Mountain Modernity: Genealogies of Climbing
The ascent of a mountain for its own sake was unheard of, and there could be no thought of the companionship of friends or acquaintances.
-Jakob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), on Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux, “for its own sake,” in 1339
I wished to make the experiment
And ascertain what there was on top of it.
I called two knights, my intimate friends,
And proposed to them that we ascend
Together. They vowed it secret and rejoiced.
-Peter III of Aragon, on his 1285 ascent of Pic Canigou; verse translation my own, after Salimbene de Adam, Chronica
Genealogists of modernity have frequently looked to mountain climbing to discover what the GenMod project calls “modernity moments”—those turning points that inaugurate a new age. To climb a mountain for enjoyment and discovery, not out of necessity, has been thought to mark a new relationship between humanity and nature, a new appreciation of the limitless vistas of the human subject.
There is something about the analogy of mountain climbing that draws genealogists of modernity. The Renaissance scholar Jakob Burckhardt found in Petrarch’s ascent of Mt. Ventoux the invention of the modern individual. Mountain modernity has become a species of “modernity talk”: tropes, images, and figures of speech that are especially conducive to thinking about and expressing epochal shifts.
I’ll speak of “mountain modernity” as the name for mountain climbing’s gravitational pull on modernity talk and modernity moments. For instance, mountain modernity is particularly well suited to classical liberalism’s understanding of history as humanity’s progress from herd mentality and authoritarianism toward individual liberty. And this progress carries a secularizing force. To climb a mountain for its own sake is to assert the sovereignty of the buffered subject, to adopt Charles Taylor’s term, and to dispel the enchantment of the mountain as the house of the gods.
Illustration to an unidentified Latin edition of Sebastian Münster, 'Cosmographia', probably printed by Petri in Basel, c.1544-52
There is no doubt that at some point people in Europe started to reach mountain peaks and cross Alpine ridges in greater numbers than they had done in the past. Some groups of Europeans began to get a feel for the mountains that they did not previously share. A sober study of this development empirically affirms its validity and finds its impetus in the burgeoning trade networks in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Yet, as the second epigraph attests, once you start looking for modernity moments in the history of mountain climbing, they begin to proliferate.
If we zoom out from the particular history of Alpine peak climbing, looking beyond Europe and adopting a more anthropological approach, a number of new considerations emerge, urging us to reexamine mountain climbing’s relationship to religion and secularity, individualism, and technological progress.
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Who may climb the mountain of the Lord?
Who may stand in his holy place?
Only those whose hands and hearts are pure,
who do not worship idols
and never tell lies.
-Psalm 24:3-4
The first consideration is that the secularizing force of mountain climbing is consistent with the secularizing impulses of Judaism and medieval Christianity. Zion may be the mountain of God, but it became so as part of a program to tear down the idols of all the other “high places” in Judah and Israel. Barbara Newman has written incisively about the secularizing force of Christianity in medieval Arthurian romance, where Camelot becomes the center of enchantment only after the Knights of the Round Table have gone around the land breaking all the local magic of enchanted castles and cursed maidens. A similar logic seems to be at work in the early placement of crosses atop Alpine peaks upon first ascent. Break one enchantment to establish another.
The second prompt to reconsider the genealogy of mountain modernity is that for much of human history climbing has been communal, not individualistic. Peter Hansen has compellingly demonstrated how the mountain modernity of the nineteenth-century alpine clubs went hand in hand with imperial ideology and the cultivation of masculine individualism. These alpinists invented the myth of the lone individual standing on a summit never before conquered by another man. Hansen shows how this was nearly always a fiction that belied the cooperation necessary to reach any summit.
Contrary to that myth, for much of human climbing history, cooperation has been gratuitous, unnecessary. Examples abound of premodern and modern communal climbing. The monasteries of Meteora, perched atop airy pinnacles, attest to a communal summit culture. In the karst hills of China, communities once climbed together to bury their dead in the cliffside, and their descendants today climb together to harvest medicinal herbs. The present-day residents of Stolby, Siberia, frolic together on their local crags as urbanites would gather for a summer concert in the park.
Alex Honnold has made famous the discipline of “free soloing”—climbing without protective gear or artificial hardware in the rock. Yet each of these examples of communal climbing also occurs unprotected. They take the “solo” out of “free solo.”
Honnold’s free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite has been heralded as futuristic. But it is probably actually the apex of the nineteenth-century cult of individual, masculine conquest. For the perfect counterstatement to the Oscar-winning documentary of Honnold’s Free Solo, watch The Dawn Wall, which is just as good a movie and celebrates the bonds of partnership and the ineluctably communal nature of the actually futuristic discipline of hard big-wall free climbing (“free” meaning climbing with ropes and hardware for protection, using only one’s body to make upward progress).
Even as Honnold reached the summit of mountain modernity, that movement had already been outflanked by the communal culture of the climbing gym, one of many new tribal forms of association that convey identity and belonging in a post-Christian American culture. The majority of new climbing gym square-footage is now dedicated to the discipline of bouldering, which you can safely do on your own because the walls top out at 14 feet, above ample padding. So climbers don’t need to hold each other’s ropes for safety. Instead, they enjoy each other. While there are certainly eremitical boulderers out wandering forests alone with their crash pads, the vast majority rarely venture outdoors, preferring the common cause of solving a boulder “problem” and cheering each other on. Even among serious outdoor climbers, an ideology of thick community and existential authenticity prevails.
