The Call of the Climb

November 27, 2024  |  The Wall Street Journal

Modern mountaineering is a quest for niche glory. The Earth’s highest peaks have been climbed and reclimbed so many times now that elite alpinists must distinguish themselves with obscure prizes: ascend faster, or by a harder route, in winter or without ropes; summit every peak above a certain height, on every continent, or with a parachute or skis for a photo-op descent, ready to post online. The romance of exploration has given way to a crass sprint for records that feel manufactured rather than unequivocal. Climb, snap, repeat—sponsors want fresh superlatives, and few are left.

There was a time when merely glimpsing an unreachable mountain was enough to fill voyagers with awe. A party of Italians on a long march in 1909 came within view of K2, the world’s second-highest peak, and were thunderstruck by its enormity. “For a whole hour we stood absorbed,” Filippo De Filippi later wrote. “We gazed, we minutely inspected, we examined with our glasses the incredible rock wall.” Soon clouds moved in, “the veil of whitish vapor heaving, stretching and expanding and melting together, until even the last spectral image disappeared.” It would be almost 50 years before the imposing summit would be touched.

Daniel Light’s The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Dawn of Mountaineering returns readers to an era when alpine progress was measured in steps closer to the sun rather than seconds on the stopwatch or likes on social media. Mr. Light, an amateur climber making his authorial debut, chronicles an overlooked period from the late-19th through the early-20th centuries. The so-called golden age of mountaineering in the 1850s and ’60s had ended with successful climbs of the major European peaks, including Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn. The first ascents of the Himalayan giants—Everest, K2 and Annapurna—were still many decades away, but were beginning to beckon ambitious climbers. Most of the expeditions that Mr. Light chronicles ended in failure. The book concludes with George Mallory’s death on Everest in 1924.

Mountaineering came to terms with itself at the turn of the 20th century. Mr. Light recounts numerous debates between scientists and athletes, in settings such as Britain’s Alpine Club, over mountain climbing’s purpose. “I hold that the climber who turns his steps towards distant lands, still little visited and difficult of access, and offering a field for geographical discovery, should also give his attention to the advancement of scientific knowledge,” wrote Maurice de Déhy in the Alpine Journal in 1880. Déhy’s view was shared, for instance, by the government-run Survey of India, which had long employed climbers to map the far reaches of the subcontinent. Meanwhile, William Woodman Graham, after nearly reaching the 24,015-foot summit of Kabru, in the Himalayas, told a shocked audience at the Royal Geographical Society in 1884 that he climbed for “sport and adventures” rather than knowledge; he described the fine challenge of an ascent and the rarefied mountain air. Mr. Light calls Graham “an outrider for the future.”

Mountain air was a confounding problem. Science did not yet grasp the effect of reduced oxygen on the body, and conditions like high-altitude cerebral edema were years from being medically understood. Anecdotal evidence abounded. “Mountain sickness,” as the condition was then known, disabled some climbers more than others, at differing elevations. Those who climbed both the Alps and the Himalayas, for instance, couldn’t figure out why the impact was worse in the latter ranges.

Climbers at the dawn of the 20th century looked altogether different than they do today. Instead of wearing colorful synthetic fibers and carrying ultralight gear, they hiked in tweeds and lugged heavy steel. Greasing their legs in marmot fat to protect against the cold, they hauled firewood, even when there was too little oxygen at altitude to maintain a blaze. Oscar Eckenstein, a practical-minded climber, made leaps in the development of mountain hardware in the 1890s when he forged shorter, lighter ice axes and replaced hobnailed boots with crampons. In the tradition of the gentleman adventurer, Aleister Crowley insisted in 1902 on bringing several large vellum-bound volumes of poetry up the slopes of K2. “I would rather bear physical starvation,” he said, “than intellectual starvation.”

Not all climbers, of course, were gentlemen. Women made major contributions to alpinism then as they do today. Mr. Light profiles Fanny Bullock Workman, an American heiress and writer who broke altitude records for climbers of any gender during trips to the Himalayas in the early 20th century. She did so partly by force of personality and partly by athletic rigor, outclimbing her husband and his guides. Yet Mr. Light refuses to give Workman a pass on her racist attitudes toward Asian porters and servants. Such views were common at the time and their legacy continues to haunt the sport.

Although mountaineering has evolved, Mr. Light deftly spotlights several of its enduring touchstones. Climbers have long bickered with one another over their achievements and what constitutes honorable conduct in extremis. A public exchange of vitriolic letters after a failed attempt on the 28,169-foot Kangchenjunga in 1905 foreshadows the Everest disaster in 1996, after which survivors gave clashing accounts of each others’ deeds and motives. The White Ladder also shows how the “siege” tactics of the 19th century—trains of supplies, multiple camps, dozens of porters—have aged poorly compared to the present preference for fast-and-light summit attempts by a few quick climbers during good weather.

In an era characterized by commercial imperatives and a shrinking frontier, alpinism no longer seems to know where it is going. Perhaps the sport can begin to see the future by understanding where it has been. The White Ladder—a thoughtful, nuanced, engaging history—is an excellent place to start.