Leading Through - The Next 6 Years

Leading Through - The Next 6 Years

Priorities, Plans and Projects for the Alpine Club following Blencathra 2024.

In 2018, the Alpine Club, under the leadership of John Porter, began quite an extraordinary process. It dedicated itself to a programme whereby, every six years, it would bring together its members for a large-scale consultation, assessing its organisational health, its relevance and its priorities for the future.

Informed by the feedback from its members following the 2018 event, held at the Blencathra Field Studies Centre in the Lake District, the AC began a journey which, among other developments, has seen the Club rapidly expand its meets programme, provide increasing opportunities for member development and commit itself to growing its digital offering.

When we met for the second ever Blencathra event in November 2024, it was astonishing to consider how much the Club had changed in the preceding six years; cementing significant progress despite the added challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. There was a sense from attendees that the Club was travelling in the right direction and an enthusiasm to build upon the progress that had already been made.

As well as broader discussions about the AC and the mountaineering world at large, the event focused on five major topic areas – Membership, Our Values, Publications, Heritage and The Soul of the Club – with some consistent priorities emerging across these subjects.

The weekend was alive with ideas, as much in the downtime between formal sessions as in the discussions themselves. We have pulled together some of the clearest priorities and most widely-supported ideas below.

^{The Blencathra Field Studies Centre - Iain Young}

^{AC President Simon Richardson introducing the weekend - Iain Young}

Membership

The Club currently has more than 1,500 members and is attracting increasing numbers of women and younger members thanks to a dedicated focus on broadening our appeal. This was felt to be a healthy size for the Club and efforts to widen our membership through Younger Members' Meets, opportunities for development like the Rick Allen Skills Award and the revitalised ACG, were welcomed. The committee are dedicated to working to maintain our numbers, while continuing to increase the diversity of our membership so that it better reflects the mountaineering community at large.

Some newer members expressed how they had initially found the Club to be intimidating as an institution. We have already made some changes to our events at Charlotte Road to reduce these barriers and will be investigating other ways to actively make new and prospective members feel more welcome at their first Club events.

All the AC events discussed at Blencathra are built on an incredible foundation of voluntary effort and there was a real appetite amongst attendees for more opportunities to become involved in the Club. The committee is already considering the creation of a Volunteer Officer to help encourage and support volunteers. Additionally, we are looking at ways to regularly advertise volunteering opportunities.

Our Values

One of the great successes of 2018’s Blencathra was the creation of the AC Green Group, which has advised the Club on environmental matters and set out Club positions relating to travel and climate change. Sadly, in more recent years, the Green Group has been less active and there was a strong desire among attendees to see it reinvigorated. Happily, volunteers to help make this a reality have already come forward and this process has begun. Watch this space!

There was a general consensus that the Club’s mission statement was in need of a small update and the committee will bring this into review. It was also felt that we should continue to make a positive case for the Club’s values through our communications and by reviving the Spirit of Mountaineering Award, which recognises those who selflessly come to the aid of others in the mountains.

Lastly, there was an appetite for the Club to function as a hub for ‘lessons learned’ when accidents or near-misses occur in the mountains. The exact scope of this potential project and how it would interact with existing systems run by other organisations is currently being considered.

Publications

Throughout the weekend there was a real sense of pride in the Club’s literary legacy but also a degree of regret that it had not remained active in the guidebooks space. As an immediate priority, the Club will be continuing its work to digitise its existing guidebooks, creating an online database which will be made available to members and which can serve as the basis for future progress in this area.

In addition, the work to complete the updated Himalayan Index, a potentially colossal resource for exploratory mountaineers, continues apace, with project lead Lina Arthur recruiting 20 additional volunteers in the period following Blencathra.

The Alpine Journal and Club Newsletter remain valued publications and there was an eagerness from members to suggest potential new areas of focus for future editions. Similarly to the nervousness some members felt when first attending AC events, there was also an occasional reticence from some members to submit to the Journal and Newsletter. We will be working to demystify this process and to consolidate the excellent work done by Ed Douglas in encouraging more women to write for the Journal.

Heritage

From those not already involved with the Club’s collections, there was tangible excitement in learning about the literature, photographs, artefacts and art which the Club holds. We need to spread this awareness more widely, to the membership and the public at large, by making greater use of digital communications and novel forms of presentation to showcase our collections. This will be a key priority for the Library in the coming years, with the groundwork already laid by our hard-working Librarian Emma McDonald.

