It is not just buffoons who come to grief climbing mountains

Against stupidity, the poet Schiller observed, the gods themselves struggle in vain. So if they’re keeping up with the human news on Mount Olympus, there will doubtless have been some eye-rolling at recent incidents in which mountaineers in the Alps and the Dolomites encountered tourists attempting to scale precipitous peaks in preposterously unsuitable garb.

One chap was photographed in deep snow wearing knee-length shorts from which protruded his bare legs, pink with cold. Another picture showed a woman trudging bareheaded through a snowfield in what looked like skinny jeans, handbag slung over her shoulder, a carrier bag in one hand.

Italy’s National Alpine Rescue Corps, reporting numbers of people who “approach the high peaks as though they are going for a city-centre stroll, wearing gym shoes, jeans and sweatshirts”, warned that “the mountain is an extraordinary place but… we have to respect it”.

Meanwhile, Jean-marc Peillex, mayor of the commune that includes the summit of Mont Blanc, made a trenchant call for “ill-prepared thrillseekers” and “dangerous buffoons” to be banned from attempting ascents of the peak, after 15 climbers died on the mountain this summer.

The border between a dangerous buffoon and a dashing adventurer occupies debatable ground. A century or so ago, a certain sort of (largely patrician) recklessness was generally regarded as heroic, rather than stupidly risky. The soldier, scholar, diplomat and purblind adventurer, Aubrey Herbert, whose exploits were recorded by his biographer (and granddaughter), Margaret Fitzherbert, in The Man Who Was Greenmantle, began his intrepid career at the turn of the last century by scaling the spires of Oxford – an undergraduate feat that would now be considered more boorish than romantic.

Yet if one were to ask the ill-equipped modern tourists why they chose to attempt a mountain peak – rather than, say, a nice stroll on a flat surface – they might echo George Mallory’s answer when he was asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest: “Because it was there.” Mass tourism and the democratisation of adventure have created intractable problems for the guardians of the mountains; but the longing, however misguided, of individuals to measure themselves against nature at its most demanding is apparently inextinguishable.

Is the answer, as Mayor Peillex suggests, to professionalise access to the mountains, allowing only the properly qualified to climb? Perhaps; but a few pages on from last week’s Daily Telegraph report of the clueless Alpine tourists was the obituary of the impeccably experienced and resourceful climber, Ted Atkins, who died, aged 60, in a climbing accident in the Dolomites. The former RAF officer, who invented an award-winning oxygen delivery system, was a veteran – as the obituary put it – of “a number of eventful ascents”. In the same week, I read the obituary of a charismatic young climber who perished last year, aged 22, on an expedition far less taxing than others he had accomplished.

So it is not just buffoons who come to grief on mountains. Sometimes the well prepared and brilliant suffer, too. The difference is that they do what they do for the intellectual and technical challenge, not the selfie, taking responsibility for themselves, rather than expecting the mountain rescue services to make everything all right. Theirs, too, may be a kind of folly – but it is a noble folly.