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Mountain Literature Classics
A continuing series of short articles on some classics of mountain literature on UKhillwalking.com. What counts as a classic? For me, it's a mountaineering (or hiking) book I could recommend to someone who isn't a mountaineer. Accounts of amazing ascents, autobiographies of outstanding ascensionists – but if the book itself is a bit boring, it doesn't make it into my list.
And so, on 14 July 1865, he sets off on his seventh attempt on the Matterhorn. With just a little more luck, the party would have descended as readily as they'd got up. It's with hindsight that we see the lack of organisation and leadership, the social tensions within the party, as leading to the inevitable accident.
Few have explored the extremes of outdoor life further than Bavarian film-maker Werner Herzog. As Herzog himself has said: "Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life." And he's written up his own long distance walk: Munich to Paris, in winter conditions and unsuitable shoes
'Many cliffs he clambered up in countries strange; wandered far from his friends, as a foreigner he rides.' Sometime in the Dark Ages, the knight Sir Gawain, along with his horse Gringolet, sets out on a serious long-distance hike through Wales and the Peak District. An eight-week journey, from autumn through into early winter, sleeping out in the open in cold iron armour.
The idea of setting out on a very long walk, for the sake of – well, for the sake of whatever it is we go on long distance walks for. It happened here, and it also happened in Japan. In 1689, 113 years before the English Romantics and 6000 miles away, a different poet was setting out on a long walk of his own.
I wandered lonely as a cloud… Except, he didn't. William Wordsworth had his sister Dorothy along with him. And she left her diary on the kitchen table at Dove Cottage for brother William to pick bits out of. For two years, all around the lake and up into the hills, it's the little things that she sees, and records in her diary. The progress of her green peas. Coleridge's tummy upsets. But also, moonlight on Rydal Water. The sound of the cows carried across the lake. The sparkling waterdrops above Greenhead Gill. Plus, of course, those damn daffodils...
The hills have inspired some great writing over the years, but the original might still be among the best. Ronald Turnbull traces the footsteps of a youthful Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a prolific walker, accidental scrambling pioneer and romantic idoliser of the wild and sublime.
The effects of light and shadow upon the vales. The colours in wintertime. The best direction to look at a lake (it's from the foot, except in the case of Loweswater). A wonderful full-page diatribe against the larch tree. Plus something not noticed by any other of Lakeland's ten thousand guidebook writers: the weird beauty of the scattered rocks of the Kirkstone Pass, seen in thick mist on a wet morning in November.
In July of 1814, Mary Godwin, with her boyfriend Percy Bysshe Shelley and her stepsister Claire Claremont, fixed on a plan "eccentric enough, but which, from its romance, was very pleasing to us. We resolved to walk through France." This Romantic Travel was an all-new thing to do. And at the bottom of Mont Blanc, Shelley paused to write a poem.
"To the Lakes? What delight! what felicity! You give me fresh life and vigour. Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains? Oh! what hours of transport we shall spend!" It is a truth universally acknowledged, that no young woman, of eighteen or twenty summers, may attain the rôle of heroine in Miss Austen's novels, without a keen appreciation of country walks.
It may be a stretch to hail Queen Victoria as a feminist icon. But between 1848 and 1861 she summited nine Munros, including the first recorded ascent of Carn a' Chlamain above Glen Tilt. She also pioneered the sport of pony-trekking, with four long expeditions through the glens of the Cairngorms. Her journal has quite a bit to say about the life – and not just aristocratic life – of Victorian Deeside. But most of all, it's a charming and unselfconscious account of some jolly nice days in the hills, a century and a half ago.
For millions of years, there was no such thing as mountain climbing for fun. Just how many other undiscovered sports are there out there, waiting for a little band of eccentrics to one day start doing them – in the same way as the upper-middle class Englishmen wandering into the valleys of Switzerland in the mid nineteenth century, tying themselves onto the local chamois hunters with lengths of hempen rope, and climbing the north ridge of the Rothorn?
For twelve days he walked, musing on wolves and religious history, through a 'tanned and sallow autumn landscape, with black blots of fir-wood and white roads wandering through the hills'. To make things more difficult (every adventurer seeks to make things more difficult) he accompanied himself with a bad-tempered donkey called Modestine.
The reason Muir matters is not much to do with his soppy prose, and hardly at all his Scottishness. It isn't his 1000 mile hike from Wisconsin to Florida in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War, or his invention of an automatic get-out-of-bed machine and an all-wooden, clockwork precursor of the Kindle.
