Introduction

I’m by no means an expert in anything mountaineering related, but over the years, I’ve been able to pick up a few useful things that make now the difference between a critical situation and just tolerable discomfort.

What I am surely no capable of is teaching stuff properly to others (as opposed to a few subjects in Engineering I can claim with sincerity I am qualified enough). I lack the routine and the in-depth knowledge about too many things at this point in time, to say nothing about having no paper qualifications at all as guide or trainer.

When someone expresses interest and decides to join me for a mountain tour, I assume (or have to assume) that he has experience to some degree.

If it is blatant that he or she does not, however, I will recommend going to safe environments to learn the absolute basics first, dedicated Alpine club trainings, bouldering or climbing gyms for example.

Of course it can sometimes be hard to tell how much experience someone really has when you don’t know him well.

More often than not it’s the case that you can’t be overly picky when choosing partners for a rope team, for example, and a larger experience gap between partners has to be accepted as such.

In order to account for that, easier tours have to be chosen, or a tour has to be quitted at some point when your partner feels not safe anymore. This leads almost certainly to disappointment when the guy was not really honest about his skills neither to you, nor to himself. 

Recently I had such an experience with an utterly inadequate tour partner, and I have to blame myself for being ignorant about the clear indicators that our tour was doomed to failure from the very beginning.

Process versus event

If you are a consumer of self-development and business literature, you will be familiar with the concept of process and event.

In short, it goes like this: people hate the process, but love the events. They usually don’t want to see years let alone decades of training, daily routines, habits and sacrifices (the process), but want to see crushing it in business, sports competitions, or other relevant fields (the event).

Applied to mountaineering it is just seeing speed records, collection of summits, sponsorship deals, yet without having any desire to learn about the process that lay the grounds for it (endless injuries, the third failed attempt to reach one summit, two weeks of stupefying boredom while sitting out bad weather in a tent and so forth).

A while ago I could experience this sort of mentality first hand, not the first, and certainly not the last time. 

The ignorance about the process

I’d met this guy during one of my numerous mountain tours in the Alps a while back. He struck me as enthusiastic and generous individual, in pretty good shape, curious about new experiences, so he conjured up the idea doing a tall mountain and a glacier in the Alps together.

I did not take that proposal too seriously at first since he quite clearly lacked the necessary experience, but he had this infectious enthusiasm about him, so despite better judgement I eventually agreed.

Everyone’s a beginner at one point, and although mountaineering can be a dangerous pastime it isn’t rocket science either, so why not?

In the weeks after we made acquintance, that were the weeks before our scheduled glacier tour, I was setting up a few phone calls where I told him in detail what gear was necessary, what knots he has to familiarize himself with, and a couple of other things.

I emphasized, when we are going to set off as a rope team, we are dependant on each other, and all of these concepts aren’t just nice-to-knows.

I also reminded him I am not an expert myself and he has to acquire additional expertise through other channels as well. My impression of him after these calls was still, he would be able to learn in quick fashion, not everything of course (what would have been delusional to assume), but certainly a good deal of it.

For example, I told him it is mandatory to learn how to put on his crampons (he had no experience with walking on crampons), how to tie knot A and knot B (he never had tied a knot in his life, no kidding), and how to use an ice axe for self-arrest, at least in theory (he never had handled an ice-axe before).

As the days were passing by I wondered about his progress, yet his learning curve seemed a rather odd one, and I should have started questioning whether a joint tour makes sense at all.

Instead of asking me one or two things about the specifics of ropes, for instance, his efforts were by and large posting motivational quotes on social media, forwarding me funny reels (“haha take a look at this stupid mountain guide”) in random intervalls, as well as videos about successful summit attempts of other people. Days at a stretch, I could not reach him at all on his phone for claryfying details.

As we finally managed to meet in one mountain village in late summer, he was as enthusiastic as ever as he showed me his brand new gear, with most of the price tags still attached to it.

An unpleasant situation

You remember my talk about events and process, don’t you? So you can probably point to the paragraphs describing process, and the paragraphs describing events.

Serious doubts on my part surfaced, at last, as we conducted a training session in the less dangerous fringe areas of the glacier one day before our planned summit attempt, a proposal he had happily agreed on. 

The bindings of his crampons were an endless mystery to him. I had to tighten his laces three or four times as we went along with our exercises, and his swearings did nothing to improve the situation. Just imagine a mother tying her kid’s shoelaces before going to school.

Marching on crampons was no less arduous task to him. It looked like a teenage girl who tried to walk on high heels for the first time ever, and he had to support himself with his walking sticks a great deal not to fall over.

Then we tried knots. He apparently did not even watch the two-minutes videos I’d sent him about the essential knots, so there was no point in working through the crevasse rescue techniques.

After a few remarks that he’s getting tired and hungry we stashed our stuff and made our way back to the mountain hut.

Pour conclure

Useless to say we did not do our glacier tour the next day (we did another training session that was largely identical to the previous day, no improvements, no questions), and I’ll spare you any details now because it is starting to get dull and repetitive.

For my part, I was becoming increasingly passive-aggressive the more time I spent with this tour partner, so our paths had to split in an orderly manner.

The fact that this guy had no business being in high altitude mountains, a place with all sorts of objective dangers, was obvious, should have been obvious in the first place.

In hindsight it was pretty much a case of wishful thinking, and the excitement about a great alpine tour until it was right into my face.

Self-evidently reading behaviour of other people is a learning process in its own right, and a field that is anything but easy to master.