Pints, potions and glasses (1)

A three-part disquisition, in which we celebrate the Golden Age of drinking and mountaineering.

Nobody who reads Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, a collection of the earliest effusions "by Members of the Alpine Club", can fail to be impressed by their capacity. Not just for adventure – so much can be taken for granted in the protagonists of this heroic era – but for their consumption of alcoholic beverages. Yes, you read that right: drinking while climbing was more than merely acceptable; it was de rigueur.

For this truly was the golden age of alcoholic alpinism. Strictly speaking, of course, the term “Golden Age” refers not to the potations but only to the pioneering climbs between Alfred Wills’s ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 and Edward Whymper’s conquest of the Matterhorn in 1865 – the phrase was coined by the controversial W A B Coolidge, an Oxford don-turned-mountaineer who doubtless enjoyed his port at High Table.

Yet alcohol stood at the very heart of the alpinistic enterprise. Paging through the inaugural volume of Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers (1859), for example, we find a “W. Mathews, Jun.” gearing up at a village in the Val de Bagnes for an attempt on the Graffeineire, or Grand Combin:

Our next step was to settle the commissariat for the three days’ march. We took six loaves of bread, a quantity of excellent cold chamois, a piece of cheese, chocolate, sugar, and ten bottles of sour white wine. Wine is always a heavy and troublesome thing to carry, but it is not easy to dispense with it, and I have always found a mixture of wine, snow, and sugar a very refreshing beverage at great altitudes. Simond was greatly dissatisfied that there was no vin rouge; “ Le vin blanc,” said he, “coupe toujours les jambes” – a result which happily we did not experience.

Now William Mathews (1828–1901) was not just any old tosspot. He too was at the heart of the enterprise, having first proposed the formation of an Alpine Club in a letter to a climbing colleague in February 1857, the year after his bibulous investigations in the Val de Bagnes.

The Finsteraarhorn from the southeast
Illustration from Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

Matters moved along during an ascent of the “Finster Aarhorn” in August 1857 by William Mathews, his cousin St John Mathews, John Ellis, E S Kennedy and J F Hardy – who wrote up the trip for Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers, not omitting details of the commissariat:

We woke on August 12th to find the clouds all swept away, and as brilliant a morning as we could desire. In the highest spirits we ate a hearty breakfast, and then descended to the kitchen to arrange about provisions. Wine in abundance, one bottle of brandy, afterwards rashly increased to two, roast mutton, roast veal, ham, sausage, cheese, bread, figs and raisins, were put together, one after the other, till the pile looked big enough to feed an army, and the corresponding arithmetic amounted to seventy-four francs. Later in the morning the guides expressed a desire for “noch ein wenig Brod und Fleisch,” and the result of our consenting to this request was that the bill was increased to 114 francs, whence I presume that the word “wenig” does not exactly correspond to our English “little”, nor do I think it would have been a difficult matter to prove, from the character of the additions which were actually made to our store, that the phrase “Brod und Fleisch” includes things potable as well as things edible.

The supernumerary bottle of spirits soon took the anticipated toll on the least reliable of the party’s guides:

He had already, in my opinion, had more cognac than was good for him, but being somewhat flustered by our objurgations, he now drew frequent and copious draughts from the dangerous flask.

Leaving two of the guides behind on a col, the party reached the summit at 11.53 – the first to do so for sixteen years – and celebrated their triumph appropriately:

A very small modicum of brandy tempered with snow was then administered to each (wine would have been better, but it would not have been possible to carry a sufficient quantity through the final climb), and we sat down to enjoy the magnificent scene around us.

In fact, they did more than enjoy the scenery, for it was during this same expedition that Mathews and his friends resolved to form what was to become the world’s first Alpine Club. And we may depend upon it that the fateful decision was adequately lubricated.