What mattered was one backpacking weekend he took with a mate in the summer of 1903, when he was in his early 70s. The mate in question being President Theodore Roosevelt.
In 1895, Mummery was about 50 years ahead of his time by becoming the first mountaineer to die on an 8000m peak – caught in an avalanche while attempting the Rakhiot Face of Nanga Parbat. Herman Buhl, who made Nanga Parbat's first ascent nearly 60 years later, described Mummery as one of the greatest mountaineers of all time. Mummery's book – plus Mary's contribution – is the defining account of what's called the Silver Age of Alpine Mountaineering.
Six readable novels taking place on mountains: from AEW Mason's Running Waters (1906) by way of Frison-Roche's First on the Rope to One Green Bottle by Elizabeth Coxhead.
A mountain literature classic –with no mountains? But the most adventurous adventure of all time, in terms of discomfort, danger, mental strain and pure squalor, extended over two full years – it has to be the Antarctic expedition of 1914-16 led by Sir Ernest Shackleton. March 2022 saw the first submarine pictures of their ship, 3000m down in the Weddell Sea.
Mountains with a Difference is a roundup of the entire life of this mountain man. His early days in Wales, when he could put his hand on the north face of Glyder Fach knowing that nobody in the whole history of human beings had ever seen or been on this particular bit of rock. The climbing parties at Gorphwysfa (Pen-y-Pass), where he oversaw the first footholds of Siegfried Herford (Central Buttress of Scafell) and Mallory (Everest summit, maybe). But beyond all that, there's the difference in Mountains with a Difference. That difference being, only having one leg.
At the very moment when members of the Young Communist League were trespassing on the grouse moors of Kinder Scout, the grouse-shooters themselves – or their irresponsible sons and brothers – were trespassing on the ancient buildings of Cambridge. "Crossing the corner of the Hall by a convenient sloping parapet we get our first glimpses of the impressive summits of the Great Court range..."
Some climbing books grant you insights into geography, or topology, or human psychology. Some climbing books simply scare you to death. Just now and then, there's one that conveys the sheer fun of it all.
The Ideal of mountaineering is a classic Alpine ridge, at grade AD or AD+, with hardly any fixed rope or other extraneous ironmongery; a climb reached from a mountain hut that still looks like a hut rather than a strangely displaced hotel; starting off with a candle lantern, across a glacier that's basically still there; all overlooked by the cynical eye of the Choucas, the Alpine chough.
Laurie Lee walks out for three months across Spain southwards to the sea. By the end of the first one the blisters have hardened up and he can walk without pain. He faces an attack by wolves, heatstroke, bedbugs the size of beetles, two mountain ranges and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He busks in the streets, in cafés, and once in a brothel. "Holy Mother of God, give the young man a little drink. If he lives, and still wishes to go to Valladolid, we will take him in the car."
The biography of J Menlove Edwards, pioneer rockclimber in Snowdonia, the man who climbed 'Spiral Stairs' and wanted to hame it 'Sodom'. But it wasn't just his climbs that were extreme. What makes this book, and Menlove's own writings, so intriguing is Menlove himself. Loose, slippery, unreliable, vegetative and difficult is the description applied to his signature climbs on the Devil's Kitchen, and Menlove himself was much the same. Apart from not having the Snowdon lily growing out of him.
The long, lonely and hugely uncomfortable journeys through the Karakoram and Patagonia: they were what life was for. The time he took a complete beginner, Bill Tilman, up the third ascent of Mount Kenya by an unexplored and difficult new route. Such sports as dead goat polo and hunting gazelles with eagles, played out north of the Karakoram. Exploring the glaciers of the same range using camels. Plus, of course, the finding of the yeti footprints around the back of Everest.
Patrick Leigh Fermor walks out for thirteen months across Europe eastwards to Constantinople, on a budget of £1 a day. "A new life! Freedom! Something to write about!" And write he does, weaving words into townscapes, and skyscapes, and whole kingdoms of dream: three volumes, by the time he's arrived at the edge of Asia. The book, like the walk, is somewhat sesquipedelian, involves a certain amount of noctambulism, and does feature quite a few words like 'sesquipedelian' and 'noctambulism' in it.
Climbing is a useless activity. Except that, every ten years or so, it throws out an utterly charming account of itself, written by someone nobody's ever heard of.
