Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
This insight offers an explanation for Alex's premonitions at base camp, not least
because Novalis also said, 'a character is a completely fashioned will.'
Free will. Character. Fate. We all knew the dangers. With every expedition, the
odds increase that something will happen. We all knew that. The evidence was
there. The characteristics we shared were the will to continue and trust in our own
good luck. Each year, the periods between expeditions were punctuated by funer-
als and the huge piss-ups for lost friends. At one wake, a well-known but very
drunk young British climber went around telling everyone that it was good for him
because since x had died, he moved up in the pecking order. Can such inane, brutal
and disrespectful behaviour ever be forgiven? Perhaps it can, because behind it
was a sort of self-realised fear.
Voytek Kurtyka has said many times that those who truly follow the path of the
mountains should have no desire to explain the activity in quantifiable results. If
we were really in the quantifying game, the lists of failures and deaths would be
the only meaningful ones.
Luck in mountaineering, as in war, is a major factor. For success on the most dif-
ficult routes on the highest mountains, the first quality required is blindness to the
importance of individual luck. Gaston Rébuffat once warned climbers, 'remember,
the mountain does not know that you are an expert.' The mind needs to trick itself
into knowing that the mountain will fall to the expert.
The complex set of circumstances that can create or take away luck means that
luck cannot be defined. It is made up of both natural and human factors - the un-
certainties of weather, the exact moment a serac topples, the accuracy of human
observation, the reaction of mind and body at altitude on a particular day, the
right piton and the right plan, the single stone set on its fatal journey by a ripple of
melted snow.
Most climbers begin their interest in climbing by reading a good adventure story.
The first climbing book can shape the reader's view of what climbing is all about. If
that first book is
The Ascent of Everest
(published in America under the title
The
Conquest of Everest
), then climbing may seem a matter of teamwork and national
pride overcoming adversity. If the first book is
Into Thin Air
, then one might ques-
tion the risks involved and the nature of bravery and sacrifice without realising
this topic has very little to do with climbing. If it is
The Springs of Adventure
then
the imagination might be fired by a desire for engagement of all the senses with all
that is complex and unpredictable in nature. And if that first book is the parody
The Ascent of Rum Doodle
, then climbing becomes a metaphor for most pursuits
in life. Climbers tend to read books about their passion not so much to seek an an-