Josef Feid’s Anastasius Grün
A third aspect of mountain modernity that deserves reconsideration is its myth of technological progress. A blog post by economist John Cochrane, inspired by Free Solo, throws the rapid progression in rock climbing difficulty into the sharp relief of development economics. In brief, it took some two dozen people 45 days on the wall across 18 months to make the first ascent of El Capitan, Yosemite’s central monolith, in 1958. They basically constructed scaffolding to the top: an industrial solution for an industrial age.
Just 60 years later, Alex Honnold climbed the route in under 4 hours, with no equipment but sticky rubber for his shoes and chalk (magnesium carbonate) to help dry his hands. As Cochrane points out, this development was far less a result of technological progress than it was of “knowledge transmission,” or what humanities scholars might prefer to call cultural dissemination or tradition.
While sticky rubber does seem to have transformed the sport of rock climbing at large in the last 50 years, barefoot climbing may be making a comeback; a young Frenchman recently climbed several of the world’s hardest boulder problems in bare feet. (More video of this wonderment here.) This suggests that humans have always been capable of climbing at a high level of difficulty. The most important training tools for achieving this level of power—pieces of wood attached to panels of wood—could have been made by medieval craftspeople. Tradition, not technology, makes the difference between modern bouldering (the bleeding edge of possibility) and the achievements of premodern climbers.
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When did climbing become modern? The question is raised in a typical congeries of pedantic detail, cultural disorientation, smart commentary, dumbass presentism, and earnest inquiry on the Mountain Project forum. The most sensible answer to the most sensible interpretation of the question is offered in the original post: 1993, when the climbing film Masters of Stone II depicted a world of climbing gear and methods thoroughly recognizable today. But that is ultimately a technological answer, depending on products of the modern industrial age.
Cultural factors are better captured in some climbers’ discontent with the transformation of the American Alpine Club. What began as an elite association of heroic explorers has devolved into a lifestyle brand of diminished goals and scope—from Himalayan peaks to Yosemite big walls to 60-ft crags, and, more recently, to boulders, indoor climbing gyms, and finally the Moonboard, which reduces global endeavor to a set of some 100 holds reproduced identically on factory-made boards, regulated by an app on tens of thousands of phones. (The AAC has not, to my knowledge, associated its brand with the Moonboard. And for the record, I’m a proud member of the AAC and an avid Moonboard user.)
Katsushika Hokusai Mountain Path
A less parochial version of this genealogy would begin with the mountains of the gods and traditions of religious ascent. In the Mahabharata, Arjuna and his brothers give up their thrones and worldly belongings to climb, “all rapt in Yoga, . . . the mighty mountain Meru, the foremost of all high-peaked mountains.” Moses ascends Mt. Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments. Israelite pilgrims climb Mt. Zion, “the mountain of the Lord.” The prophet Muhammad has his night vision atop a mountain peak.
At some point in this genealogy humans lower their sights, contenting themselves with the climb rather than the summit, with the wall rather than the mountain. The first rock climb, according to Robert Macfarlane, was fittingly a down-climb (Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1802 storm-harried retreat off Broad Stand, Scafell, in the Lake District). And at the bottom of the descent: the Moonboard.
Yet even this seemingly sensible genealogy ignores archaeological and anthropological evidence from around the world that humans have been climbing walls and stopping before the top for a very long time. The Ancestral Puebloans (Anasazi) and other cliff dwellers of the medieval Southwest used “hand and toe” trails carved in cliffs to access cave dwellings perched a hundred or more feet above the ground. Yet even with modern sticky rubber shoes, climbers rate many of these routes at 5.10—a difficulty the average gym climber struggles with.
Of course, there is no evidence that prehistoric cliff dwellers lived among the crags merely for pleasure. To the contrary, many sites seem to be defensive, either from human enemies or wild animals. Yet there are ample examples of cliff-dwelling cultures building scaffolding and removable ladder systems in some places, but relying on technical climbing in others, for no apparent practical reason. Reading David Roberts’s research—a climbing historian working closely with archaeologists and anthropologists—it is impossible not to see in this evidence a gratuitous appreciation for upward movement by contact of skin on rock.
In sport climbing and bouldering, the two most recent climbing disciplines, we discover what may be one timeless characteristic of human climbing: the gratuitous pleasure in bodily movement. There is a romance to sport climbing that is different from the alpinism out of which it grew. Many sport climbs and boulders end in the middle of a wall, nowhere close to the “summit.” Climbers are certainly goal-oriented: they often spend months and years trying to climb the same route bottom-to-top without falling. But most sustain that commitment through the sheer pleasure (and pain) of the movement (see the greatest climber in history lying on his back, pantomiming the moves on his hardest routes from memory). “Embrace the process” is a cliché heard more often in climbing than in other sports.
But to return to the question: when did climbing become modern? In a very real sense, climbing has always been modern. As the GenMod project has reiterated, to be modern means to be new, to be in the now, and to be so in a certain style. Considered in the history of emotions, every achievement in climbing feels new and heightens your sense of the now. The climbing community’s consensus about its great achievements also recognizes that the style is essential to that feeling. The aspirational feeling of climbing is the feeling of being modern. And that is a timeless feeling.
That is the easy answer. Here is the contestable claim: climbing became fully modern when Free Solo won the Oscar. But Free Solo’s mountain modernity was already passé in 2019. The future of climbing is not modern. It is post-secular, mystical, communal, and intensely embodied, with technology merely incidental.
Ryan McDermott is the Director of the Genealogies of Modernity Project, associate professor of medieval literature and culture in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh, and founder and faculty director of Beatrice Institute.
