Gravity Lessons

Climbers’ ancient, rarified connection to the planet

Visiting the wilderness for recreation is a relatively new development — till recent history, wilderness represented food, resources, and territory, not leisure. The impenetrable, uninhabitable high peaks, with their thunderstorms, blizzards, avalanches, and rockfall, have always imposed limits on life and put fear (awe) in our bellies. This fear is the first step toward spirituality: mountains became home to the gods, the divine and the unanswerable.

As Homo sapiens began to walk and float the globe, we almost universally enshrined the mountains. Early man would scale the precipices to receive “messages” from above, a common theme in the world’s mythologies. Some 14,000 years ago, the aborigine of Australia revered Uluru (Ayers Rock) as a place of prime birth. It was on Mount Sinai that Abraham, after an arduous climb, received the Ten Commandments. For the Hindu, Lord Shiva, the great creator and destroyer, lived on the summit of Shivling for an epoch. The Himalayas’ Mount Kailas is at the headwaters of the Indus, Ganges, and Bramaputra, three rivers key to the Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic faiths; no other mountain inspires the degree of faith that this humble peak does. Chomolungma (Everest) is for the Tibetan Buddhists the “Mother Goddess of the Earth.” The local inhabitants realized its significance long before the Indian Trigometric Survey — the great English 19th-century mapping project — identified it as our planet’s apex.

“Long before man conquered mountains, mountains conquered man.” —Daniel J. Boorstin, The Discoverers, 1983

In the 20th century, we began exploring the extreme altitudes and latitudes for the sake of science and nationalism — or perhaps more succinctly, as George Mallory said re. Everest, “Because it is there.” The North Pole in 1909 was the first of the journeys to the truly inhospitable. The South Pole in 1911, by the Norwegians under the precise leadership of Roald Amundson, solidified the quest for intrinsically rewarding goals. Forty-two years later, a well-organized English expedition successfully laid siege to Mount Everest like the Lilliputians tying down the Goliath. By walking on the roof of the planet with bottled oxygen, we’d set the stage for the 1969 “first ascent” of the moon.

Thus today when we climb, we’re tapping into a centuries-old heritage — this knowledge grounds us. It’s humbling to toil away at a mountain, get beaten down by wind, and crushed by falling rock and snow. In this humility, this unique connection to the planet, we’ve found a message about how delicate our world truly is. If we don’t respect the medium, it can kill.

Today we visit the mountains to relax — to find peace and wisdom. As we stare down a looming world population of seven billion, we face enormous challenges. How do we do more with less? Can we share the resources? Just as too many pilgrims can desecrate a holy site, too many climbers can destroy the very places we hold special. It’s not easy finding the balance between existence and sustainability. The following three “Gravity Lessons” — be it Sonnie Trotter giving the cliff its rightful strength (p.44), Verm reflecting on how boulderers need to limit impact (p.45), or Steve House playing the 8,000-meter game with a penknife instead of a bazooka (p.47) — show that we can rise to the occasion, much like the early 20th-century wilderness philosopher John Muir.