“I noted the situation was serious”

Investigating the literature of near-death experiences in the mountains

“Up and About”, Doug Scott’s recently published autobiography, shows that the Himalayan veteran still wields a deft pen. Within the first pages, there’s also more than a hint at why so few of Scott’s peers got to write their own life stories:

"This reminded me of when I was avalanched on Mazeno Peak in Pakistan. Rattling down a 500-metre gully, with time suspended, I found myself observing everything I experienced, as though from a bubble. There was no fear, just a series of impressions: tumbling down over rock and ice cliffs, wondering at how resilient the human body is and that I was still alive, turning this way and that, my whole weight bouncing off my right ankle. There was no pain, but I noted the situation was serious. I was then in space, clearing a step, sliding with the snow but unaware of the speed of my descent; I had time to register it was like being up with Leo Dickinson in his hot air balloon, not aware of the wind because we were moving at the same speed. I bumped gradually to a halt, partially buried on the glacier below but able to clear the snow away from my face, release the waist belt on my rucksack and breathe more easily."

"Aufstieg I" by Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

Unlike many a hard-climbing contemporary – Dougal Haston, Peter Boardman and Joe Tasker are just a few names that come to mind – Doug Scott has survived to tell his tale. With the passage quoted above, he therefore becomes the latest contributor to a select genre – the corpus, if that is the right word, of mountaineering near-death experiences.

“Time suspended … no fear, just a series of impressions … no pain”: the essential elements of Scott’s experience on Mazeno Peak are widely confirmed in this literature. Take, for example, the accident that befell Albert Heim (1849–1937) on the Säntis, a mountain in eastern Switzerland, in 1871. Then a doctoral candidate in geology, Heim was leading a party down a steep snowfield when he lost his footing and slid over a cliff. During a fall of more than sixty feet, he felt no pain – that came later – yet all his thoughts remained coherent and very clear. And time slowed to a crawl: “What I felt in five to ten seconds could not be described in ten times that length of time”.

Albert Heim

Heim had ample leisure for practical decision-making on his way down. He chose to keep hold of his alpenstock, as it might still be of use, and he thought of taking off his glasses, in case they shattered. He also decided to call out to his companions immediately, should he survive the fall, so that they wouldn’t unduly hurry their own descent down the dangerous cliff. But that was by no means all:

"My next thought was that I would not be able to give my inaugural university lecture that had been announced for five days later. I considered how the news of my death would arrive for my loved ones and I consoled them in my thoughts. Then I saw my whole past life take place in many images, as though on a stage at some distance from me. I saw myself as the chief character in the performance. Everything was transfigured as though by a heavenly light and everything was beautiful without grief, without anxiety, and without pain. The memory of very tragic experiences I had had was clear but not saddening. I felt no conflict or strife; conflict had been transmuted into love. Elevated and harmonious thoughts dominated and united the individual images, and like magnificent music a divine calm swept through my soul. I became ever more surrounded by a splendid blue heaven with delicate roseate and violet cloudlets. I swept into it painlessly and softly and I saw that now I was falling freely through the air and that under me a snow field lay waiting. Objective observations, thoughts, and subjective feelings were simultaneous. Then I heard a dull thud and my fall was over."

After the impact, Heim lay unconscious for half an hour. His companions had to carry him down to the nearest alp huts. Yet, five days later, he gave his inaugural lecture on schedule, and apparently to good effect.

Two years later, at an extraordinarily young age, Heim was appointed professor of geology at the Zurich Polytechnic (now the Federal Institute of Technology). His approach to science would be far from blinkered. Besides elucidating the structure of the Alps, he found time to investigate topics as diverse as water-divining and sky colours. And, in due course, he returned to the subject of consciousness during near-fatal mountain accidents.

"Absturz IV" by Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

The question Heim asked was, quite simply: in a mountaineering fall, or similar accident, what did the victim experience in the last seconds of his life? After collecting the experiences of other accident survivors, he presented his findings to the Swiss Alpine Club’s Uto Section in Zurich on February 26, 1892. The paper was subsequently published in the club’s yearbook as “Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz”. An English translation, “The experience of dying from falls”, appeared in a 1972 edition of Omega, a journal that is somewhat lugubriously dedicated to “the psychological study of dying, death, bereavement, suicide and other lethal behaviors”.

