Hello everybody and welcome to a new episode of my channel.
This time I would like to talk about a crucial topic: how to approach mountaineering.
As usually I will try to be as synthetic as possible.
You know I love short videos that get to the heart of the matter.
First of all, a short introduction.
Above all mountaineering means admitting our own limits.
It let us to acquire an intellectual maturity capable of recognizing risks and consequently
the moment to stop.
Remember: Mountaineering is 20-percent physical and 80-percent mental.
When you are faced with a choice in the mountains, it is important to understand the consequence
of that choice.
Evaluating consequences allows you to assess risk.
Consequence is a part of every mountaineering decision.
Learning mountaineering is above all this.
I divided the things to do into 4 main points: 1- Basic skills learning
2- fitness gain 3- setting
4- learning Technique At the end my personal experience.
First, you should acquire a set of preparatory skills which are crucial for mountaineering.
The basic skills you need are cartography and meteorology.
More navigation experience you have the better it is.
Practice at home by looking at map and maybe plotting a course between two points.
Plan walks and choose point of interest you can navigate to.
My suggestion is to practice with maps.
Only when you fill yourself confident with paper maps, you will pass to GPS compass.
Another useful exercise you should practice is to estimate distances.
Try with things near your home, confirm your estimations and walk these distances.
You should routinely look at forecast on paper or tv and at the same time watch the sky.
You should try to catch signs of weather changes: cloud shapes, wing direction, and so on.
You must study.
Read books and article on these arguments.
Apply your knowledge in everyday life.
Second, get fit.
Include walking and stair climbing in your daily routine.
If you have enough time, consider regular running and cycling.
It will help you in two ways.
First, you will be used to fatigue.
Second, you will fill better in high altitude and hypobaric sets.
Do weights to strengthen the upper body.
it will be especially useful for not having a little harmonic development of the body.
in addition, many of the muscles in the upper body are critical for balance and walking,
especially the muscles of the back, shoulders and abdominals.
you should also do a lot of proprioception and stretching exercises.
Remember, you do not need to join expensive gyms.
You must train large muscle groups with basic simple exercises.
The famous mountaineer Reinhold Messner says he trained doing push-ups on the ceiling beams
at home.
Third, approach the mountain for small steps.
It is not obvious.
in fact, many people decide to start mountaineering without experience.
About that, I have to tell a story.
I have a colleague who was born and raised in a seaside town.
He moved to my city at the age of thirty.
my city is not far from the highest mountains of the alps.
For example, Mont Blanc is just an hour away by car.
many other lower but equally fascinating peaks are closer.
obviously, many of our mutual friends and colleagues, including myself, are mountain
enthusiasts.
Accordingly, in my city you can smell mountaineering flavor
one day we were at work when he said the evening before he watched on TV a fantastic documentary
on mountaineering.
Therefore, he has decided to go to Peru the following year to climb Alpamayo.
For the uninitiated, this 6000-meter-high mountain is in the list of the most dangerous
in the world.
Imagine the comments of the other colleagues for this declaration.
The problem is that my colleague did not understand the absurdity of his statement.
And he is a person with an excellent level of education and high responsibility.
From that moment on, my colleague was considered an idiot by all.
I suggest you TO not make the same mistake.
But do not think it is difficult to do this error.
We all have our Alpamayo.
mine was a mountain near my house.
although from the harmless aspect it needed an exceptionally long and difficult path to
reach the summit.
Finally, to reach to the top you have to climb some rocks.
at the age of ten, without preparation, I convinced a friend who had never been to the
mountains to come with me.
ok, we survived but it was just luck. in all it took us almost 15 hours and as we had not
yet returned late at night our parents were forced to call rangers.
You can imagine how we were welcomed once back home
Since we are no longer 10 years old children, we need to think well about what we are doing.
The mountain belongs to everyone and there are no gates to enter.
Everyone can go wherever they want.
So, do it!
Start with simple hikes and walk more and more.
Fourth: learn mountaineering techniques.
There are basically three ways to do this: a simple one, a classic one, a more expensive
one.
The simplest way is to follow friends who already practice mountaineering.
This is also the less expensive way.
Obviously, if you are lucky, your friends are good climbers.
Otherwise your risk Is to learn wrong mountaineering technique exposing yourself to risks.
There are few concepts you need to learn well.
Then the experience is needed to understand when and where to apply the different techniques.
The classic way is to attend a mountaineering course.
For example, National mountaineering Clubs organize them.
In alternative, I found out many courses organized in indoor climbing wall or by mountain guide
associations.
There you will find experienced certified teachers who can explain you the correct techniques
and make clear when to use them.
Additionally, in these courses you can find other people who are approaching mountaineering.
Therefore, if you don't have friends with your same interest you can find new ones to
start with.
The expensive way is to start with a mountain guide.
of course, this is also the most beautiful and formative way.
In this case you will have an instructor prepared all for you, a professional who explains mountaineering
and climbing techniques.
a person who knows you and, consequently, your deficiencies and strengths.
I would like to tell you my personal experience.
My father was a mountaineer.
Not long after my mother was pregnant, she made my father facing with the moral problem
of continuing with a rather dangerous sport with the new responsibilities acquired.
Consequently, my father stopped climbing and mountaineering.
It was the year 1983.
Really you cannot expect that my fate may have been different from that of my father.
I could pursue my desire for the mountains only once I became independent.
And at that point I also had no idea how to get started.
I started with some walks, going out more and more challenging with stops in shelters
or bivouacs.
I liked it.
Therefore, I decided to go to the headquarters of the alpine club of my city and to enroll
in a course.
The first I found.
It was a basic climbing course.
It was one of the wettest years I can remember, and, thanks to some working problems, at the
end of the course none of the participants felt particularly ready to tackle a cliff
alone.
However, my new friends and I decided to climb in artificial wall to get familiar with the
safety systems and climbing techniques.
One day I went to a newly opened mountaineering shop.
It was not far from my workplace.
I had to buy a rope and some quickdraws.
Once there, I started talking to one of the shop assistants.
I discovered he was a colleague’s best friend.
So, I felt free to tell him how I was feeling in a dead end why I didn't know how to improve
my preparation.
Smiling, he pointed to a poster hanging on a wall.
it was a list of courses offered by an association of local mountain guides.
I immediately called the phone number on it.
A week later I was to the mountains with new mates to take a basic course in winter mountaineering.
This time: no theory and one hundred percent practice.
all theory explained directly on the glacier.
a fantastic course ended with the climbing of the Gran Paradiso peak, one of the simplest
four-thousanders of Italian’s Alps.
Once I took the basic necessary skills to be independent, I started with friends to
go to easy trails.
And so on.
Then once or two a year, when I want to go to some particularely difficult trails, I call
the guide who held me the course and that is became a friend.
That’s all folks!!!
I hope I have been useful and interesting.
Leave me suggestions and comments.
Enjoy.