'Always a Little Further' covers some easy climbs on the Cobbler, Window Buttress (Diff) in the Cuillin, a truly nasty winter day in the Upper Couloir of Stob Ghabhar (Grade 2), a walk across Rannoch Moor, hitchhiking to Ben Nevis in a lorryload of dead sheep, and a bivvybag trip through the Lairig Ghru. Along the way it documents that interesting period when the posh sport of mountaineering was being taken over by the working classes of Glasgow.
Two Italians break out of prisoner-of-war camp in 1943 to climb Mount Kenya with improvised crampons and no map. Review published during the Coronavirus lockdown April 2020.
Before the war, Bill Murray was at the cutting edge (yeah, the step-cutting edge) of Scottish winter climbing. The boldness of his routes in Glen Coe puts them almost on the level of the Eiger's North Face: technically they were more demanding than the top Alpine climbs. But among the most compelling chapters of his classic tomes Mountaineering in Scotland and the follow-up, Undiscovered Scotland, are a summer double crossing of Rannoch Moor. A winter traverse of Liathach, in foul weather, but in today's terms a Winter Grade III. A January night camp on the Aonach Eagach.
If you want to know what it's actually like to bivvy on a ledge high on the Walker Spur, in the 1940s, with a storm coming in – and if you want to go far beyond that, and be carried away by the power of words and share the intoxicated joy of that man on that ledge with the snow down the back of his neck – well, the man is Gaston. And his book is called 'Étoiles et Tempêtes'.
For five months she never slept in a bed, but out in the open with an ex-army gas cape as a bivvy bag. She lived on £1 a day, by informal guiding, casual farm work or posing as an artist's model. She seems to have enjoyed more love affairs than hot baths... In terms of adventure and Bohemian, bivvybag lifestyle, in terms of total devotion to the mountains, she makes even the likes of Joe Brown and Don Whillans seem – well – just a little bit too tame.
Tarns, the 'eyes of the mountain', lend themselves to this kind of treatment. Nobody arrives at a tarn, has a quick piss and hurries on towards the next one. Nobody feels they've 'done' Stickle Tarn or Goats Water and never go there ever again. Tarns invite you to stop and – in a very literal way – reflect.
An Amazon reviewer sums up their journey: "A generally wretched and pointless trek through a remote mountainous region of central Asia characterised largely by unattractive impassable terrain, surly miserable locals (including their porters), inadequate and generally revolting food and inevitably lots of diarrhoea." Except, of course, it isn't pointless at all. They're going there to climb up a hill.
After the Walker Spur and the Eiger: "Now that we had climbed the highest and hardest faces in the Alps we had nothing left to hope for." The Alps, basically, were all used up... Luckily, there's the Himalayas, and all the unclimbed 8000m peaks.
Himalayan 8000m peaks are a bit like bad video games. Plodding uphill, in a snowstorm, not really knowing where you are; and then pouf! You're dead. What is it about this one that has sold 11 million copies, making it the Number One mountaineering book of all time? Well, it was the first 8000m one to get done, and in lightweight style without bottled oxygen. It does include one of the longest and nastiest mountain rescues ever. But what makes the difference could be being written, in French, by French people familiar with the works of Mallarmé.
One of the less exciting books I know is the official account of the 1953 Everest expedition. Everything went according to plan; the weather was favourable; they got to the top. But for a more insightful, as well as more entertaining, story of it all, Wilfrid Noyce, a minor poet and top climber, writes a lot better than the official account by Sir John Hunt.
Patey was known among climbers for his sardonic wit, and his ribald and often obscene drinking songs. 'One Man's Mountains' was compiled after his death, and it's a mess, put together from the Scottish Mountaineering Club Journal and the more printable of the songs. You won't find here any sensitive analysis of the mental health issues aroused or assuaged by climbing up hills. For that you have to come forward to the present day – or, or course, back to Wordsworth. Patey offers vigorous description, of men (no women in this book) as much as of mountains, informed by a lively awareness of one thing. Climbing up icefields and rocks is a completely ridiculous thing to do.
Climbing is a practical artform in its own right, occupying the space between dance and sculpture, with an approach to literature in the unwinding of a rock route through the complication of a crag. The best expression of it is not through words, dance, poetry or painting, but in the climbing itself.So Native Stones, like David Craig's attempts to climb Kipling Groove, was always going to be a failure.
But better to fail on Kipling Groove than not to have tried it at all.
To cross Afghanistan, alone, on a bicycle, in the 1960s – this does take a special sort of woman. Devla Murphy has her own attitude to risks and dangers. "In general the possibility of physical danger does not frighten me" – she only gets scared when the dangers actually happen. And happen they do...
