On 4 December 2002, Doug Scott, legendary Himalayan alpinist, delivered a keynote address at a symposium on 'Directions in Himalayan Climbing', organised as part of the Kathmandu International Mountain Film Festival. In the excerpts from Scott's speech below, he discusses the primordial connection of mankind to climbing, the psychology of mountaineering, his own experience pioneering a route up the southwest face of Mount Everest in 1975, and, above all, the need for "commitment" to the mountain while climbing it.
Humanity
To have any understanding about the future of mountaineering, we had better first look back to have an idea of how we got to where we are now. It has been about 200,000 years since homo sapiens first emerged and began hunting-gathering in small groups for mutual aid, though there are just a few remnants of hunter-gatherers left in the world. But they were everywhere 10,000 years ago before the first urbanisation. The chief characteristics of this lengthy period experienced by our ancestors involved mainly facing uncertainty and risk. And to survive in those frugal times they had to be resourceful, imaginative, exploratory and cooperative.
Climbers might just be catching my drift here and making parallel connections. It was not survival of the fittest, as Darwin was supposed to have said but did not, but survival of the most social. Life was not one constant quest for the next mouthful of food. For these hunter-gatherers, it seems, did have leisure time, probably more than most of us here have. They had time to paint and carve. We know from their cave paintings and the figurines caved out of rock and ivory that they had the ability to develop the level of everyday consciousness that we experience and connect with the sub-conscience. In other words, they naturally developed spirituality, and got into religion.