Selecting the first vertex to climb

Choice of your first mountain for climbing

The first peak for a novice mountaineer – the choice of it even more important than the choice of the first wife! Once you have made a wrong choice – that will hang on you for all your life! So, this issue should be approached carefully and in detail, with skill, based on the extensive life experience of senior comrades.

Speaking seriously - “from which mountain to start climbing” - this is one of the most frequent questions with which people come to my school of mountaineering. Of course, it is impossible to answer this question unequivocally, since for every person there are their own individual prerequisites that lead them to the mountains, each one has their own individual characteristics and physical abilities. And the financial moment is also important, because there are enough options for everyone.

Here is a simple advice: understand why you need to go to the mountains, and then you will understand exactly where you have to go.

A) If you want just a fun for a few days, change the environment without any moral or aesthetic demands? – in that case you can go for any hackneyed commercial trash route – plenty of this can be found everywhere. (Elbrus from the south, Kazbek via Meteo, Eastern Belukha, Everest, Mont Blanc, Lenin Peak, Kilimanjaro etc.)

B) If you want to get away from the hustle and bustle, fully reload your mind and stay in peace among the pristine mountain nature - with due respect to yourself and your fellow travelers? - it is better to choose a quieter area, let the program be more expensive, but there will be no bazaar-station around. (Laila, B-Duzu, Ak Oyuk, Klyuchevskaya Sopka, Khalatsa)

C) If you need a good lesson once and for all your life, if you want to face real difficulties, to go through fire and water and become a “real tough nut”? – in that case there are some technical routes for you of the average complexity, available for whom the physical fitness if normal way of life, but somehow they lack adrenaline. (Tetnuld, West Belukha, Gestola, Elbrus from the West, Kazbek from the east)

D) If you want to set a distant goal and move towards it step by step in premeditated stages, learning and preparing, changing yourself physically and psychologically? – only in that case you are appealing to the mountaineering "idols", classic peaks, which for more than hundred years after their first conquest, until now keeping their indomitable and unpredictable character. (Ushba, Shkhara, Dykh Tau, Matterhorn)

Understanding of your goal and building plans for your mountaineering future, you should accept the fact that today even in mountaineering, such a pure and honest occupation at the first glance, there is a lot of surrogate, dishonesty and low-grade junk made for unscrupulous consumers. Honestly, I am really tired of clearing my ears from the obsessive calls "Lets go with us to Elbrus" or "Lets climb Kilimanjaro" in many different styles, with your ass riding a giraffe or with an oxygen canister. People with a healthy appetite for money but poor imagination are trying to sell the product, which suddenly became in a certain trend and can be sold only because one reason - the buyer’s lack of elementary taste, consumer culture and the ability to distinguish pearls from what looks and smells like shit.

And not Elbrus, nor Kilimanjaro are responsible for that- these are amazingly beautiful mountains, capable of giving incredible impressions both from the climbing to their summits, or just only contemplation of their fantastic outlines from the distance. But what happens on commercially loaded "mountaineering" routes, on which the freshly made merchants drive herds of their clients - such impression can permanently close the further way to the mountains for a person totally shadowing the original values to which he initially sought, fascinated by the glow of the mountain peaks.

Today, the commercial mountaineering industry focuses exclusively on the most accessible, well-known, popular objects. First of all, these are the “Vanity points” – “the highest” Everest, Elbrus, Kilimanjaro, Aconcagua, and so on - all the names of the highest points of seven continents are familiar to us from the school geography textbook. The level of service on the commercial routes makes them accessible to completely unprepared people who can buy everything, including pizza delivery to the top. And here is the substitution of concepts - after all, the main value of mountaineering is not just being on top in any way.

Maybe not so obvious, but still more meaningful goal is to overcome yourself, to go step by step to your dream, to prepare for it, to crave about it. Without a struggle, without a certain risk, adventurism, self-sacrifice, failures, defeats and victories - the ultimate goal - the summit loses its zest, that subtle elusive value that remains with a person for all the life as an acute experience of the moment of happiness.

Therefore, just in the moment of the very first step it should be understood - why we are going there? In order to put a tick in some list, to collect “likes” on the social network or to prove to your neighbor or office colleagues that you also could (like a couple of hundreds of other “climbers” who were climbing in a line with you) crawl to the pile of stones with some flag? Or are we looking for an appeasement, merging with nature and achieving some new levels of personal growth? Mountains give to each of us according our needs, so the primary motivation is very important.

Text — Alexey Trubachev, founder of the MCS AlexClimb mountaineering and climbing school.