Emory, Vision Quest

Vision Quest: Recreating the Mountaineering Experience through Digital Media

One source for consideration in the quest to develop media that are truly educational and therapeutic is to examine activities that rely on a high and prolonged sense of physical and psychological coherence. The concept of sense of coherence can be broadly defined as a view of life that allows people “to consider their external and internal resources, to identify andmobilize them, to promote effective coping by finding solutions,and to resolve tension in a health-promoting manner”(Mayer and Thiel, 2014, p.1), and is related to Jung’s transcendent function—the removal of the separation between the conscious and unconscious mind (as cited in Campbell, p. 273). Paradoxically, enough, such an examination might profitably be directed toward activities such as extreme sports that, on their surface, appear to be primarily physical in nature. The sport of mountaineering stands as a prime example of this—although alpinism requires a high level of physical fitness, it ultimately involves all four aspects of human health—physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.[1]During the days and hours a mountaineer spends in what is often an unforgiving environment, the alignment of these aspects is of paramount importance. Obviously, the ability to approximate the sense of coherence essential for mountaineers would be beneficial to individuals in any setting. This, then, raises the following questions for research: by what mechanisms might we bring lessons from alpinism to what is becoming an increasingly urban population? Can media-based analogies be developed that reflect the physical and psychological techniques mountaineers use to maintain a sense of coherence?Certain types of drama-based media, built on objective correlatives drawn between the direct climbing experience and a mediated reality, may provide avenues worth further exploration.

Mountaineering has been described as an extremely literary sport, having been the subject of numerous critically well-regarded books such as Heinrich Harrer’s 1959 The White Spider, James Salter’s 1988 Solo Faces, and David Robert’s 1991 The Mountain of my Fear. To date, however, efforts to recreate the mountaineering experience through mainstream media, particularly digital media, have been both limited and generally unsuccessful. The majority of films that involve mountaineering have generally used climbing as an aspect of setting, with the plot being driven by conflict other than the “man versus nature” one that would be expected in the attempt to portray an ascent of a challenging peak. Of the few major productions that do at least place their characters in a mountain setting, many seem to find that climbing itself needs other risk factors added to make the experience thrilling enough for a mainstream audience. Two egregious examples of this type of film include Columbia Pictures ‘2000 production, “Vertical Limit”, which drew this comment from “Three Film Buffs” reviewer Scott Nash: “In fact, if you ever have the choice of being trapped, halfway up a mountain, or of having to watch this movie, then I advise you to don that parka and long underwear” (2000, Dec.10). In this film, the mere ascent of K-2, probably the world’s most challenging major peak, is deemed not to be challenging enough in itself, so characters are, by a plot device, required to climb while carrying jugs of nitroglycerine in their backpacks. Similarly, Tri-Star Picture’s 1993 “Cliffhanger”, drops a team of Uzi-wielding thieves into the mountains, where they discover a true mountaineer (played by Sylvester Stallone) and spend much of the time requiring him to scale dangerous cliffs without his shirt. While there have been several excellent films devoted to at least the attempt to recreate the climbing experience, these films, such as 2008’s“North Face” and especially 2004’s “Touching the Void” (discussed in more detail below), have been smaller budget, independent productions.

Other forms of media have not been particularly successful in capturing the climbing experience either. In video games, when climbing is built into the plot, it appears primarily as a type of stunt that must be performed, with one example of this being designer Naughty Dog’s, 2009 Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, which has glorious settings in the Himalayas and the mythological mountain setting of Shambhala, but uses the mountains as a device in the action platforming genre, with the character leaping from hold to hold as the plot requires. Even ostensibly objective media have difficulty representing the climbing experience. News coverage of accidents is frequently so garbled that climbers themselves have to interpret stories in order to ascertain what actually happened. On occasion, even climbers themselves return to publish books that directly contradict one another, with perhaps the most obvious example of this being the controversy that arose from Jon Krakauer’s highly successful book “Into Thin Air” (1997), which described the tragic events on Mount Everest in 1996 and ascribed blame to several climbers, notably guide Anatoli Boukreev. Boukreev responded with a book of his own, The Climb (1997), providing his own version of events and initiating a debate that is ongoing in climbing circles.