Heim's conclusion was remarkable: in practically all individuals who faced death through accidental falls, a similar mental state developed:

“There was no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain; but rather calm seriousness, profound acceptance, and a dominant mental quickness and sense of surety. Mental activity became enormous, rising to a hundred-fold velocity or intensity. The relationships of events and their probable outcomes were overviewed with objective clarity. No confusion entered at all. Time became greatly expanded. The individual acted with lightning-quickness in accord with accurate judgment of his situation. In many cases there followed a sudden review of the individual's entire past; and finally the person falling often heard beautiful music and fell in a superbly blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets. Then consciousness was painlessly extinguished, usually at the moment of impact, and the impact was, at the most, heard but never painfully felt. Apparently hearing is the last of the senses to be extinguished.”

Whymper on the Matterhorn: alpinism's first NDE?

Most of the case histories examined by Heim were drawn from Switzerland or nearby. Mentioned but not quoted are two British exponents of alpinism’s “golden age”. These are the physicist John Tyndall, who was avalanched on Piz Morteratsch in 1864, and Edward Whymper, who fell 200 feet down an ice-gully while exploring the Matterhorn’s south side two years earlier. In describing this latter accident, Whymper produced what may be the Magna Carta of mountaineering near-death literature – although, in keeping with the buttoned-up conventions of the Victorian era, he demoted the experience to a mere footnote within his best-known book:

“As it seldom happens that one survives such a fall, it may be interesting to record what my sensations were during its occurrence. I was perfectly conscious of what was happening, and felt each blow; but, like a patient under chloroform, experienced no pain. Each blow was, naturally, more severe than that which preceded it, and I distinctly remember thinking, “Well, if the next is harder still, that will be the end!” Like persons who have been rescued from drowning, I remember that the recollection of a multitude of things rushed through my head, many of them trivialities or absurdities, which had been forgotten long before; and, more remarkable, this bounding through space did not feel disagreeable. But I think that in no very great distance more, consciousness as well as sensation would have been lost, and upon that I base my belief, improbable as it seems, that death by a fall from a great height is as painless an end as can be experienced.”

In a sense, Heim had no need to call Whymper to the witness stand. For the Englishman’s experience tallies almost exactly with the patterns later identified by the Swiss scholar. The absence of pain, the “multitude of things” rushing through the victim’s mind and Whymper’s conclusion all accord with Heim’s analysis. Only the radical compression of time mentioned by Heim and perhaps his “blue heaven containing roseate cloudlets” are missing from Whymper’s account.

Speaking of those roseate cloudlets, is it possible that Albert Heim was guilty of overselling death by falling? He presented his findings to a section of the Swiss Alpine Club that had been founded less than a decade before. By encouraging more people to participate, the activities of mass-membership clubs such as the SAC unavoidably raised the mountain accident rate, even as they strove, in many ways successfully, to improve safety standards. In concluding his paper, Heim mentions that his observations had been a comfort to a mother who had lost two sons in falls. So it would have been only natural for Heim to emphasise the consolatory aspects of his findings.

"Absturz III" by Ferdinand Hodler, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

Or it may be that different people experience things in different ways. After all, Heim himself said only that his findings applied to “95 percent of victims”. That leaves some room for variation.

Frank Smythe

Half a century after Heim published his paper, a young English mountaineer by the name of Frank Smythe scaled a difficult overhang in the Dolomites. Perhaps carried away by the euphoria of the moment, he then failed to set up a safe belay before allowing his companion to start climbing. Thus, when a hold broke away under the second climber, Smythe was dragged off his stance. As he fell into the void, he assumed that he was “as good as dead”. Yet he found himself insensible to bumps and blows, “as though all life’s forces were in the process of undergoing some fundamental evolutionary change, the change called death…”

So far, Smythe’s account cleaves closely to Heim’s findings – almost as if underlining how well these have stood the test of time. What follows, though, departs in some details from the Swiss scholar's playbook, or even goes beyond it:

“For how long I experienced this crescendo of power I cannot say. Time no longer existed as time ... Then, suddenly, this feeling was superseded by a feeling of complete detachment, indifference to what happened to my body ... Had the tenant already departed in anticipation of the wreck that was to follow? Was it merely a mental effect due to a sudden and intense nervous strain? It is not within my province to discuss that which only death can prove; yet to me this experience was a convincing one; it convinced me that consciousness survives beyond the grave.”

In hindsight, Smythe was better qualified than most to describe a near-death experience in the mountains. Surviving this youthful mishap almost unscathed, he went on to become equally prolific as an alpinist, writer and photographer. Among other feats, he put up two hard new routes on the south side of Mt Blanc, made the first ascent of a Himalayan peak that was then the highest mountain ever climbed, and took part in three of the pre-war attempts on Everest.

