Preface to the Third Edition

We are pleased that so many people have been irritated at finding this Manual out of print so long—and that they have finally shamed us into bringing it back, revised.

We are a little abashed that, after all this time, we haven't changed it much. We'll explain all this in a moment.

We are amazed that so many people bought the book in the first place, thus taking it through two editions— two printings of the second edition—and distributing far more copies than there are ski mountaineers.

We are grateful to the University of California Press for transferring its rights in the book to the Sierra Club, and appreciate what the Press did to publish what was es­sentially a Sierra Club product in the first place. The Press did the book initially to aid the war effort, back in the days when great importance was attached to physical initiative—when the late Belmore Browne, coin­ing the slogan "Wars are fought outdoors," helped the armed forces train men once again to feel at home out­doors, as their pioneer forebears had, even to learn how to survive, to live off the land, if wrenched for several days out of their normal civilized dependencies. The Press has now been encouraged to believe that the book would do better in the Sierra Club's how-to-do-it series than it would do as a fairly distant cousin to scholarly university publishing. We thank August Fruge, Director of the University of California Press, for helping us with the change; he is also chairman of the club's Publica­tions Committee.

We are hopeful that this book will keep encouraging people at least to intend to take off into the winter wilder­ness occasionally as a change in diet from the frenetically linked turns that are the inevitable part of the daily grind on what we like to think of as practice slopes for some­thing better. We hope a great number of skiers will actually come to do something about their intentions, that they will really go ski mountaineering, forsake the se­curity blanket of packed snow from time to time, make their own tracks, discover how rewarding pleasure is when it is earned by a little out-and-out hard uphill work . . .

We could go on, but our hypocrisy-quotient is a little low and we are not quite so eager as we sound. It has lately been a bit harder for us to take off on snow-camp­ing trips than it was twenty years ago when the first edition took shape. The Spartan life has faded for us in those decades. We don't struggle as much as we should against the prospect of taking our meals while reclining, or against other activities which make minimal demands upon physical fitness. But our sons must not be so soft, nor our daughters. If we must show them how, we will relearn ourselves how to feel at home on the snow!

In addition to changing our physical condition, twenty years has brought changes of ski-mountaineering equip­ment, medicine, reading material, technique, and fashion. This edition accommodates some of them and adds photographic illustrations. The rest of the book is just as it was.

Equipment, for example, has been judged too changeable for a book to keep up with. New styles, models, and discoveries are better told about in periodicals. The basic principles last longer, and these are what the chapter on equipment is talking about for the most part anyway.

Even medicine is changeable; last year's super burn remedy or antibiotic may turn out, on further research, to have consisted of equal parts of placebo and unfore­seen hazard. Here again, the periodical can be more useful in keeping the reader posted.

Fashion and its relation to ski technique—and to the parts of the ski-mountaineering test related to current technique—are beyond us. Collectively we have so far been exposed, in sequence, to Telemark, low Arlberg, high Arlberg, swing skiing, counterswing skiing, power skiing, and (to date this edition) wedeln. We must re­main partial to whatever devices of techniques will keep a skier intact as he makes his way, with pack, through widely ranging snow conditions, well beyond the reach of a ski-patrol clean-up squad.

And now, having wished some of our problems onto the periodicals, we should like to square ourselves with them by assigning you, the reading skier, a valuable role. As you go out and do things, write in about them— about where you went, how you improved upon existing technique, or exploited your love of gadgetry by im­proving the equipment we have been using—to the editors of Appalachia, Trail and Timberline, Mazama, The Mountaineer, or the Sierra Club Bulletin (to name a few appropriate journals) and share what you have learned. Join one (or a few) of the organizations and learn firsthand from people who go ski mountaineering those things about their technique which they can demon­strate better than they can describe them in writing. The Sierra Club, for example, has a series of huts in the Sierra Nevada where you can start the easy way, with parties making scheduled tours from hut to hut, until your confidence rises and urges you farther toward that "something lost behind the ranges."

We'll go one step further ourselves. Write the chair­man of the Sierra Club's Winter Sports Committee and let him know that you would like to receive the Com-miitee's occasional bulletins on ski mountaineering trails and tips. These will come to you with only one obliga­tion—that you also let him know what suggestions you have for improving the next edition of this book.

Finally, and belatedly, I gratefully acknowledge the good work of Allen P. Steck for making this edition cur­rent, of Joel Hildebrand for revising his wax work, and Dr. L. Bruce Meyer for reconciling us with modern medicine. The many other important contributions are listed in the following excerpts from earlier prefaces, which report history in reverse order.

D. R. B.

Berkeley, California December 22, 1961

Preface to the Second Edition

When this book first appeared in 1942, the editors were mildly taken to task for having presumed to call it a man­ual of ski mountaineering without explaining how a skier was to travel safely in really rugged mountain terrain. And indeed the manual did advise that the skier "should or­dinarily be able to select his route that he avoids steep terrain requiring advanced technique," meanwhile giving little help to the ski mountaineer who should prefer that very terrain.

It is still unwise to attempt to condense an entire litera­ture in a manual and we won't try. The skier who would know what men have done in mountains, and how they did it, must still go to Finch, Irving, Mummery, Lunn, Rey, Whymper, Young, a host of others, and to the journals and archives of the mountaineering clubs of the world. The search will repay him abundantly.

