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| Geezers on tour: halving the height of the mountains works well |
Such compromises wouldn’t appeal to Carlos Soria Fontán. The news just came in that an injury has forced the 84-year-old Spanish mountaineer to abandon his bid to reach the summit of Dhaulagiri. This was one of the two eight-thousanders he had left to scale to claim the title of the oldest climber to conquer the world’s 14 highest mountains.
Normal folks tend to wind down in retirement. But Carlos Soria’s climbing CV shows that the normal rules may not apply to him. Indeed, it seems that he started his eight-thousanders campaign when many people would already be drawing their first pension payments.
According to Wikipedia, Soria is the only mountaineer to have ascended ten mountains of more than 8,000 metres after turning 60, and he is the oldest person in history to have successfully climbed K2 (65 years old), Broad Peak (68 years old), Makalu (69 years old), Gasherbrum I (70 years old), Manaslu (71 years old), Kanchenjunga (75 years old) and Annapurna (77 years old). Gasp.
As you’d expect, the literature of “silver-age mountaineering” is rather slim. There was Karl Blodig (1859–1956), of course, who came out of retirement at the age of 73 to make solo ascents of the Aiguille du Jardin and the Grande Rocheuse. This was because these peaks had recently been added to the generally accepted list of 4,000-metre alpine summits, all of which he wanted to climb.
Then there was Riccardo Cassin (1909-2009), who after making the first ascent of the north-east face of Piz Badile (6a) in the Swiss Val Bregaglia in 1937, went back and repeated the route fifty years later at the age of 78. For his part, W H Tillman (1898-1977) was one year older than that when he went down with his ship on his way to climb in Antarctica. But I'm not aware that any of these paragons left any hints on how to keep alpinistically agile in old age.
One top mountaineer who did reflect on ageing was Furukawa Yoshikazu, a pioneer of Japan’s epic post-war phase of alpinism. He was also a founder of the second Rock Climbing Club of Japan (RCCII), an elite group of hard-core alpinists. Having helped to put up rugged lines such as the Bernina Route on Tsurugi and the Furukawa Route on the Takidani Grepon, he recorded these experiences in a memoir entitled simply My Crags (わが岸壁）
In his afterword, Furukawa, then 41 years old, mused what would happen when his peak performance was behind him. Would climbing after that high point of achievement still be alpinism, he asked himself. It would depend, he decided, on his attitude, ie his inner self:
So what kind of attitude does alpinism consist in? When your climbing involves taking a line towards the highest point, we’re constantly asking ourselves if we can really do this, whether we can get up it at all. A wall of fear looms over us, but we have to keep pushing ourselves up against it, struggling against our own selves. Isn’t this alpinism, when we confront ourselves while climbing a mountain? … But if you shirk the difficulties and climb only within your comfort zone, you may look like an alpinist on the outside but, in reality, you are no more than a hiker. But I don’t mean to impose my views on anybody as to what they have to do to be an alpinist, or how they have to behave as one. After all, it’s a free world. I do venture as far as to clarify what alpinism could mean for mountaineers in their declining years.
References
The Guardian, “Spanish climber, 84, injured in bid to be oldest to scale world’s 14 highest peaks”, 17 May 2023
Furukawa Yoshikazu, Waga ganpeki (My crags), Yama to Keikoku-sha, January 1975
And if you want to keep cragging into your dotage, there are some good tips over on the Climbing magazine website.
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