How Love Changes Priorities

It may be an unexpected example of ‘love as a verb’, but as Nature writer Marissa Land discovers, it is indeed love that has persuaded professional climber Bernd Zangerl to introduce other climbers to the idea of holding deep reverence for the landscapes they descend on, and of putting a love of Nature above their climbing ambitions

Illustration by Coralie Huon www.coraliehuon.com

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I can imagine Bernd Zangerl sitting on the floor in the old Rupin River View Hotel as we catch up via WhatsApp, warming up his lean climber’s body with the rays of the morning sun filtering through his window. It’s been six years since I climbed with Bernd in Rakchham, which sits in the India Himalaya close to the border with Tibet, but I can still picture the Sangla-Chitkul road outside — the only road in and out of this valley — busy with village life: cowherds steering cows through the dusty streets, women chatting on their way to the buckwheat fields, baby goats worn around people’s necks like scarves, bleating at passers by.

But as climbing tourism grows in this region, the Austrian-born rock climber is determined to protect and nurture this alpine sanctuary where traditional life and Nature have seemingly been held still in time.

Bernd is well known in the rock-climbing world for establishing difficult first ascents and for helping to develop some the most popular bouldering areas in Europe, but there came a point in his career where his love for the European bouldering scene began to change.

“With bouldering becoming so popular and the increase in the numbers of people coming to climb, I realised these activities change places,” he explains. “Like the quietness I had experienced in Magic Wood and Ticino, Switzerland, when I first climbed there. When I went back, it was kind of gone.”

To Bernd, losing the quietness of a place means loosing his connection with Nature and those wild places that ignite his passion for climbing. And as someone whose professional life depends on the sport, when motivation wanes he must find it again. So off he went searching for the mysterious valley he had first seen in an old book published half a century ago that included a black and white photo of the Kinner Kailash mountain.

What he found when he got to Rakchham was a climber’s parade: endless granite peaks, where broadleaf forests fade into agricultural floodplains that are still planted and harvested by hand, and where village life continues to move slowly with the seasons.

To climb in Rakchham is to experience more than the thrill of getting to the top of a route. In a place where the locals believe that the mountains house the gods, you’re touching a landscape that is imbued with spiritual power — you may think you’re arriving to climb, but you leave having been completely captivated and absorbed by the place and embraced by the people.

“The potential for climbing here is immense. Not just bouldering and climbing, but also trekking and climbing mountains, “ says Bernd, who at the same time tells me of his concern over what will happen to this special place if the climbing masses were to find this hidden gem.

“Just think, when a hundred or two hundred people suddenly come in one summer with no rules, and they can just run around in theses places, that’s just giving [the villagers] a problem.”

From the littering of rubbish (cigarette butts, climbing tape, food scraps) to erosion and plant damage from foot traffic, to bright lights at night, loud music playing and overzealous marking with chalk, degradation and problems caused by climbing tourism can be both ecologically damaging and culturally offensive. I’ve seen used sanitary pads throws under blocks. I’ve seen protected trees chainsawed or hacked with axes. And it’s not just restricted to Europe.

Once, at the end of a climbing season in South Africa, I went searching for an ancient rock-art site close to a bouldering area. I weaved through the sandstone blocks to find the small windblown cave, about shoulder-height, where three red-ochre, delicate antelope were painted at the back. In front of the artwork were piles of human waste and toilet paper. Close to the boulders and hidden from view, it appeared that a number of climbers had used the cave as a toilet. I remember wondering at the time, if our behaviours and our choices reflect what matters to us, what is this saying about how much we care for the places we climb in?…

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