SEASONAL NOTE ON ALPINE SPORT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 1, Issue 18, 27 October 1939, Page 10

SEASONAL NOTE ON ALPINE SPORT

LF Jenkins knows to the day and hour when Don George beat Earl McCready, when they drew, and when McCready won. He even knows on what day of the year horses have their racing birthdays, but when he allowed 2YD to put him through their questionnaire he did not know what a "slalom" might be. Conversely, Barry Caulfeild and Ernst Skardarasy, when they were on the air, were less informative about racing, wrestling and Rugby than about their own special sport of ski-ing. They would, in fact, know a good deal less about other sports than other sportsmen would know about them, for mountain sports,

like sea sports, as we recorded last week, demand of their devotees that they must relish seclusion. They find in their solitude an excellent excuse for knowing as little as possible about other people. Ski-ing, with an ess and a _ haitch, although chosen to introduce ‘this discourse, may be dismissed immediately with its parent, mountaineering, remaining to amplify the theme. For the

skier, if he will avoid the crowd, must go touring, and few skiers have the energy. Unseen And Unsung But mountaineers, as much by inclination as by the nature of their craft, are forced into solitude. The skier is generous enough to share with others the spectacle of his devious manoeuvres, More than often his enjoyment relates closely to the enjoyment he thus imparts; but the climber works unseen and prefers to be unsung. Until October he gives up his moufitains to the skier, knowing full well they will not be overrun until he once again has use for them. September sees him looking for the wet-snow avalanches that spell Spring (and wondering just when some ignorant skier will get caught in one). October finds him trying out his thighs again; loosening the grip of Winter on his diaphragm by toil on local hills. November gladdens his heart with budding celmisia and the first edelweiss, as Spring and Summer draw him farther afield. By Christmas he is ready for the tops and they, incidentally, are ready for him, entrenched behind the battlements of the nor’wester. There is no record of a climber ever dying of ennui, or any other disease of civilisation. Unaccountably, some have died of tuberculosis; but without blaming the mountains. None has been run over by chamois. In no mountaineering history will you find that any mountaineer has ever gone mad, either from too much company or too little. The Optimists They are all confirmed optimists. They have to be. They say that in the mountains they expect one fine day in three. That is optimism. On the West Coast of the South Island more than 200 inches of rain fall annually. That is a lot, but there is still plenty left to fall on the mountains. The climber’s weather average is nearer 1 in 10. Winter was late again this year but set to work to some purpose after June and was still going strong in September, when by rights it should have ended. There is plenty of snow now to close the bergschrunds and make their approaches easier. Optimism does not mean invariable good humour. They are saying now that snow is a good thing. When they get amongst it, and sweat knee-deep through it, with the sun frying them and the glare blinding them, they will curse the snow and long for shade. They are the first to admit, just as Englishmen will gladly admit to foreigners, that they are more than a little mad-by ordinary standards — to submit their bodies to heat, and frost, and being wet, and exhausted; but there will be reason in their counter charge that it is also more than a little mad to submit bodies and brains to the infinitely greater and more dangerously wearying strain of living ig a city. Berg Heill

% Contributors to this page have lately been discussing common points in yachting and mountaineering. Hence this unusual illustration for this week’s note on mountaineering: the figure on the mast happens to be a climber who somehow strayed from Canterbury’s mountains to Wellington Harbour, This association of the two interests is not uncommon, We can’t vouch for Ernst Skardarasy (who appears in 4YZ programmes next week) but Barry Caulfeild, the ski instructor who has talked for the ZB stations, has a nautical hobby when he comes down from the hills: eating oysters and digging for toheroas. But we do not possess a photograph of a skier chasing toheroas along the Ninety-Mile Beach. Our prize bun for the first one sent in,