Men y. Mountains

Mountain climbing came into its own 98 years ago, thanks largely to a London physician named Albert Smith who could not keep his enthusiasm to himself. Among the first ever to scale white-domed Mont Blanc, the highest (15,781 ft.) of Alpine peaks, Smith produced a play based on his trek. It was no great shakes as drama, but it caught on like the Wild West shows in the U.S., ran six years in London, and gave people who had never seen a mountain the urge to climb one.

Although the Alps were far from the loftiest of mountains, they were the handiest for Europeans, and they made up in beauty what they lacked in sheer mass. Each year there was news of cave-ins, slips and deaths. But the danger seemed only to increase the fascination and the number of climbers. This summer, a record 100,000 enthusiasts (v. 66,000 last season) checked in at Alpine mountain cabins, equipped with ropes, poles and ice axes, for what turned out to be one of the most disastrous years in the sport's history.

On Swiss mountains 75 climbers had died (against 14 last year). Fifty had been killed in France, 28 of them on Mont Blanc and its neighboring ridges alone.

A Big Climb. Unlike the Matterhorn (14,780 ft.), a jagged spire of rock to which little snow clings, the white stairway of Mont Blanc looks deceptively accessible from Chamonix in the valley below. Any tourist with an urge can hire guides and make the one-day ascent by cable car and a trek across the Bossons Glacier to the Grands-Mulets Hotel. If he still wants more, he can be awakened at 1 a.m. next morning for the big climb to the summit, more than a mile higher over treacherous snow crevasses, where high winds blow unceasingly and there is a constant threat of avalanches.

From the Grand Plateau (12,880 ft), the climber can choose the path to the right or the sharper but less windswept one to the left. The thrills are much the same either way. At the top, the Alpinist may experience what one veteran climber called "the feeling of release and mystic union upon reaching the goal." All climbers do not attain that experience. Last month, eight climbers were caught in a blizzard near the top and froze to death.

Page at a Time. The news of successive accidents traveled fast this summer (though some Alpine hotelkeepers arranged to have the bodies carried down to the villages after dark to avoid talk). But the news did not seem to discourage the growing number of enthusiasts. The Alpine Club of France has almost 40,000 members, those of Italy and Switzerland 100,000 each, with booming sales of books and magazines devoted solely to how to scale a mountain.

The best explanation of the calamitous 1949 season was simply that more people were climbing, and having more accidents. Another explanation: the long, hot summer had dried out slopes, increased the number of avalanches. One 18-year-old Briton who spent three days trapped on a mountain ledge--and lived to tell about it --was Timothy Smiley of Aberystwyth.

His tale: "I built a little mud wall around the ledge to protect me from the wind. I read aloud page after page of [G. K.] Chesterton's The Thing, tearing out each page as I finished it and stuffed it inside my jacket to keep me warm . . . The third day, I spent solving mathematical problems in my head, then I saw the feet of a rescuer being lowered to me from above."

The guides had to lower him 1,000 feet on ropes. Then he had to walk two miles to a hotel. On the way, Alpine enthusiast Smiley bought a picture postcard "so as to remember the place."

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