usually lost, and more than intended is often taken, in standing about at the beginning of a halt, or by slackness at the end: one man has misplaced his axe; another finds out for the first time that his puttie wants rewinding; and so on. Once the time allowed for the halt is over, the packing and restart should be brisk and immediate. Rest intervals are assuredly a part of the day’s measure, but dawdling at their edges is time lost from the climbing hours, not time added to the resting.

[Sidenote: The Maximum Rhythm.]

Moving slowly is not less effort than moving reasonably fast. The muscles in movement generate their own warmth, which is the body’s energy. Muscles when in training can consume and create their own energy at more than their normal rate without more effort. The maximum pace for a man is the highest rate of effort at which his system will carry on its functions without demanding direct impulses of will from the brain, and without generating more waste matter than it can naturally consume and discharge. Each man has his maximum rhythm, which varies according to his condition. Up to this maximum he can climb, when in training, without feeling increased fatigue. Above it, his system will soon feel symptoms of exhaustion; below it, he gets no profit from the relaxation, and even suffers some prejudice to his energy in the loss of a sustained rhythm.

The pace of a party is the maximum rhythm of its weakest member.

A good mountaineering party moving continuously and in combination in the common time of its comfortable maximum rhythm will gain steadily on a less experienced rope, although it may allow itself longer definite intervals of “idling on the great peaks,” and spend even more moments on its difficult passages. The margin in time which it will save will serve, on a well-calculated day, to see the party of sustained pace down to easy going before darkness. The one party will be home to dinner; the other may be still struggling at midnight with the quadrupling of difficulties night brings in its train, or sitting out and relieving its feelings by accusing the former party of ‘racing.’

Gradual beginning, gradual acceleration and uninterrupted moving on a steady top-gear of comfortable pace keep a party fresh, and leave it free to appreciate the beauty of the day or of the climb. Its mind is relieved of care as to a timely return, and it can enjoy a margin of leisure, when it pleases, in pleasant exploration, in essaying experimental routes or in the meditation that mimics slumber.

The real freedom to rest, to idle and to enjoy themselves where and when they will, is only for those who have the measure of their day well in hand, and who know that their collective pace, their maximum rhythm of comfort, before it can rise to a rate of disagreeable effort, has a point or two of pressure still to spare, to recover lost ground or to meet emergency.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Except where it is expressly stated, or is plain from the context, that the word ‘leader’ refers to the ‘first man’ on the rope, it is used of the most experienced mountaineer of a party, the one who exercises the functions of manager in matters of organization or arrangement and of leader or director in the actual business of climbing.

[2] See “Equipment,” pp. 82 and 86.

[3] See “Snow Craft,” p. 332.