Mountaineering - lessons in focus, decision-making and fun (Part 1)
The hollow sound under my crampons sounds ominous. Before I have time to react, a piece of the icy sheath peels off and my foot plunges into a puddle of icy glacial melt. Thankfully we’re at the edge of the Ball Glacier and the crust is thin and shallow. I manage to pull out my leg from the puddle before I find out how deep it goes. Brent and our mountain guide, Elke, turn around at the sound of the crack. I’m tied at the back of the echelon, a piece of rope, strung between me, Elke and Brent with three butterfly knots between each person, the rest of the rope coiled around my and Brent’s torsos.
Part of the lake under the glacier that I accidentally stepped into
We’ve been practicing glacier travel - a mountaineering technique that allows people to travel on glaciers and have at least a chance of rescuing each other in case of a crevasse fall. Crevasse falls, together with avalanches, are some of the most serious risks faced by climbers in the alpine. There are plenty of other risks that constantly have to be weighed in the mind of the climbing party - weather, risk of sliding / falling on ice, wind, route finding and planning, pacing, exhaustion, food, water, etc. But throughout all this information overload, the most amazing part is that there is no distraction or noise typical of today’s world. You’re in the mountains, there’s no TV, no internet, no noise or chatter to distract you. That is, other than your own mind (and the occasional chopper buzzing overhead with scenic tours).
View of the Ball Glacier from our bivvy spot - Mt Cook is up on the left, behind a cloud
What you experience is space, majestic mountain views, the sound of your breath or the creaking of snow or ice under your feet and the silence that clears the mind and allows you to focus. Being in the alpine environment is like being invited to a sacred cathedral space where every step needs to be measured and every movement intentional. The price for lack of presence is high - a distracted movement can result in an injury or worse for yourself and your whole party. It’s the type of space that I have rarely experienced in the busy modern world where true silence is on the brink of extinction.
The Tasman glacier (the lower, ablation part of the glacier is covered in rock and dust) and the terminal lake as viewed from our climb to Caroline Hut
Elke, Brent and Lisa on the way to Caroline Hut via the Tasman Glacier
We’re on our 8 day mountaineering course with Alpine Recreation, a mountaineering guiding company out of Tekapo in New Zealand. It was founded by Gottlieb Braun-Elwert, a German emigre who was one of the most active mountain guides in New Zealand, founding a guiding company, building a few huts and pioneering a lot of the ski touring routes on the glaciers. Today, his wife and his daughters carry his legacy - both Elke Braun-Elwert, our guide, and her sister Carla were 14 when they first submitted Mount Cook, rated as a more technically challenging mountain than Everest. Elke, our guide, exhibits the hallmarks of a true professional in the mountains - she’s collected, calm, decisive, knowledgeable, experienced and most importantly, patient when teaching the fundamentals of alpinism to newbies like us. Her mind exhibits the power of concentration and clarity that have obviously been honed by years of guiding in this majestic but unforgiving environment.
I like the ethos embodied by the Braun-Elwert family. You can tell they carry a true love and dedication to the mountains and to the New Zealand alpine. There are wonderful postcards of various alpine flowers that were made from photographs that their dad took when he was alive. The eye that captured those images clearly belonged to someone who appreciated every single living thing on the mountain as a creation of beauty. They also reveal the personality of a man who discovered life’s essence and beauty in the mountains and lived for that. He reportedly said: “Climbing a mountain is like life in general. When you make a decision, you must put up with the outcome - good or bad. I would say that, if you are able to pull off a climb on a mountain, you will see personal difficulties from a distant perspective. Fewer and fewer pursuits in life are as creative, as personally challenging, and as satisfying as being in the mountains." His legacy also lives through the Symphony on Skis - a poetic and first-of-a-kind journey he made with some Swiss and German partners, crossing the Southern Alps on skis from Mt Cook village to the West Coast, skiing on the glaciers. His daughters repeated the feat and made an inspirational documentary movie about it, appropriately called by the name their father gave that journey.
The week we spend with Elke is intense. Our day starts at 7am at the latest and ends at dinner at 8pm. We’re thrown in a complex and precise classroom of knots, rope management, awareness, footwork, situational awareness, rock climbing, abseiling, belaying, anchor-building, understanding weather maps and movements in the sky, route-finding, avalanche awareness, glacier walking, navigation, using ice tools, practicing self-arrest and crevasse rescue and many more novel, exciting but technically complex concepts. That, plus we’re doing lots of walking - hours of hiking uphill through bush and steep rocks and later on ice and snow with no path, with a heavy backpack. On our bivouac day, we carry in excess of 20 kg each (45lbs+).
One of our packs the morning we set out for the glacier (ice and snow gear, rope + bivvy gear)
With this firehose of learning, the brain is struggling to absorb so much new information by wiring new neural pathways, resulting in an occasional brain freeze on my part (for ex. “which hole was the carabiner supposed to go into the ATC when belaying from the anchor?”) It will take time for all that new knowledge to sink in and a lot of practice in the alpine. In the meantime, we’re just focused on applying a few concepts at a time.
