Mountaineering

• 1. Introduction

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  Mountaineering begins with a body in ice. The remains of a man known as Otzi, who lived in the 4th millennium BC, were found preserved in a glacier in the Otztal Alps. He predates the sport by thousands of years, yet his presence in those high places tells us something essential: humans have always been drawn upward, into the cold and the risk and the thin air.

  For most of recorded history, climbing a mountain meant something practical or sacred. It was a military operation, a religious rite, a survey mission. The idea that someone might scale a summit purely for the pleasure of it would have seemed eccentric, even incomprehensible, to most ancient societies. Yet that impulse existed too, quietly, before it had a name.

  What we now call mountaineering has no single rulebook, no governing body with real authority over who may climb and how. It is a collection of techniques, philosophies, and hard-won traditions that evolved over centuries. It carries the marks of the Enlightenment, the British Empire, the Space Race-era drive to reach summits no human had touched, and a quieter, more personal hunger for transcendence that has drawn people to high places since before history was written down.

• 2. The First Climbers

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  Antoine de Ville, a French military officer and lord of Domjulien and Beaupre, used ropes, ladders, and iron hooks to reach the summit of Mont Aiguille in 1492. The peak stands at 2,085 metres. Because the ascent was the first climb of genuine technical difficulty to be officially verified, it is widely recognised as the birth of mountaineering as a distinct activity.

  Before that moment, the record is scattered and uncertain. The poet Petrarch described his ascent of Mount Ventoux, at 1,912 metres, on the 26th of April 1336, claiming he was inspired by Philip V of Macedon's climb of Mount Haemo. In the Andes, in the late 1400s and early 1500s, the Incas and their subjects climbed peaks of extraordinary height. The highest they are known with certainty to have reached was 6,739 metres, at the summit of Volcan Llullaillaco.

  The Swiss physician Conrad Gessner, working in the mid-16th century, is credited as the first person to hike and climb purely for pleasure. He was a botanist and naturalist, and the mountains gave him both specimens and joy. His example was unusual for his time, a preview of a sensibility that would not become widespread for another two centuries.

• 3. The Golden Age

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  In 1757, Swiss scientist Horace-Benedict de Saussure made his first unsuccessful attempt on Mont Blanc. He then offered a financial reward to anyone who could climb it. The prize was claimed in 1786 by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard, and their ascent became a symbolic starting gun for the sport.

  By the early 19th century, the alpine peaks fell one after another. The Grossglockner was reached in 1800, the Ortler in 1804, the Jungfrau in 1811, the Finsteraarhorn in 1812, and the Breithorn in 1813. In 1808, Marie Paradis became the first woman to summit Mont Blanc; Henriette d'Angeville followed in 1838.

  The English mountaineer Sir Alfred Wills ascended the Wetterhorn in 1854, making the sport fashionable in Britain and inaugurating what became known as the Golden Age of Alpinism. Three years later, the first mountaineering club, the Alpine Club, was founded in 1857. John Ball, its first president, is considered the discoverer of the Dolomites, which drew climbers including Paul Grohmann and Angelo Dibona for decades.

  The Golden Age closed with a catastrophe. Edward Whymper, an English illustrator, led the first party to the summit of the Matterhorn in 1865. Four of his companions fell to their deaths on the descent. The disaster sparked public debate about the nature and morality of the sport, yet by that point mountaineering had already acquired professional guides, codified techniques, and a body of equipment that would define it for generations.

• 4. Beyond the Alps

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  British mountaineers arrived in Norway in the 19th century and found new terrain in Jotunheimen. William Cecil Slingsby was among the early pioneers there, and his book Norway, the Northern Playground helped introduce Norwegian peaks to the international climbing community. A younger generation of Norwegian climbers, including George Paus, Eilert Sundt, and Kristian Tandberg, later founded Norsk Tindeklub, which became the third oldest mountaineering association in the world.

  Edward Whymper, whose name was already attached to the Matterhorn tragedy, returned to exploration in 1879-1880 when he climbed Chimborazo at 20,549 feet and surveyed the mountains of Ecuador. In 1897, the Duke of the Abruzzi and his party summited Mount Saint Elias, at 18,008 feet, on the Alaska-Yukon border.

  Africa came later. Ludwig Purtscheller, an Austrian mountaineer, and Hans Meyer, a German geologist, climbed Mount Kilimanjaro in 1889. Halford Mackinder reached Mount Kenya a decade later, in 1899. Each of these ascents carried the marks of their era: scientific ambition, colonial reach, and the particular energy of a sport that was, for the first time, looking beyond its European cradle.