The 'Silver Age' of Himalayan mountaineering starts on 2 May 1964, with the knocking off of Shishapangma, the last of the 8000-ers. The most dedicated climbers then turn to smaller teams, lightweight and often alpine-style, on difficult routes in the greater ranges. One of its defining stories is the ascent of Changabang by Pete Boardman and Joe Tasker in the autumn of 1976.
Among mountaineering books, there are some that are fun – but only a select handful that are actually funny. Strange, in a way, given a sport that, with its tenuous pleasures, its all too obvious discomforts, and its utterly gruesome style sense, so readily lends itself to being laughed at. Long may the Doctor's tricouni-nails continue to tramp across the hills of Scotland.
Back in 1980, an 'inspirational' walking book had phrases like "viewpoint beyond compare" and "whence the walk along the ridge", and was written by an elderly but vigorous bloke in breeches and a beard. It had stunning black-and-grey photos, printed on the glossy pages only, and rendered at 120 half-tone dots to the inch. In the hillwritings of 1980, 'The Big Walks' landed as sudden and astonishing as an eagle.
The Biography of Mo Antoine, the member of the Joe Brown group you maybe haven't heard of. And the Rat? The rat is that other climber inside you, the one that thinks you're spectacularly adventurous and skilful. "When they come close to each other, that's smashing, that is." And so it's necessary, from time to time, to feed the Rat with suitably serious and exciting climbs.
Well, it is if you're Mo Anthoine.
It was J Dow, Munroist number 5, who first pointed out that all four of the so-called 'compleaters' previous to himself had availed themselves of beards, and that these were perhaps to be counted as improper aids. (Or else if it wasn't J Dow it was somebody else.) Hence the subtitle of Muriel Gray's book, she having been up most of the Scottish 3000ers with no more assistance than a smear of lipstick and a splodge-of-vomit fleece designed as ideal camouflage for when passed out on the pavement on a Glasgow Friday night.
The word 'tragedy' is applied unthinkingly to anybody who dies. And 'travel writing' is someone who got a freebie to Cancun in exchange for 2000 words in an in-flight magazine. But travel writing is also Bruce Chatwin. And tragedy is also King Lear and Othello. Alison Hargreaves is, or comes close to, tragedy in that full Shakespearean sense: a tale of pity and horror, a noble soul brought low by circumstances, but also by her own flaws. [thumbnail photo: Steve Aisthorpe
The three books – set around the disastrous Everest season of 1996 – are best read as a single three-volume Trilogy. The three narrators (Jon Krakauer, Anatoli Boukreev and Beck Weathers, the latter two aided by ghostwriters) illuminate and contradict one another. As in a Shakespeare play, subplots and main plots twine together like the strands of an old-style climbing rope. The three together make a detailed exploration, not just of that often-described mountain, but of the rationale and morality of paid-for adventure.
I was complaining to my friend David about this book. It's an account of a long-distance walk – a walk that the author didn't even complete. It's written in a discursive, lightweight style. It's the sort of thing I write myself. But, somehow, it's made the leap out of 'outdoor writing' across to the category 'best-seller'.
"Ah, but – " says David. "The thing is, Ronald. Bill Bryson is a lot funnier than you are."
Aron Ralston, alone in a slot canyon in a really remote part of the Utah backcountry, clambers down a jammed boulder. It rolls over and traps his right hand. He breaks his own armbones and cuts himself free with a blunt multitool. How did he find it in himself to do that? How much did it hurt? Would I be able to do the same? If you're going to find self-knowledge the hard way, it doesn't come much harder than Utah's canyonlands
Plus '127 Hours' film version by Danny Boyle
A man walking down the Pennine Way, from Kirk Yetholm to Edale, mostly on his own but sometimes with some other people. In early summer, the reasonably dry early summer of 2010. The difference is: he's doing it without any money at all, relying on the kindness of strangers to put a few bob in an old sock. And the other difference is, being our future Poet Laureate.
Alex Honnold's free solo ascent in 2017 of Freerider (5.13a) on El Capitan is the one that stands out as the iconic, paradigm-shifting 1000m high step-change in the meaning of mountaineering. If 'Free Solo', 90 mins, 2018, the Oscar winning documentary by directors and cameras Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin can be considered as a Literary Classic, then 'Free Solo' is a classic. And if it can't – too bad, because Free Solo's a classic anyway.
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