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In 1907, Tom Longstaff made the first known summit of a 7,000-plus-meter peak, Trisul in the Himalayas. What did he consider the sine qua non for a mountaineer? 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 Dawn of Mountaineering.
It wasn’t just about turning back, Light says, it was “turning back at the right moment, even if what you dreamed of all your life was just within reach.” Light marvels at “what Longstaff achieved and how he went about it. He went on some 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 “rattling the icicles on our beards and moustaches,” and recalling “the whole scarp of the Western Himalaya so vast that I expected to see the earth rotating before my eyes.”
“I was happy to see Longstaff succeed,” Light says. “It’s something he had been trying to do for so long.” The author calls this “the crux, really, of the pre-Everest era.”
The book is a chronicle of dramatic ascents across the globe – mostly in the Himalayas, but also the Alps and Latin America. Accounts of each climb evoke the rugged terrain, colorful characters, daunting obstacles and sometimes deadly outcomes.
“There’s an element of roulette to it,” Light says. “You see people from experienced backgrounds, the most able mountaineers you can find, have no idea how the altitude is going to operate on them individually.” Consider Edward FitzGerald’s attempt on Aconcagua, the tallest mountain in the Americas, in the 1890s: “He was so much into it in terms of resolve, but he couldn’t [do it] physically. The last 500 to 1,000 feet, it was just a wall there.”
As mountaineers battled it out for the world altitude record, their collective understanding increased of the technology needed to get to the top.
“In order to give myself some parameters, I was going to focus on mountaineers who at least attempted to set new altitude records,” Light says. “I was going to find all the expeditions I could, prior to the Everest expeditions of the 1920s – someone who either deliberately or by accident set an altitude record or attempted to do so.”
The book ends with George Mallory’s ill-fated quest to summit Mount Everest; on his third and final attempt, in 1924, he and fellow climber Andrew Irvine disappeared.
“Others have already done a far better job than I would even think to do,” Light says of chronicling Mallory on Everest. “Wade Davis’ Into the Silence was a huge influence on me, a real source of inspiration.”
Light is a climber himself, although he’s more inclined to explore the mountains of Scotland with his brother than trek in the Himalayas. He did go to the Asian range late in the book process, which gave him a chance to see if it accorded with his descriptions in the book. Mission accomplished.
He laments the current queues on Everest, while similarly rewarding climbing opportunities nearby go unvisited by tourists. While he enjoys encountering kindred spirits on an ascent, he also enjoys the solitude inherent in mountaineering, disconnected from those down below. Earlier in life, the then-tech entrepreneur made a different kind of disconnect, from the internet – goodbye social media, goodbye smartphone. He began bringing a book everywhere he went, along with a journal to write in – unconsciously fueling the idea to write a book himself.
To research the book, Light visited the Royal Geographical Society and the Alpine Club, and accessed first-hand accounts that proved valuable. It helped that many of the central characters had written their own lively chronicles of their climbs.
They included Aleister Crowley, who won renown as a mountaineer before gaining later notoriety 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, established female altitude records on climbs with her husband, William Hunter Workman.
“Crowley was a reprehensible figure for so many reasons,” Light says. “How he treated other people, especially women and also those from other cultures. A lot of Crowley is deeply problematic, especially through the lens of today.” Yet the author also calls him “visionary” and “charismatic,” adding, “He sort of forced himself on to scenes and pages. It really required constant effort to stop him from stealing every scene.”
Crowley and Eckenstein teamed up for ascents in Mexico and an ill-fated attempt on the world’s second-highest mountain, K2. (Light writes in the book that a feverish and hallucinating Crowley drew his revolver on expedition member Guy Knowles before being disarmed.) Crowley’s attempt at the third-highest peak, Kangchenjunga, was made without Eckenstein and had graver consequences. Four men died on the ill-fated climb, which was marked by dissension during and after the ascent.
While Crowley respected Eckenstein, the latter got a chilly reception among other climbers for reasons that had nothing to do with his climbing skills.
“He is someone who is clearly facing a particular challenge to get recognition – not because he was a difficult character, but because he was Jewish,” Light says. “At the Alpine Club, it was sort of accepted that he wasn’t going to be welcomed in … as one former president of the club put it, he suffered ‘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,” Light says. “His focus on technique … the physics of the body, its relationship with the rock, a very contemporary view of climbing.”
“He was another visionary, someone who really ought to be more famous than he is,” 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, and also her writing about her expeditions.
“Ascending the Nun Kun sounds like a hugely challenging trek,” Light says of the Himalayan peak Workman climbed but did not summit in 1906. “I’m really struck whenever I read about it, how courageous they were to even attempt that.” As for Workman summiting the nearby Pinnacle Peak that same year, “even though a guide started out on the path and supported them, it was amazing, really, to achieve it in her day with what they had available,” Light says.
He acknowledges that the Workmans and fellow Western members of their climbs mistreated indigenous porters in the Himalayas, including on a trek through the Chogo Lungma glacier. According to the book, the Westerners had warm clothing and snowshoes; the Balti porters did not. When the latter group declined to wake up at 4am, their tent pins were removed from the ground. The book quotes Fanny Bullock Workman calling them “Bawling and unendurable … and only a few really ill.”
“In her view, she was the equal of men,” Light says. “At the same time, that never would have been extended to … Westerners’ relationships with Indigenous people.”
“I think she was more open and honest on the page,” he says. “I don’t know if she necessarily was that much more problematic than some of the other people in the book.”
The author seeks to highlight non-Westerners who played key roles in the epic climbs, including a Gurkha soldier named Karbir Burathoki who was among the four members of Longstaff’s party to summit Trisul.
“I was really happy to … give him a sort of prominence he deserves … the first great indigenous Himalayan mountaineer,” Light says. “We talk a lot about Sherpas now, but Gurkha involvement was significant in these [earlier] expeditions.”
Research on the manuscript yielded an original copy of Arnold Mumm’s contemporary book about Trisul. Inside, there was a photo of the participants, including Kabir.
“It’s a wonderful photo, an interesting cross-section of the individuals who made up that expedition,” Light says. “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 started to understand how integral indigenous participation would be to the expeditions. It feels like a really missing piece in terms of how we understand Himalayan mountaineering.”
