A literary critic, a judge and an explorer were among a tiny group of wealthy Britons who conquered the Alps’ highest peaks 150 years ago, never expecting their “gentlemen’s” hobby would morph into a worldwide sport.
Mountaineering today attracts people from all walks of life, tackling summits well beyond Europe’s Alpine range where it all began in 1865.
“Everything changed in just two days,” says Claude Marin, a mountain guide organising 150th anniversary celebrations in Chamonix, one of France’s oldest ski and climbing resorts in the shadow of Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps.
On July 14 that year, explorer, illustrator and author Edward Whymper made history when he reached the daunting 4,478-metre summit of the Matterhorn on the Italian-Swiss border.
On the way down, three other Britons and a guide, a legendary Chamonix alpinist named Michel Croz, slipped and fell to their deaths. The accident launched a fierce debate in Britain over whether the practice should be banned.
But the very next day, another British group made it to the even higher top of Mont Blanc, which straddles France and Italy.
While not the first to conquer the 4,810-metre peak – that feat was achieved in 1786 – they were the first get there via the arduous Brenva route on the Italian side.
Today, Mont Blanc attracts climbers by the tens of thousands each year though only a small number ever see the summit.
The year 1865 “was the beginning of mountaineering as the sport we still practise today,” says Marin.
Over the previous decade, what had largely been a scientific venture was increasingly seen as a challenge for clubs. “Science was no longer the sole motivation,” says Gilles Modica in his book, “1865 and the Golden Age of Mountaineering”.
Morin has documented 81 first-ever ascents that year in the Alps and the Pyrenees, the range between France and Spain, with Britons clearly at the forefront.
Of the 63 mountaineers who conquered 65 Alpine summits in 1865, 34 were British, followed by 13 Austrians, nine Swiss, six Italians and one Frenchman. A total 53 local guides assisted these teams, according to official Chamonix records.
Eight years earlier, an elite group of 28 British men had formed the world’s first mountaineering club, the Alpine Club in London. It promoted climbing as both a sport and a cultural endeavour, encouraging members to immortalise the majestic landscapes in writing, photographs and paintings.
The results include some genre classics like Whymper’s 1871 book “Scrambles Amongst the Alps”, and another tome the same year by author Viginia Woolf’s father, the literary critic Leslie Stephen, “The Playground of Europe”.
For the 150th anniversary, some of the Alpine Club’s prints, oil paintings and watercolours will be on show for the first time on the continent. There will also be a re-enactment in period costume of one of the 1865 ascents, while the Climbing World Cup was held in Chamonix over July 11 and 12.
Elsewhere, Switzerland’s famed resort of Zermatt hosted open-air performances to mark the first ascent of the Matterhorn, where climbing was banned on July 14 to honour some 500 mountaineers who lost their lives there since 1865.
Today’s practitioners, with sophisticated, high-tech equipment, are a far cry from the pioneers who blazed trails at high altitude with little more than energy, good sense and thick layers of sheepskin to brave the freezing night-time temperatures.
Mobile phones guide 21st-century climbers up well-mapped routes, with little left to chance in the Alps or other mountains around the world.
Climbing became “democratised, mainly thanks to cartography”, says the president of Chamonix’ mountain guides association, David Ravanel, who holds deep respect for his 19th-century predecessors.
Despite the sport’s popularity, Ravanel says uncharted territory remains. From valleys in Pakistan to spots in Antarctica, “there is still a lot to do”.
And not all are mountains, he says, pointing to “the huge growth of urban climbing” up the dizzying heights of some of the world’s tallest buildings.
