Motivations of the scientist-mountaineer

The name of Fritz Zwicky (1898–1974) will live for ever in the annals of cosmology. In 1933, the Swiss astronomer was the first to postulate the existence of dark matter. And, to follow up, he predicted the existence of neutron stars, only two years after James Chadwick’s discovery of the neutron itself. 

Fritz Zwicky demonstrates his crampon technique

Zwicky applied his talents widely. During the war years, he served, quite literally, as a rocket scientist, on the board of a company that pioneered JATO “bottles” for overloaded aircraft. Before he moved to the United States, he was also a hard-driving scientist-mountaineer, making several bold first ascents in the Alps of Glarus, his home canton. What follows is his take on what motivates a mountaineer:

As for the value of expanding our comfort zone, we should certainly not omit to mention the kind of risky adventure that we occasionally and deliberately undertake in the prime of our lives. If we achieve such an adventure, it not only lives in our memory as a striking episode, but it also strengthens our confidence that we will be able to unerringly trace the one path through life that suits our genius and which nobody else could follow. 

There are many such follies to choose from. I mention here only one example, which represented the summit of summits for ourselves as alpinists in my time. Non-alpinists ask again and again why we rush like madmen into the mountains. All kinds of answers have been given, the magnificence of nature, blowing off physical steam, the escape from everyday life, the joy of adventure (according to Schiller "And if you do not put your life at stake/Never will you gain your life"), and so on.

Fritz Zwicky in Zermatt, 1932

But I have never read the kind of reply that would apply to people like myself and my faithful mountain companions such as Professor Thadeus Reichstein of Basel University, namely this. In daily life, as well as in science, one rarely encounters problems that one can solve by oneself, quickly and completely. Even if one tackles some real-life problem with success, new issues always seem to emerge, and these we have to grapple with over time, perhaps over our entire lifespan. We therefore have a hankering for achievements that can be completed like a work of art, by ourselves and alone, and which nobody can deny us. The first ascent of a mountain, or of a difficult new route (such as one of those prized direttissimas), represents exactly such an achievement.

But even here, people are never completely satisfied and they’ll think up something that is artistically more compelling, harder still than the riskiest first ascent, even a solo one. I myself had two things in mind. The mountain I wanted to climb had to be a long ice face, at least sixty degrees steep, of hard blue ice into which you’d have to cut steps, tough work, a real man’s job. 

Zwicky's first ascent route on the Glärnisch north face

You can’t deal with rocks in this way; you have to cling to them, and there’s something effete about that – though the world’s great rock climbers will want to strangle me for this remark. And, to push things even further, I wouldn’t solo the ice face but I’d take with me a lady companion who wouldn’t be a top alpinist and so couldn’t help me with the step-cutting, but who’d nevertheless blindly trust me to bring her safely to the summit.

To this day, almost fifty years later, I’m amazed when I think back to that sunny day in August 1923, when I set off the Grünhornhütte on the Tödi at two o'clock in the morning with Leni Ott, a pianist from Glarus, and crossed the Biferten glacier heading towards the rarely climbed blue ice walls of Piz Urlaun.

More than fifty mountaineers were setting out at the same time to climb the Tödi (the highest mountain in the canton of Glarus), and some shouted to us that we must be on the wrong route. When we pointed to Piz Urlaun, half of them seem to have the breath taken from them. They forgot about the Tödi and sat down on the edge of the glacier, where they stayed all day following us with their binoculars, watching us as we worked our way up the hard blue ice for twelve hours, with me driving in ice-pitons to secure my companion. By four o'clock in the afternoon we were on the summit.

From one of my friends, an excellent alpinist, I later learned that one of her colleagues from the Swiss Ladies Alpine Club, who was observing our ascent, had told her that a total lunatic had dragged a young lady over the bergschrund, ice slopes and up the treacherous overhanging ice cliffs of Piz Urlaun. She said the man should be sent to a lunatic asylum.

Of course, the shackles of tradition don’t necessarily need to be shaken loose on the ice slopes of Piz Urlaun, the Marinelli Couloir of Monte Rosa, or on the north face of Mount Robson in the Canadian Rockies. For the excellent advice to "do things differently" can be put into practice in many ways, and it doesn’t have to be a reckless one.

References

Fritz Zwicky, Jeder ein Genie: Der berühmte Astrophysiker revolutioniert unsere Denkmethode, Glarus Fritz-Zwicky-Stiftung, 1992 (translated text is from this book). 

Roland Müller, Alfred Stöckli, Fritz Zwicky: An Extraordinary Astrophysicist, Cambridge Scientific Publishers, 2011 (illustrations are from this book).