Ascent of the "Schwarze Glacier"
Illustration from Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

During the following autumn, ad hoc gatherings ensued at Mathews's house near Birmingham, leading to the founding of the Alpine Club itself on 22 December 1857 at a dinner meeting chaired by E S Kennedy. If only we still had the wine list from that illustrious occasion at Ashley’s Hotel in London….

Now steady on, I hear you objurgate, the Alpine Clubbists were by no means the first to bring beverages into the mountains. And this one must concede. And while we’re at it, let us dispel any inference that such drinking was just a guy thing: when Henriette d’Angeville (1794–1871) climbed Mont Blanc in 1838, one of the first women to do so, her commissariat included “18 bouteilles de vin de St. Jean, 1 bouteille d’eau-de-vie de Cognac, 1 bouteille de sirop de capillaire, 1 baril de vin ordinaire.”

A view of Mont Blanc from the Jardin
Illustration from Peaks, Passes, and Glaciers

Then there was Albert Smith (1816–1860), the impresario who put on a show about Mont Blanc in London that ran for 2,000 performances over six years. The script was inspired by his ascent of the mountain in 1851 when, between them, his four guides and twenty porters had to carry sixty bottles of vin ordinaire, six of Bordeaux, ten of St George, fifteen of St Jean, three of cognac and two of champagne, to say nothing of other liquid refreshments supplied by the Hôtel de Londres at Chamonix.

After all, nobody in their right mind would drink the local water in those days. And, while we’d now buy our beers and wines at an alpine hut, those Golden Age pioneers had to carry up all their victuals to some high-mountain cowshed or bivouac à la belle étoile …

(Coming soon: reviewing the risks attendant on alcoholic alpinism)

Tozan: in mountains begin responsibilities

Book review: an Aussie hiker-turned-mountaineer makes an eloquent case for questing the Hyakumeizan.

Heck, everyone knows what the Hyakumeizan are – the Japanese mountains spotlighted in a book published by a struggling ex-novelist in 1964. It’s a rare spirit, though, who can explain what compels thousands of otherwise rational folk to climb all one hundred summits at such a vast expense in time, money and boot-leather.

One who can explain is William Banff. In his recently published book, the Kansai-based English teacher sets out his starting position on the very second page:  

Ah, life in Osaka, for half a decade I’d dabbled in its delights, content to drift rudderless on a sea of all-you-can-drink booze, every so often running aground on islands of illicit pleasure, where I would allow myself to remain, happily marooned, until I felt the tentacles of commitment begin to wrap themselves around my ankles….

Until, that is, he did commit himself. Flicking through a little-thumbed Lonely Planet guide, he happened across the Hyakumeizan and felt their call. Making a start in 2007, he took time off work with the aim of climbing the full set by Christmas. That didn’t quite work out, but he still managed to complete his century over the following two years, tracking his progress in a series of blog posts – which are worth revisiting for their excellent photography.

In turn, the blog posts paved the way for a book, published this year as Tozan: A Japanese Mountain Odyssey. For those who have read the blog, the book is much more than the sum of the posts. By adding a sense of perspective to the whole campaign, not to mention a lot of detail, it makes one of the most eloquent cases for Hyakumeizan hunting that I’ve so far read.

Your reviewer first heard about this project from Willie himself, over lunch in Osaka. The book would be self-published, he said, so that he could say things the way he wanted to say them, without being censored by editors, publishers or monitors of the politically correct. And, by ****, he has made good on his promise.

It's a mercy indeed that Willie didn’t submit his manuscript to any gentlefolk publishers – you could imagine them fainting dead away after hitting just the first few expletives. But, here’s the thing: if they were to read their way onwards, these gentry would find themselves reaching for their smelling salts less and less often. And, as we shall see, there might be a good reason for that.

