No-one reads the old classics of mountaineering any more. Now we have slick movies and Youtube videos, but these more visual stories from a world tamed by the increasing spread of human influence are no real match for the stories of pure struggle, some success, much failure and tragedy that accounts like Heinrich Harrier's The White Spider, or Lionel Terray's Conquistadors of the Useless recounted.
As a youth, I borrowed every book on adventure exploration and mountaineering I could get from my public library in suburban Sydney. I read David Roberts' The Mountain Of My Fear, Eric Shipton's Six Mountain Travel Books, all the books the library had about Douglas Mawson and Ernest Shackleton, and somewhere along the way I became obsessed with the idea of finding myself through explorations in the natural world.
Forty years later, while the body is decidedly less able, the mind is still so very willing and I continue to find most of my meaning in life from pursuing outdoor skill sports that require complete immersion in the natural world. Every social media poseur now has multiple media accounts where they claim an undying devotion to outdoor adventure yet in real life, appear paralytically afraid of insects or snakes, surely the most innocuous of the "tribulations" one faces when adventuring in the outdoors.
Talking about some of my (mis)adventures in the mountains recently with my relatives, I recounted a couple of those epics: one of which involved a stuck knee near 3000 metres (ASL) on Bugaboo Spire necessitating a professional helicopter rescue, and the other a long (as in multiple days) ski out from the middle of the Purcell Mountain Range after losing our entire food cache in a semi-frozen alpine lake.
My relatives wanted to know why we were not carrying communication devices - SPOTs, satellite phones, or PLB's. Apart from the fact that none of those things existed at the time, I doubt we would have carried them anyway. There is an ethic to exploring in wild places that is not understood by those who rarely if ever venture far from the groomed ski trail, hiking track, or sheltered coast-line. We explore to experience consequences, real consequences from real decisions and real actions, many of which are, by dint of human frailty, mistaken, and the consequences unfortunate at best, dangerous at other times are ours to confront, to win or lose, but to at least engage on equal ground.
"Ego," my relatives exclaimed when I tried to explain this. "No," I repeated "ethics." "Ego," they cried even more loudly, as I tried to explain the arcane and obscure rules that have spurned literally decades of discussion among climbers, but still motivate our behavior even as the ethics themselves change and flux as society shifts. Ethics are as tough for climbers to explain to non-climbers as kissing the ring of an old celibate man is to an atheist. These are two solitudes that will never meet.
I know ego in the mountains. Once, with a group of female friends, I very nearly led us all to either death or disability on an avalanche slope in very poor conditions. I thought I was good enough to manage the slope. I wasn't; no-one really is. But, I also know ethics. The rules that govern our conduct. I endeavour not to lie, to cheat, to steal, not just in my everyday life, but in my adventure life. I will not claim as an ascent a route I cheated on, I will not pretend I am the old female version of the young Marc Twight, nor will I emboss upon my achievements or claim to be an adventurer when the furthest I have gone off the beaten trail is a step to the side to piss in the woods.
As more and more of us pile into the modern world and as the connections between individuals become ever more attenuated by social media and the inevitable social comparison that our connected lives spawn, I wonder if we have lost our ethics as we struggle to be seen, to have our minor successes seen as major accomplishments, to achieve the acclaim to which we have come to believe we are all entitled in our world of special unicorns. Do we even have ethics any more?
I cannot explain the concept of ethics any more clearly than George Mallory in his book Climbing Everest:
People ask me, "What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?" and my answer must at once be, "it is of no use. There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron... If you cannot understand that there is something in man which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life itself upward and forever upward, then you won't see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life. We do not live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to be able to live. That is what life means and what life is for.
We won't all climb Mount Everest - nor should we, the mountain is over-run by bumblies already - but we can all go out into the wild, to find our own Everests which we should rise to meet with courage, conviction and ethics.
End note: If you want to listen to a very irreverant climbing podcast where ethics are discussed, go here.
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