A perennial problem for our collections is storage. The Club’s premises have limited capacity to store and display heritage items, especially when the demands of work and meeting space are factored in. We will examine ways to make better use of our space and to free up storage by loaning out items to other museums and collections. Our incoming Honorary Secretary, Charlie Burbridge, is already investigating one potential avenue for this.

To ensure that challenges like the issue of space are responded to more proactively in the future, it was recommended that the Club seek to establish a Heritage Board to help coordinate the custodianship, development and showcasing of its collections. Discussions about how this Board will work are already underway.

^{Summit smiles on the 2024 Aspirants Meet}

The Soul of the Club

This final topic might initially appear to be the most nebulous of those discussed, but it actually led to a number of extremely practical suggestions.

The annual Aspirants’ Meet in Sass Fee was singled out for particular praise for the way in which it fostered a sense of community. To build on the work of Nick Hurndall Smith and his team, it was felt that the Club should seek to find locations throughout the Alps in which to base itself for the summer, creating hubs where AC members know they can find each other during the season. The committee is already discussing what is required to make this a reality.

In recent years, the Club has run a number of symposia. These, it was agreed, are a great way of encouraging networking and promoting a sense of belonging. The committee will continue its support for these events in the coming years and investigate potential new topics such as destination-focused sessions.

The Club’s renewed focussing on supporting member development was welcomed and the committee will be making available a complete overview of all our development opportunities in the near future so that members at all levels can see how they can access guidance and support.

Conclusion

These, we hope you’ll agree, are an incredible range of priorities for the Club to work on over the next six years. There is a huge amount that needs to be done in order to make them a success, but if we can do so, the Club will continue to thrive, serving both its members and the wider mountaineering community.

The Club is the sum total of its membership, and our successes, like those we achieve in the mountains, are the result of our collective endeavour. If you’d like to help us make any of these projects a reality, in however small a way, we’d love to hear from you. You can fill out our new AC Volunteer Form and a member of the AC team will be in touch to find out more about how you’d like to be involved.

Finally, the Club would like to thank Sherry Macliver whose organisational work helped to make Blencathra 2024 a reality and Iain Young, our fantastic facilitator from the Scottish Mountaineering Club who lent an invaluable outsider’s eye to proceedings.

New Study Helps Quantify the Risk of Developing Acute Mountain Sickness

New Study Helps Quantify the Risk of Developing Acute Mountain Sickness

A new study by Johannes Burtscher and colleagues at the University of Lausanne has gone some way to helping us estimate the chances of developing acute mountain sickness (AMS) when we ascend quickly to high altitude. Jeremy Windsor explains.

The human body has an incredible capacity to adapt to its surroundings. Nowhere is this more obvious than following an ascent to high altitude. But if you try to rush the process you’re likely to be left exhausted or in some cases, faced with a bout of acute mountain sickness (AMS). But it's not always the case. There are plenty of people who drive out to Chamonix, spend their first night at the Torino Hut (3375m) and climb the Dent du Géant (4013m) the next day. But at the same time there’s quite a few others who spend the night awake and descend exhausted and disappointed the next day. So is there any way to estimate the risk of developing AMS? A new study has attempted to do just that.

Last year, a group of high altitude experts scoured the medical literature and identified 12 studies that quantified the risk of developing AMS at a given height. In seven studies the volunteers ascended slowly over 2 or 3 days, whilst those in the remaining five studies ascended in just a couple of hours.

In those who ascended over 2 to 3 days, the chances of developing AMS increased steadily with height. Whilst noone developed AMS at just over 2000m, 52% of those who ascended to 4559m developed the condition. Meanwhile, those who flew directly to altitudes of between 3350m and 3740m saw their chances of developing AMS range from 39 to 84%. Put simply, the study found that there is a 4.5 times greater risk of AMS if you fly to your high altitude destination compared to if you take a little time and walk to it. 

The 12 studies are divided into 2 groups - those who ascended in hours (orange) or 2 to 3 days (blue). There are often several data points for each study.
The numbers beside the data points are references to the studies identified by Burtscher and his colleagues

For me, this is all much clearer if you take a look at the graph. There are two lines of “best fit” that make it possible to estimate the chances of developing AMS at any given altitude. Using the trip to the Torino Hut (3375m) as an example. If you drive a minibus with ten passengers to Chamonix and jump straight on the Pointe Helbronner cable car, there’s a good chance that almost half of you will develop AMS by the next morning. If instead, you spend a couple of long days cragging on the Brevent, it’s likely that only 1 or 2 will encounter symptoms at the Torino Hut.