Though not even the genteelest of publishers could object to Willie’s nature writing, a vital attribute for any book that aims to distinguish one mountain from another. Here he is marching across the Oze marshes towards Hiuchi-ga-take:

Up before the crowds, I strode the boardwalks into a golden sunlit mist, crossing paths with a mere handful of lone hikers and photographers on my way north. Dewdrop-laden spiderwebs shone like diamond necklaces in the long marshland grasses that masked the slow northward creep of the waters beneath. In places where the water deepened, the grasses would part to reveal blue, waterlily-dotted pools …

But it’s as a raconteur that Willie really hits the ball out of the park. Take the episode in what purports to be the Kobushi-ga-dake chapter, where he describes himself sneaking into the woman’s section of a pharmacy in a bid to buy nylon stockings. It’s all the fault of an ex-US Army colleague who advised as follows:

“Yeah man.” He sucked the life out of a can of black coffee. “My old sergeant swore by ‘em. Nylons are the best way to stop blisters caused by new boots. ‘Wear ‘em under your socks. They reduce friction,’ he said. ‘But if I catch any of you m***********s puttin’ on lipstick, there’ll be hell to pay!’”

Fukada Kyūya, the original Hyakumeizan author, famously described mountains as people. But where Willie excels is describing people as people. And it is these pen portraits of hut wardens, taxi drivers and fellow hikers that give life to vignettes such as the one above. Suffice it to say that this reviewer hasn’t LOLed as much since reading Will Ferguson’s Hokkaido Highway Blues.

As David Lowe notes in his excellent review over on Ridgeline Images, Tozan is a long book – it handsomely outhefts Hokkaido Highway Blues. It is also just as well produced; self-publishing no longer means shonky. On the contrary: as a physical book, Tozan is more elegantly presented than the products of many so-called publishing houses. What kept me turning over the 500-plus pages, though, was a sense of development. There is more here than just a series of amusing anecdotes.

Willie starts on his Hyakumeizan campaign as a self-confessed mountain neophyte. This opens the door to a picaresque catalogue of foul-ups and faulty planning. But by his 47th summit – fittingly, this is Mt Fuji – he’s starting to get the hang of things. He can still miss the right trail but, whereas “A couple of weeks earlier, I would have howled to the heavens in fury … I’d harnessed an inner calm which allowed me to maintain some semblance of even temperament.”

This is just as well, since Willie embraces a rigorous climbing ethic. He steels himself to reach the true highest points on mountains such as Rishiri-dake, Daisen and Asama, all of which involve a degree of personal risk. On Hodaka, he and his companion save the life of a lost hiker by sharing their tent with him. By mountain 57, which happens to be Myōkō-san, he’s starting to ask himself “Who will I be when I walk out of the mountains?”

So what does he learn during his Hyakumeizan campaign? Camping below Mountain 100, Ōdaigahara, Willie answers the question like this:

I’d set out with no preconceptions of finding myself or any of that belly button-baring nonsense. But I had learned lessons – it was impossible not to. My Japanese had improved – a bit, I suppose. I’d visited some spectacular places. I feared the outdoors less yet respected it more. I’d learned to listen to my gut. I could push myself when previously I may not have, but hold off when something unfathomable didn’t feel right …

Not only that but he gets his life sorted too. Starting out as a fancy-free bachelor, he ends the book with a wife, a kid and Lego spilt all across the rug in front of the sofa. Now can the One Hundred Mountains really do all that for a man? Readers, you will have to pick up the book and decide for yourselves.

And then, be warned, you may be inspired to lace up your boots and follow in Willie’s footprints through the mountains. As he says, “The first steps are the hardest, and things won’t necessarily go to plan, but it’s no good rotting in a nursing home forgotten by your kids with nothing but job performance reviews to reminisce over, is it?”

Mate, you couldn’t put the case for the Hyakumeizan fairer than that.

References

William Banff, Tozan: A Japanese Mountain Odyssey – Willie Walks, Bozu Books, 2024.

Will Ferguson, Hokkaido Highway Blues: Hitchhiking Japan, Canongate Books Ltd, 2000.