On one of these expeditions, climbing at his physical and psychological limits close to the summit, Smythe saw hovering above him two bulbous objects with “what looked like squat, underdeveloped wings, whilst the other had a beak-like protuberance like the spout of a teakettle. They distinctly pulsated... as though they possessed some horrible quality of life."

"Absturz I" (detail) by Ferdinand Hoder, Swiss Alpine Museum, Bern

This was not the only occasion when Smythe met with mysteries that are not revealed to ordinary mortals. His biography notes an episode of automatic writing and, during a visit to a Scottish glen, a vision of ghostly figures which convinced him that he had been “vouchsafed a backward glimpse into a blood-stained page of Highland history”.

If Frank Smythe brought a greater-than-average sensibility to the experience of falling, it should be no surprise that he got more out of it than others have done. In this respect, the literature of near-death experiences resembles any other branch of travel writing – that what you see and hear depends a great deal on what you take with you on the journey.

References

Doug Scott, Up and About: the hard road to Everest, Vertebrate Press, 2015.

Albert Heim, “Notizen über den Tod durch Absturz”, Yearbook of the Swiss Alpine Club, 1892, translated as “The experience of dying from falls” and introduced by Russell Noyes and Roy Kletti, Omega, vol 3, no 1, February 1972.

Edward Whymper, Scrambles amongst the Alps in the years 1860-69.

Tony Smythe, My father, Frank: Unresting spirit of Everest, biography of Frank Smythe, 2013.

Images and ink (29)

Image: View of Azumino and Jōnen-dake, woodprint from the Hyakumeizan series, by Kogure Shinbō.

Ink: On Jōnen-dake, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

Unlike most of the remoter peaks in the Northern Alps, the beauty of the scenery around Jōnen's base matches that of the mountain itself. This is yet another reason for artistic souls to acquaint themselves with it. ...  Seen in winter season from the train that runs between Matsumoto and Ōmachi through the fields of Azumi, Jōnen is the lambent, glittering pyramid soaring above the foothills. Every time I see this sight, I vow to myself that I will climb the mountain again in the coming year.

Images and ink (28)

Image: View of Amakazari-yama, Sosaku woodprint, artist unknown

Ink: On Amakazari-yama, from Nihon Hyakumeizan (One Hundred Mountains of Japan) by Fukada Kyūya (1964):

A mountain should leave an impression on one’s heart, somebody has said. Certainly, my memories of a mountain are all the deeper if it has to be attempted several times, rather than succumbing at first nod. For me, Amakazari is that kind of mountain.

Thoughts from a bivouac ledge

Excerpt from the novella Bergfahrt by the Swiss author Ludwig Pohl, translated as Ascent by Donna Stonecipher:

The most important matter, the most difficult activity, of this night, was, as already mentioned, the fight against sleep. (For if he had fallen asleep, either he would never have reawakened or he would have awakened in such a state as to make any further action impossible.) And out of this endless struggle he emerged a victor, mostly. For there were tiny moments in which he did fall into a kind of half-sleep; no, however small the moments were, it was real sleep; for he dreamed. Such a dream lasted perhaps only seconds, and then his hard will battered him again from outside.

Thus he suddenly found himself in a warm, familiar chamber, remembering with sympathetic astonishment how he had just fancied himself to be exposed, freezing to the marrow on a narrow strip in a monstrous cliff wall; with the impenetrable blacks of the depths, with cliffs and glaciers jutting into the zenith of the heavens, as if he were caught in the throat of an unimaginably large animal, whose teeth were the towers and corner pillars; the dark abyss was its gullet, the stars its eyes.

And then there were the other moments, that were no longer dreams but a mix of waking and dreaming, exactly what one calls a hallucination. In such a moment he had suddenly found the definitive answer to the often asked question: "Why climb a mountain?"

For all of the usual answers were insufficient. For one's health? But there must certainly be other, and less costly, means for that. For the height? But what about funicular railways, aeroplanes? Because it's an especially substantial kind of sport, which, even if only in narrow circles, earns you a particular degree of kudos from an elite: that was better, but also insufficient. Now, this was it:

To escape from prison.

... And now?

References

Bergfahrt by Ludwig Pohl, translated as Ascent by Donna Stonecipher, Black Square Editions, 2012.

Image: "Das Biwak" ("The bivouac"), oil painting by Maurice Gallay in the collection of the Swiss Alpine Club Museum, Berne © - Photo Boissonnas, Geneva

Forthright exchange

From an interview with legendary Polish climber Voytek Kurtyka in Alpinist 43

“I'm really into people who are sensitive to beauty. To me, beauty is the door to another world. Don’t ask what world, because it will f*** up the whole conversation.”