The reasons behind media’s ongoing failure to accurately portray mountaineering are immediately evident. The number of people involved in mountaineering as a percentage of the general population is small, and the areas in which the activity occurs are generally remote. In addition, the landscapes and atmospheric conditions through which climbers move are rife with opportunities for perceptual distortion. At times, simply the configuration of the landscape itself can produce confusion. For example, climbing guides for both Mount Rainier and Mount Hood list the ending stages of the descent as being especially dangerous. While one would expect that simply following the fall line downhill would lead one back to the lodge and safety, the reality is that, in both cases, trusting one’s instincts leads into difficulty. The Mount Hood National Forest, “Mount Hood Detailed Climbing Information” webpage says the following: “Poor visibility, particularly when descending, can pull you off route.Use your compass and/or GPS. Following the fall line from Crater Rock will pull you down into Zigzag Canyon - not back to Timberline Lodge.” (U.S. Forest Service, n.d.). The same disorienting effect occurs on the descent from Camp Muir to Paradise Lodge on Mount Rainer, where a failure to retain focus leads one onto either the Paradise or Nisqually Glaciers rather than to safety. One of many examples is described in Accidents in North American Mountaineering 1991, this situation led to a situation in which three highly trained soldiers from a Special Forces unit had to spend two unplanned nights on the mountain before making their way back to the lodge, with one soldier suffering from frostbite and another from a back injury. The cause of the accident was given as follows: “The three became disoriented and descended Paradise Glacier instead of the [safer] Muir Snowfield“(The Mountaineers, p. 48.)

The disorientation caused by whiteouts as an atmospheric condition is especially severe. Again, multiple media definitions of the condition are in themselves inaccurate, describing the effect as being limited only to conditions involving falling snow. A more exact definition can be found in the Cambridge Dictionaries Online: “a weathercondition in which snow and cloudschange the way light is reflected so that only very darkobjects can be seen.” In essence, under whiteout conditions, earth, air and sky all are one uniform color and visibility becomes limited to several feet, in severe cases to the point at which even other climbers on a rope team disappear. This form of sensory deprivation not only makes navigation difficult—it frequently also leads to hallucinations. An article by Hadley Leggett in Wiredquoted psychiatrist Paul Fletcher’s comments on a sensory deprivation study: “This is a pretty robust finding….It appears that, when confronted by lack of sensory patterns in our environment, we have a natural tendency to superimpose our own patterns” (2009). Alpinists move through these conditions for hours, often while extremely fatigued, and they frequently face the challenge of maintaining their focus and staying on route while dealing with what are essentially high-elevation mirages. As Wallace R. Hansen noted in his book Greenland’s Icy Fury, “Weird side effects [of whiteouts] include hallucinations, or at least strange illusory images” (1994, p. 158). Climber Todd Wiggins, when recounting his descent of Nepal’s Mera Peak, reported that he unclipped from the team’s rope because he saw the team entering the safety of a grove of trees, when in reality they were on a narrow, rocky ridge far above tree line (Personal communication, April 12, 2015). In essence, mountaineers in these conditions must navigate treacherous areas while deprived of almost any reliable sensory information.

While all of these factors—the public’s limited experience, and the confusion brought on by disorienting landscapes and the climber’s exhaustion—play a role in the media’s limited capacity to recreate the alpine experience, the central cause of the disconnection arises from the fact that mountaineering, which superficially appears to be a physical activity, is in reality grounded in the psychology of individual climbers, each of whom functions in relative isolation for a great portion of any climb. Mountaineers are guided not only by conscious decisions regarding any summit attempt, but also by internal motivation, mental tricks, subconscious drives, and archetypal frames based on the often-unstated narratives of why climbers climb. As an unnamed female climber says in Maria Coffey’s Explorers of the Infinite, “The scariest thing for climbers….is having to look at why they climb” (2008, p. 3). The internal nature of climbing and the mystery of what motivates climbers presents the primary source of the difficulty the media faces in attempting to recreate the positive benefits of a mountaineering mentality.

In order to identify qualities from the climbing mindset that can be recreated in media, one needs first to identify and describe the mental environment in which mountaineers function. Physical skill plays a necessary but not sufficient role in climbing, and though one might expect that risk and adrenalin are the predominate factors in developing a certain state of mind, the reality is that climbing involves long periods that can only be described as drudgery. Although the sense of team is extremely important, mountaineers often cannot hear one another, and at times cannot even see one another, so they travel vast distances over large amounts of time in isolation. As noted above, at times they traverse disorienting landscapes, made even more so by sensory deprivation and exhaustion. In a sense, climbers frequently move locked entirely within their own minds, a state of mind more akin to dreaming than waking. Viewed from the perspective of our ordinary, day-to-day cognition, the task of climbing a serious mountain comes to seem almost impossible. One’s judgement and one’s awareness of the surrounding environment may mean the difference between life and death, but this extremity of focus must be maintained under sensory and emotional conditions that would seem certain to produce its opposite.

