In 1907 Tom Longstaff reached the first known summit of a peak over 7,000 metres, Trisul in the Himalayas. What did he think of the sine qua non for a mountain climber? The answer may surprise you.
Longstaff believed that “the most important quality of a mountaineer” was “knowing when to turn back,” according to Dan Light, who documents the rise of mountaineering in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in a new book: The White Ladder: Triumph and Tragedy at the Beginning of Mountain Climbing.
It wasn’t just about returning, Light says, it was about “returning at the right time, even though what you’ve dreamed of all your life was just within reach.” Light marvels at “what Longstaff has achieved and how he has gone about it. He had real adventures.”
That included Trisul, which is Sanskrit for “trident,” a weapon wielded by Shiva in Hinduism. Longstaff is quoted in the book describing the wind “that rattles the icicles on our beards and moustaches” and recalling “the whole steep slope of the western Himalayas, so vast that I expected to see the earth turning before my eyes” .
“I was happy to see Longstaff succeed,” Light said. “It’s something he’s been trying to do for so long.” The author calls this “basically the crux of the pre-Everest era.”
The book is a chronicle of dramatic climbs around the world – especially in the Himalayas, but also in the Alps and Latin America. Accounts of each climb evoke the rugged terrain, colorful characters, terrifying obstacles and sometimes deadly outcomes.
“There’s an element of roulette to it,” says Light. “You see that people with experienced backgrounds, the most skilled mountain climbers you can find, have no idea how altitude affects them individually.” Consider Edward FitzGerald’s attack on Aconcagua, the highest mountain in Americain the 1890s: ‘He was so into it in terms of determination, but he couldn’t do it [do it] physically. The last 150 to 300 meters it was just a wall there.’
As mountain climbers battled for the world altitude record, their collective understanding of the technology required to reach the summit grew.
“To give myself some parameters, I started focusing on mountain climbers who were at least trying to set new altitude records,” says Light. “I set out to find as many expeditions as I could, prior to the Everest expeditions of the 1920s – anyone who intentionally or accidentally set or attempted to set an altitude record.”
The book ends with George Mallory’s fateful quest to the top of Mount Everest; on his third and final attempt, in 1924, he and fellow climber Andrew Irvine disappeared.
“Others have done a much better job than I would even imagine,” Light says of capturing Mallory on Everest. “Into the Silence by Wade Davis had a huge influence on me, a real source of inspiration.”
Light is a climber himself, although he is more likely to explore the mountains of Scotland with his brother than trek the Himalayas. He went to the Asian area late in the book process, which gave him a chance to see if it matched his descriptions in the book. Mission accomplished.
He laments the current queues on Everest, while similar rewarding climbing opportunities nearby are not frequented by tourists. Although he enjoys meeting like-minded people during a climb, he also enjoys the solitude inherent in mountain climbing, apart from the people below. Earlier in his life, the then-tech entrepreneur made a different kind of disconnect from the internet: goodbye social media, goodbye smartphone. He started taking a book with him everywhere he went, along with a journal to write in – which subconsciously sparked the idea of writing a book himself.
To research the book, Light visited the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club and gained access to first-hand accounts that proved valuable. It helped that many of the main characters had written their own vivid chronicles of their climbs.
Among them were Aleister Crowley, who rose to fame as a mountain climber before later gaining fame as an occultist; and Crowley’s mentor Oscar Eckenstein – whose German Jewish socialist father had fled the revolutions of 1848 for England. Fanny Bullock Workman of Massachusetts, together with her husband, William Hunter Workman, set altitude records for women on climbs.
“Crowley was a despicable figure for so many reasons,” Light says. “How he treated other people, especially women and also people from other cultures. Much of Crowley is deeply problematic, especially through today’s lens. Yet the author also calls him “visionary” and “charismatic,” adding, “He kind of forced himself into scenes and pages. It really took constant effort to keep him from stealing every scene.
Crowley and Eckenstein teamed up for climbs in Mexico and an ill-fated attempt on the world’s second highest mountain, K2. (Light writes in the book that a feverish and hallucinatory Crowley drew his revolver on expedition member Guy Knowles before he was disarmed.) Crowley’s attempt at the third highest peak, Kangchenjunga, was done without Eckenstein and had more serious consequences. Four men died during the ill-fated climb, which was marked by disagreements during and after the ascent.
Although Crowley respected Eckenstein, the latter received a cold reception among other climbers for reasons unrelated to his climbing skills.
“He is someone who clearly faces a special challenge in gaining recognition – not because he was a difficult character, but because he was Jewish,” says Light. “It was more or less accepted at the Alpine Club that he would not be welcomed… as a former club president put it, he suffered from ‘disadvantages of race.’”
It was their loss: Eckenstein played a pioneering role in both crampons and bouldering.
“Eckenstein is the first person I found who really understood that how you climb is as important as what you climb,” says Light. “His focus on technique… the physics of the body, his relationship with the rock, a very contemporary view of climbing.”
“He was another visionary, someone who really should be more famous than him,” Light says, noting that he may return to Eckenstein as a subject in the future.
Light praises Workman’s achievements as a pioneering female climber, as well as her writing about her expeditions.
“Climbing Nun Kun sounds like an extremely challenging trek,” Light says of the Himalayan peak that Workman climbed in 1906 but didn’t reach. “It really strikes me when I read about it, how brave they were to even try that.” As for Workman, who climbed nearby Pinnacle Peak that same year, “even though a guide went out and supported them, it was really amazing to accomplish it in her time with what they had available,” Light says.
He acknowledges that the Workmans and other Western members of their climbs abused indigenous porters in the Himalayas, including during a trek across the Chogo Lungma Glacier. According to the book, the Westerners had warm clothes and snowshoes; the Balti porters do not. When this last group refused to wake up at four in the morning, their tent pegs were removed from the ground. The book quotes Fanny Bullock Workman calling them “roaring and intolerable… and only a few really sick.”
“In her eyes, she was the equal of men,” Light says. “At the same time, that would never have been extended to Westerners’ relations with indigenous people.”
“I think she was more open and honest on the page,” he says. “I don’t know if she was necessarily that much more problematic than some of the other people in the book.”
The author attempts to highlight non-Westerners who played key roles in the epic climbs, including a Gurkha soldier named Karbir Burathoki, who was one of four members of Longstaff’s party who climbed Trisul.
“I was very happy to give him the fame he deserves, the first great indigenous mountaineer from the Himalayas,” says Light. “We talk a lot about Sherpas now, but Gurkha involvement in this was significant [earlier] expeditions.”
Research into the manuscript yielded an original copy of Arnold Mumm’s contemporary book on Trisul. Inside was a photo of the participants, including Kabir.
“It’s a beautiful photo, an interesting cross-section of the individuals who were part of that expedition,” says Light. “You can see the seed of the Everest expedition… And the Gurkhas were the forerunners of the Sherpa, in the sense that with the Gurkhas and men like Karbir, Europeans began to understand how integral indigenous participation in the expeditions would be. It feels like a real missing piece in terms of how we understand mountaineering in the Himalayas.