(Quoted from The View from the Wall, interview by Zbyszek Skierski)

From the Letters page in Alpinist 48

A More Delicate Vocabulary

Like Clay G. (Letters, Alpinist 45), I was shocked by the language in Alpinist 43. In my experience, climbers are never so crude. Even in critical situations, they maintain decorum. For example, recently my friend Leonard Forthwith was leading me up Yosemite's famous Nightmare Crack. Encountering unexpected difficulties, he exclaimed, "Bosley, I fear I am about to topple over. Kindly guard the rope for me." I did so, although in fact Leonard regained his balance.

I offer you some future guidelines for propriety:

Crevasse fall: "Dear me, it is chilly down here."
Stove won't start: "How unfortunate. But we can still suck icicles."
Rappel rope doesn't reach: "This is surely a dilemma. Have you some extra Jumars?"
Dropped gear rack: "No doubt this was meant to be."
Forced to bivouac on an icy ledge: "Dawn is a mere twelve hours away."

I am certain that Voytek Kurtyka's regrettable adjective on Page 68 was a mistranslation of the original Polish. 

 Bosley Sidwell, Pokhara, Nepal

But who was first?

Mountain ascents can be traced to the dawn of Japanese history if not beyond

A luminary of the American Alpine Club recently got in touch to enquire if there is any evidence of "prehistoric" first ascents in Japan. Another AAC member, no less than Royal Robbins, once said that every first ascent is a creation, in the same sense as a painting or a song. That’s why alpine historians and guidebook writers alike take great pains to establish who was first on a particular mountain or route.

Taicho Daishi: the first high-altitude monk?

Records of mountaineering creativity go back a long way in Japan, thanks to the country’s great relief and a tradition of historical writing that dates back to the eighth century. According to the Hyakumeizan author, Mt Fuji was first climbed as early as the year 633, by the mountain mystic En no Ozunu, making this the highest peak in the world to have been scaled at that time.

Alas, the claim needs to be treated with a pinch of salt. Not only is En no Ozunu as much a semi-legendary as a historical figure but, in some accounts, he is said to have skimmed magically up the mountain every night. Perhaps he did it for the frequent flyer miles.

Summit shrine on Hakusan

In the Hakusan chapter of his most famous book, Fukada Kyūya puts forward a more credible early ascent. When the 2,702-metre volcano was opened in the first year of Yōrō (717) by the monk Taichō, it became the first high mountain in Japan to be climbed for religious ends, he says. Again, though, caution is in order. As Fukada grew up in its shadow, he would have lent a partial ear to any claims of priority on Hakusan’s behalf.

And sceptics might question if Taichō made his ascent at all. A modern scholar warns that “much of the story of Taicho's career is certainly fiction, yet enough details of his life correspond to information in other, more reliable sources to conclude that certain aspects are in all likelihood true”. Whether Taichō’s ascent of Hakusan is documented by one of those more reliable sources is a question that will have to be left for another time.

Moreover, there are rival claimants to the title of first Japanese ascent for religious ends. According to Wolfram Manzenreiter, Iide-san (2,105 metres) was opened in the second year of Hakuchi (651), by the monk Chitsū. However, in the relevant chapter of Nihon Hyakumeizan, Fukada makes no mention of Chitsū. Instead, he quotes from a shrine "testimonial" to the effect that the mountain was first climbed by none other than En no Ozunu – perhaps using up all those air miles.

Jizo figure on Iide-san (Wikipedia)

What can’t be contested is that, from the earliest historical times, monks roamed far and wide among Japan’s high mountains. Kūkai’s account of Monk Shōdō’s ascent of Nantai (2,484 metres) in 782 has the ring of real-life experience. In an inspired comparison, Fukada Kyūya likened the ageing monk’s feelings of joy and grief, when he reached the summit fifteen years after his first attempt, to those of the Himalayan pioneer H W Tilman atop Nanda Devi in 1936.

Less accessible mountains waited longer for first ascents. Situated far from the capital and wracked by violent eruptions through the Jōgan era (859–878), Mt Fuji probably kept all its suitors at bay until the eleventh century. Remoter still, the 3,000-metre peaks of central Honshū – later to be rebranded as the Japan Alps – remained outside the ken of literate folk until feudal times. The first recorded ascent of Yari-ga-take (3,180 metres), again by a monk, took place as late as 1828.