Then what technique must a skier acquire, perhaps with the aid of the printed page, if he is to become, in a mountaineer's sense of the term, a true ski moun­taineer? He should learn where to look for the best route on a glaciated mountain; how to handle himself on rock and ice; what knots, belays, rappels, and rescues are best; when rope, ice ax, crampons, and pitons are used. What is believed to be the best of that technique is now presented briefly here; but the ski mountaineer may well find other techniques, preferable to him, as he searches out the literature—or better, as he explores the peaks.

The first edition was published in part to aid mountain-troop training. In the second edition it was turnabout. For on Mount Rainier and the Columbia Icefield; in the Rockies, Yoho Valley, New Hampshire, both Virginias, and Alaska; then on Kiska, later in the battles of the North Apennines and the Lake Garda Alps, and finally with the aftermath in the Julian Alps, among the Dolo­mites, on the Gross Glockner, and even along the Mont Blanc massif—in these far-flung places the men of the 10th Mountain Division learned, taught, and applied mountaincraft. Three new chapters added in 1946 com­prise a check list of the things they applied that were not specifically tactical. Some changes in equipment re­sulted from the efforts of many of the most skilled moun­taineers who, working with the Office of the Quarter­master General, gave the army the benefit of their col­lective experience. Some of the most trivial of the changes are documented most impressively, for example, where the first edition had said "warmth of clothing ... is roughly proportional to thickness," the second edition, with files of data at the National Bureau of Standards to back it up, could confidently substitute "directly" for "roughly." Military field experience amended the rules for traction splinting. By and large, however, the ideas that skiers and mountaineers contributed to the armed forces have found military proving grounds no more severe than the mountains already had been.

Appreciation is extended to the men in and out of the armed forces who have made suggestions for this revi­sion: to Artur Argiewicz, Jr., killed in action in Italy, for his contribution to the rock-climbing section of FM 70-10, Mountain Operations, much of which is used here; to Philip Dana Orcutt for outlining the need and form of the new chapters; to Raffi Bedayn, Dr. Morgan Harris, and Richard F. Weber for suggestions; to the editorial committee and the other writers—who agree essentially with what they said four years ago.

D. R. B.

Berkeley, California January 5, 1946

Preface to the First Edition

At its annual meeting in 1940 the directors of the Na­tional Ski Association authorized, and its executive com­mittee subsequently adopted, uniform ski touring tests. The need for such tests had long been felt and had re­sulted in the establishment of many tests on a local basis. The immediate impelling motive was the need for pro­ficiency tests which, with minor modifications, could be used for both recreational and military skiing; for this reason the actual content was developed in cooperation with the Army by the Advisory Committee on Equipment and Technique.

The purposes of the touring tests are four:

1. To guide skiers in knowing what to learn in order to be sufficiently proficient to enjoy the sport.
   
   
2. To measure touring proficiency in order that skiers may know for themselves (and others may judge them as well) whether they are capable of safely under­ taking tours of varying difficulty.
   
   
3. To create a reservoir of skiers competent to travel and live on the snow.
   
   
4. To encourage skiers to gain such measure of pro­ficiency in ski touring as will both enable and induce them to undertake and enjoy with safety and assured competence ski trips varying in difficulty from simple one-day tours to prolonged winter vacations among the most rugged mountain ranges.

Although merging into each other by imperceptible gradations, and having many elements in common, three methods of camping on snow exist. The Arctic technique, based primarily on dog sled or its motorized equivalent, is intended for extreme cold and terrain that is not too rough. Many Arctic manuals describe it.

The technique for glacier-covered mountains is based on relaying of loads (or dropping them from airplanes) and a successive line of camps extending toward the sum­mit goal. Many mountaineering books describe it.

In the mountain ranges of western United States a third technique has indigenously evolved. It emphasizes elimination of all dispensable equipment, the devising of items for multiple use, and the reduction of weight of every article. The result has been the reduction of the weight of a pack, whose contents are satisfactory for occasional temperatures of —30° F, to eighteen pounds plus 2% pounds of food per man-day and fuel if needed. In this manner both mobility and pleasurable ski tour­ing are accomplished.

Because of the impracticability of preparing such a manual as a group effort without repeated conferences to eliminate personal predilections, a group of Sierra Club ski mountaineers residing in the San Francisco Bay region was asked by the Committee on Uniform Tour­ing Tests to undertake its authorship.

This they willingly did. The manual was then submitted to the members of the Committee.

Appreciation is extended:

To the authors, for their strenuous work under press of time: David R. Brower, Alex Hildebrand, Dr. Joel Hildebrand, Milton Hildebrand, Dr. H. Stewart Kimball, Murray Kirkwood, Richard M. Leonard, Einar Nilsson [and Bestor Robinson—Ed.].

To Dr. Laurance M. Thompson and Dr. Millard Gump for assistance on the first-aid text, to Gerald Seligman, whose extensive book on snow structure has been an in­dispensable fund of information for the avalanche text, and to Kenneth D. Adam, H. C. Bradley, Frederic R. Kelley, William B. Rice, and Dr. Hervey H. Voge for sug­gestions.

To members of the Committee on Uniform Touring Tests for corrections and suggestions: David Bradley, Douglas M. Burckett, Charles M. Dole, Charles M. Dud­ley, Peter H. Hostmark, Roger Langley, Alfred D. Lind-ley, Rolf Munson, John E. P. Morgan, Bradford Wash-burn, Jr., and Walter A. Wood.

To the skiers who will use the manual, recognizing that it does not purport to be exhaustive, authoritative, or definitive, and who send in their suggestions so that the next edition may be greatly improved and progress in the technique of ski mountaineering continuously stim­ulated.

Bestor Robinson, Chairman, Committee on Uniform Touring Tests National Ski Association

Oakland, California January 5, 1942

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