It starts with a night at the Unwin - a lodge of the New Zealand Alpine Club in Mt Cook that has a convenient lounge area with a top anchor chain rigged. Elke moves the furniture away and pulls our rope through. Our first task - after an imaginary fall into a crevasse, we need to perform self-rescue. This is accomplished by rigging two loops - one for the waist and one for the leg and moving the loops progressively up the rope by alternating your weight from your leg to your waist. It’s hard work and you need all your muscles, particularly the core. The biggest challenge comes when we need to bypass an alpine butterfly knot in the rope. I don’t realize that I’m rigging the loops in a way that will make my rescue very difficult - my waist loop is too long. Elke lets me do it, so I can then problem-solve my way out of the predicament. She talks to me, drawing out ideas from me about how to bypass the rope. Finally, in a fit of determination, I retie the leg loop above the knot and I’m hanging in a 45 degree angle up the ceiling, with my head pointing down. Then I muster up all my core and leg strength and pull the extended leg under me and force myself to stand up on it.
By that time, two guides from Alpine Guides and their mountaineering clients are spectating from the couches. After my leg maneuver, which draws exclamations of surprise and support from the audience, he wisely remarks that it would be difficult to replicate such a powerful move in the glacier - with the shock and adrenaline, combined with the freezing temperatures. I agree with him, but I am glad that Elke let me learn the hard way how to properly rig my escape loops so I don’t have to replicate this power move in the alpine.
Elke demonstrating self-rescue from a crevasse in the middle of the Unwin lodge in Mt Cook
Dinner time! But not before Brent rescues himself from the crevasse with his pack
The mountaineering course is also a great tool for me to learn more about Brent. Brent’s systems thinking really comes to the fore during the course and it matches well Elke’s methodical approach. Brent likes to get the big picture and figure out the problem for himself and Elke provides her guidance in helping him make the solution better or pointing out areas that he’s missed. For our planned traverse from the Barron Saddle hut through the Sladden Glacier, Brent uses data from his GPS, the app Strava and our past hikes and climbs in Arthur’s pass to construct a grid that approximates the distances and the terrain and gives us a guesstimate of how many hours we will need for the trip. Elke is quite impressed - she says that climbers will routinely construct a planning grid like this and seems surprised that Brent came up with the concept all by himself.
One of Brent's early drafts of a table laying out the segments of our intended journey, with the terrain, distance and time expected.
While Brent’s style is a systems-thinker, I’m more of a “learn by doing” person. I like to observe the immediate environments and perfect what I’m doing, making sure all the details are correct. I like the intense focus on the environment that forces you to be fully present in the now, as opposed to worrying or daydreaming. As I observe our interactions as an alpine team, I’m pleased to see that Brent and I make a good team.
The guides also tell us that they like that we look out for each other, correcting each other gently and encouraging each other’s progress. In the alpine, your communication has to be short and clear - most of the time is spent in silence, which I love. But you also have to communicate clearly and positively. There’s absolutely no place for passive aggressive behavior, nagging or “digs” that could attack the other person or put them on the defensive. You operate as one unit if you are going to have the a chance of success in the wild. Your survival depends on you working as a cohesive team. In fact, I think that roping up in the mountains is the best test of a relationship. All couples should be sent to the mountains and roped up together, so they learn how to support each other positively and drop their petty grievances.
Practicing glacial travel in echelon formation on the Ball Glacier
A great example of the importance of team work is roping up for glacier travel and actually traversing on the glacier together. Every member of the roped team has their responsibilities - the person in the front needs to select the safest passage. The person / people in the back need to maintain just enough slack between themselves and the person in the front so that the rope is slightly dancing on the snow. As a follower, you are constantly alert to the movements of the leader. Observing the leader informs your pace of walking and if you come to a stop. It also lets you know if you should tighten the rope - if the leader needs to test a snow bridge with their axe or poking around the edge of a crevasse. You also need to maintain a 90 degree angle when crossing crevasses, which a lot of time means turning the tail around like a long truck in a semicircle to maintain the echelon formation (and not following in the footsteps of the leader).
Similarly, the leader is alert not just to the environment, but also keeping track of people in the back, slowing down or stopping as they come to cross or go around obstacles. Everyone on the rope is fully alert and prepared to sit down in case of a member fall into a crevasse, and taking care not to step on the rope or get it tangled.
The biggest security feature on the ice is everyone’s footwork. Walking on crampons, when done mindfully, is a climber’s best protection against a fall. Just like a Zen walking meditation, you feel your feet and you feel “all four corners of the foot”, as they would say in yoga. The foot sensitivity is challenged by the metal plate in the boot which renders the footbed quite stiff. However, just like a ski coach once told me, the secret to masterful movement on snow is the sensitivity and micro-movements of the foot inside the boot. Feeling the conditions (rock, ice, soft snow, crust) and intentionally feeling the foot engage with the surface felt natural and enjoyable to me. It is a natural extension of my yoga practice and skiing ungroomed snow. The cadence of planting the ice axe in the snow and then taking a step with the uphill and the downhill foot produces its own rhythm, which is very engrossing to the mind - swoosh (plant the ice ax), swoosh (left crampon), swoosh (right crampon).
It also takes a lot sustained concentration, which means that every second of walking is spent with the mind engaged in the present moment. It is this constant engagement of the mind in the motion, activities and direction of the body that distinguishes mountaineering from a daily life of “checking out and being on the iPhone” while commuting on a bus, walking on the street or even (sadly) sitting with people on the same table. And much like yoga, I believe it represents an “embodied practice”.