Proof of priority: the sword and staff from Tsurugi-dake

The monks got everywhere, though, leaving few or no first ascents for modern alpinists to claim, at least on Honshū. When, in July 1907, a party of army surveyors reached the summit of Tsurugi, the most rugged peak in the Japan Northern Alps, it turned out that they were not the first to visit what they had assumed to be an untrodden peak. In fact, the mountain had been climbed long before, as the surveyors realised when they discovered on the summit a spearhead and the tip of a priest's staff.

The relics on Tsurugi do raise an interesting question. Could the origins of mountain religion and mountain ascents be traced back even further, beyond the dawn of history? After all, some of Japan’s mountains have clearly been sacred from ancient times. For instance, burial mounds at the foot of Mt Miwa in Nara Prefecture show that the hill was revered for centuries before writing reached Japan. But what exactly the mountain stood for must remain for ever obscure.

Indeed, the obscurity of ancient traditions lies like a cloud over Mt Miwa and other sacred peaks. Because they left no records, we will never know what people of the pre-Asuka periods believed about mountains, and whether they climbed them. Is that what Princess Nukata was hinting at in the lines – possibly Japan’s oldest set of mountain verses – that the seventh-century poet and priestess contributed to the Manyōshū, Japan’s earliest poetic anthology?

O sweet-wine
Miwa Mountain
Until blue-earth
Nara Mountain's mountain crest
Should come between
And you be hidden in behind,
Until road-bendings
Should pile back upon themselves,
To the very end
I would have kept you:
O my mountain,
What right
Have heartless clouds to cover you?

Envoy

Do you dare to hide
Miwa Mountain in this way?
At least you, O clouds,
Should have greater heart than that:
What right have you to cover it?

(translated by Edwin Cranston)

References

Fukada Kyūya, Nihon Hyakumeizan translated as One Hundred Mountains of Japan

Mikael Adolphson, Edward Kamens, Stacie Matsumoto, Heian Japan: Centers and Peripheries

Wolfram Manzenreiter, Die soziale Konstruktion des japanischen Alpinismus: Kultur, Ideologie und Sport im modernen Bergsteigen, Vienna, 2000

Edwin A. Cranston, A Waka Anthology, Volume One: The Gem Glistening Cup, Stanford University Press, 1993

A meizan of Austria

Wherever they live, people feel the same way about their local mountain

Introducing his own local mountain, Fukada Kyūya wrote that “A mountain watches over the home village of most Japanese people. Tall or short, near or far, some mountain watches over our native village like a tutelary deity … And however much our lives may change, the mountain will always be there, just as it always has been, to welcome us back to our home village.”

As it happened, the Hyakumeizan author studied French literature during his student days. Thus, he could not have been acquainted with the works of Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868). Yet this passage, from a short story by the Austrian author, makes perfect sense to anyone who has a familiar mountain or “meizan” on their horizon:

"South of the village you see a snowy mountain with dazzling horn-shaped peaks, rising, as it seems, from the house-tops themselves, but actually quite far away. All year round, summer and winter, there it is with its jutting crags and white expanses, looking down upon the valley.

As the most prominent feature of the landscape and ever before the eyes of the villagers, the mountain has been the inspiration of many a tale. There is not a man, young or old, in the village who has not something to tell about its peaks and crags, its caves and crevasses, its streams and torrents – either something that has happened to himself or that he has heard about from others.

This mountain is the pride of the village, as though the people had made it themselves, and with due respect to their honesty we can't swear to it that once in a while they would not fib for the honour and glory of their mountain.

Besides being notable in itself, the mountain is actually profitable, since on the arrival of a party of mountain-climbers to make the ascent from the valley, the villagers serve as guides; and to have been a guide, had this or that experience, known this or that spot is a distinction which affords anyone great satisfaction. When they sit together in the common room at the inn, they are always talking about their feats and strange adventures, never failing to mention what this or that traveller said and how much he had given them for their labours.

The mountain also sends down from its snowy flanks streams that feed a lake in the forest, from which a brook emerges and flows merrily through the valley, driving the saw-mill, the grist-mill, and small machinery of various kinds, providing cleanliness for the village and watering the cattle. The forest tracts afford timber and also break the force of the avalanches.

Through subterranean channels and loose soil at these altitudes water filters and, coursing vein-like through the valley, comes to the surface in little fountains and springs from which the people drink. And as time and again they offer strangers this unrivalled, much extolled water, they never stop to think how useful it is, accepting it simply as something that has always been there."

Reference

From Rock crystal: a Christmas tale by Adalbert Stifter, translated by Elizabeth Mayer, Pantheon Books, 1945