• 5. The Himalayas

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  Sir William Martin Conway explored the Karakoram Himalayas in 1892, reaching a peak of 23,000 feet. Three years later, Albert F. Mummery died attempting Nanga Parbat. These two events set the pattern for Himalayan mountaineering: ambition, scale, and death.

  Fanny Bullock Workman, one of the first professional female mountaineers, made multiple ascents in the Himalayas in 1899, 1903, 1906, and 1908, including one of the Nun Kun peaks at 23,300 feet. The English mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein and the English occultist Aleister Crowley led the first attempt on K2 in 1902, reaching 22,000 feet before weather and other difficulties forced them back. Eckenstein was also an equipment innovator: he developed shorter ice axes suitable for single-handed use and designed the modern crampon. In 1905, Crowley led an expedition to Kangchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, which later commentators described as misguided and lamentable due to his failings as a leader.

  Annapurna fell first among the eight-thousanders, climbed in 1950 by Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal on the French expedition. Everest followed. A 1922 British attempt reached 8,320 metres before an avalanche killed seven porters and ended the push. The 1924 expedition set another altitude record but George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared on the final attempt. The summit was reached on the 29th of May 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, approaching from the south side in Nepal.

  Months later, Hermann Buhl made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat at 8,125 metres, completing the final 1,300 metres alone, self-medicating with pervitin, a stimulant based on methamphetamine that had been used by soldiers in World War II, as well as the vasodilator padutin and a tea brewed from coca leaves. K2, the second-highest peak at 8,611 metres, was first climbed in 1954 by Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni. Shishapangma at 8,013 metres, the lowest of all 8,000-metre peaks, was the final eight-thousander to be climbed, falling in 1964.

  Reinhold Messner, from the Dolomites in Italy, became the first person to climb all fourteen eight-thousanders, completing the list by 1986. He had already distinguished himself in 1978 when he and Peter Habeler became the first people to summit Everest without supplemental oxygen.

• 6. Risk, Body, and Mind

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  From 1947 to 2018, in the United States, 2,799 people were reported involved in mountaineering accidents, and 43 percent of those accidents resulted in death. Climbers themselves, the data shows, are responsible for nearly all of them.

  Altitude is one of the central threats. Above 7,000 metres, most mountaineers begin using bottled oxygen. The motto at high elevation is "climb high, sleep low": ascend to acclimatise, then descend to rest. Without acclimatisation, altitude sickness can progress to high-altitude cerebral edema or high-altitude pulmonary edema, both of which can be fatal within 24 hours. In the Andes, the chewing of coca leaves has traditionally been used to ease altitude sickness symptoms.

  Research in psychology has found that elite mountaineers and base jumpers score highly on traits associated with self-transcendence, including a sense of purpose, empathy, and the capacity to feel part of something larger than oneself. These findings come from work by Monisterio and Cloninger. Climbers describe their time in the mountains in terms of flow states, emotional release, and spiritual growth.

  Marc-Andre Leclerc, known for his minimalist and solitary style, described free solo climbing as meditative and spoke of a sense of harmony with the mountains. Alex Honnold, whose ropeless ascent of El Capitan brought him wide attention, has been framed by researcher Stephanie Denning as practicing a form of mindfulness that challenges conventional understandings of fear and focus. These are not marginal views within the climbing community. They are, for many practitioners, the point.

• 7. Two Philosophies

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  Expedition style, the original approach to high-altitude climbing, treats the mountain as a logistical problem. Teams carry massive amounts of equipment and provisions up and down the mountain in repeated hauls, establishing multiple camps and fixing rope lines between them. The method is still standard in ranges such as the Alaska Range and the Himalayas, where distances from civilisation and extreme elevation make any lighter approach genuinely dangerous.

  Alpine style inverts that logic. Its mantra is "light and fast." Climbers carry their own supplies, climb the route once without backtracking, and accept a narrower margin for error in exchange for speed. This style has become the most common form of mountaineering today. It suits medium-sized ranges near civilisation, such as the Alps or the Rocky Mountains, though alpine-style ascents have also been completed on peaks above 5,000 metres.

  The tradeoffs are real in both directions. Expedition style offers more time for acclimatisation and a higher margin for waiting out storms, but it exposes climbers to objective hazards such as avalanches and rockfall for longer periods, and it requires greater capital and time. Alpine style reduces that exposure window but leaves almost no buffer against deteriorating health at altitude or being trapped by a sudden storm. The choice between them is not merely tactical; it reflects a philosophy about what climbing is for and what relationship the climber wants with the mountain. Cecilia Llusco Alana, a member of the Bolivian cholita climbers, is among those who have brought new perspectives to that question, having moved from working as a porter or guide to climbing peaks in her own right.