Although alpinists function in relative isolation, their responses when asked as to how they manage in these challenging environments are relatively uniform. Climbers need to be intrinsically motivated, and they need to exercise self-discipline from the onset of any journey. Pace becomes extremely important because climbing by the “dash and gasp” method—charging ahead until one is breathless—is too physically taxing to carry a mountaineer forward over long distances. In order to avoid this, it comes important to fall into a rhythm, and climbing “how to” guides provide explicit direction on how to move through steep terrain. According to Mountaineering, the Freedom of the Hills, “The most valuable technique is setting the right pace” (The Mountaineers, 1992, p. 81). Pacing on steep terrain is achieved through techniques such as the rest step, a movement which deliberately slows pace by adding a pause between steps and by synchronizing one’s breathing with one’s movements. When climbing steep glacial terrain, alpinists frequently adopt the French step, a method intended to keep all of one’s crampon points on the slope, but which does so with a movement much like a dance step, a diagonal maneuver in which one foot swings in around the other, with that two-step sequence punctuated by the placement of the ice ax. Again, especially at higher elevations, each of those steps in the sequence is tied to one’s breathing.

In addition to these formal techniques on which mountaineers are trained, every climber adopts techniques of self-motivation. These range from mantra-like exhortations--“this is necessary” or “it’s business time”--to counting, to singing and to the repetition of jokes and stories close knit climbing teams have shared over period of years. Washington climber Jon Karpoff says that at the onset of trips his mind is filled with “lots of floating thoughts and concerns”, but as the trip continues, his mind empties, and he becomes conscious primarily of elemental points such as his breathing and heart rate(Personal communication, April 12, 2015). In essence, mountaineers use the rhythmic movements and repeated phrases, all of which are tied to their breathing in order to enter a meditative state that, while looking inward, makes them intensely aware of their surroundings in the present movement. In doing so, they are relying on ancient techniques such as pranayama (yoga breathing) that “rapidly bring the mind to the present moment and reduce stress” (Brown and Gerbarg, 2009). The repeated phrases or song lyrics, no matter how trivial or silly, provide the same type of focusing effect as is gained from any mantra.

The achievement of this highly-developed state of psychological coherence benefits alpinists in numerous ways. The intensity of focus on the present moment allows for sustained rhythmic physical movement at a level of precision rarely seen. In a sense, it aligns body with mind, a necessity because, in certain situations reactions need to occur so swiftly that time for thought followed by action simply does not exist. In retelling the story of a climb he and a partner made of the Isle of Skye’s Cuillin Ridge, a 12 kilometer route along whatis often a knife-edge ridge, Dave Cunningham, says that, when it became clear they were threatened with being benighted on the rock, he and his friend began moving wordlessly, without thinking, just reeling the rope back in and setting the next belay point, all in perfect harmony (Personal communication, April 12, 2015). His son, extreme snowboarder Russell Cunningham in describing his descent down the heavily-crevassed 5000-foot North Face of Washington State’s Mount Adams, said that he entered a new state of consciousness, one in which there was “no thinking, no waiting”, only an understanding that each of his turns needed to be perfect: “When one’s life depends on the placement of a single foot, or the direction of a single turn, there just isn’t time to reflect on much else” (splitboardbindings.com, 2013, May 10).

A standard climbing saying is“to think about falling is the same as falling”, because any discrepancy in thought, any doubt, eliminates the focus needed to stay on the slope. This level of alignment leads to distinct a discernable sense of coherence, with the psyche moving into full alignment, and without any contradictions between the conscious and unconscious mind. In this frame of mind, one’s emotions are controlled, neither rising too high or low, a point of primary importance in emergencies. In these cases, which often occur in seconds, time seems to stretch in duration, and despite an underlying realization of urgency, the mind works more or less logically through the steps necessary to prevent disaster. Karpoff, during a fall while skiing the Ptarmigan Traverse, remembers thinking, “I can’t…believe I’m not stopping”, a thought followed by his mind then walking logically through the steps needed to end a dangerous slide (Personal communication, April 12, 2015. Climber Nathan Vangor writes that, in emergency situations, it’s “Like my brain just responds so fast that there isn't time to think about what has happened” (April 25, 2015). Joe Simpson, during the voice-over narration in the film version of his book Touching the Void, says that, at the moment when his rescue seemed impossible, “I could acknowledge that I was going to die in a very matter-of-fact way” (Pathe Pictures, 2004). Even having reached that conclusion, he then simply resumed moving toward the camp which was his only possibility for salvation.

A final, less obvious benefit gained by the climber’s achievement of a sense of coherence is the ability to monitor and react to changing situations and to maintain what are at first glance contradictory perspectives—a feature that has both physical and psychological benefits.Karpoff reports that he has navigated through the hallucinations cause by whiteouts by imagining himself playing a game of Tetris—laying a logical frame over a surreal landscape. Dave Cunningham, when asked to identify what he valued most about mountaineering, identifies the development of a sense of “perspective”—the way he aligns the seeming contradiction between his feelings of physical and technical competence, the sense that he is up to the task, against the reality that, in the vastness of the mountains, “You’re literally an invisible speck” (Personal communication, April 12, 2015) As the Scottish poet Andrew Greig puts it beautifully in his book, Summit Fever, “We’re so nearly nothing, but not quite. And that makes all the difference. The mountains teach us humility, but also how much we can achieve when we commit our all” (Grieg, 1998).