The difference is even starker the higher you go. Rapid ascents to 4,000m or more seem to all but guarantee a bout of AMS. However, even short periods of time spent acclimatising at lower altitudes can reduce the risk dramatically. 

All of this seems to confirm what mountaineers have known for a long time, that ascending more slowly reduces the risk of Acute Mountain Sickness. However, having clear probabilities for different altitudes and rates of ascent is of great help with decision-making, particularly for groups who have not previously been to higher altitudes and do not know how they personally cope. It also confirms that even a day or two of acclimatising at lower altitudes is not wasted time, but a way of making a real difference to your risk of developing AMS.

Johannes Burtscher's paper can be downloaded here.

Jeremy Windsor is the director of the Centre for Mountain Medicine at the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan)

2024 Boardman-Tasker Winner: 'Headstrap' | Review

Cold Comfort on Chomolungma

In a piece originally published in the 2023 Alpine Journal, Annie Dare, Head of Communications at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), explains why her organisation is moving from a solely knowledge-sharing role to become an active advocate on the issue of climate change and its impact on the Hindu Kush Himalaya. She also explains how alpinists can add their voices to ICIMOD's call for world leaders to take all necessary steps to protect this spectacular mountain region and the people who live there.

^{Going, going, gone? Seventy years on from the first ascent of Everest, the Khumbu glacier is disappearing at an accelerating rate. (Alex Treadway)}

This spring, Catalan athlete Kilian Jornet was training around Everest, in Nepal. This was his 10th visit to the Khumbu region, but it was the first time he and his partner Swedish athlete Emilie Forsberg were accompanied by their two youngest children. Jornet, the son of a mountain guide who reached the summit of his first 3,000m peak at the tender age of three, was hoping to plant the seed for his daughters to develop a love for the people and nature of the Himalaya to equal his own. He delighted in seeing the girls playing with people and in places he felt so connected to.

Yet the trip was bittersweet. A climate advocate who consciously limits how often he flies in order to try to drive down his personal carbon footprint, it had been 10 years since Jornet had first seen Everest, or Chomolungma, ‘goddess mother of the world’ in one translation of the Tibetan. ‘The changes that have taken place in the snow and glaciers here, just in the space of that decade, are so immediately obvious, and so dramatic,’ Kilian told me. ‘It’s happening so, so fast.’

The family’s visit came just before dignitaries from the climbing world gathered at the base of the mountain, in Namche Bazaar, to mark the 70th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay’s first ascent. The glaciologists and researchers I work with at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), which for 40 years has monitored the cryosphere across the entire 3,500km long expanse of the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH), used the moment to zero in on the specific impacts of climate change on Everest. Their data provides incontrovertible scientific evidence to corroborate climbers’ increasingly alarming eyewitness accounts, such as Jornet’s, or that of Lukas Furtenbach, who saw puddles on the South Col in 2022, or another climber who, when climbing Gasherbrum IV in 2021, was shocked to find water cascading down a rock at 7,000m. Worryingly, ICIMOD scientists found that the 79 glaciers around Everest had thinned by over 100m in just six decades and that the rate of thinning had almost doubled since 2009. The iconic Khumbu glacier itself is disappearing up the mountain. And the further east you go, the worse this thinning becomes.

Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa, an early-career glaciologist at ICIMOD, travelled to Namche to join his grandfather, the last survivor of the first ascent, Kanchha Sherpa, and Helen Clark, the former prime minister of New Zealand, and Hillary and Norgay’s descendants for the anniversary events. Together, this group launched a campaign asking climbers to raise their voices to press for faster action to avert catastrophic, irreversible changes to Everest and other mountains under the banner of #SaveOurSnow. The campaign asks members of the public, but particularly climbers, scientists and mountain communities, to share stories of the climate impacts they’re seeing on social media and to add their name to a declaration that asks for governments to honour their commitments to limit warming as set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.

^{All change in the Icefall. Always danger- ous, climate change is impacting on this key section on the ascent of Everest}

^{Kanchha Sherpa, last surviving member of the 1953 expedition that put Hillary and Tenzing on the summit. (Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa)}

 

 

‘The sporting community needs to step up,’ Jornet, one of the signatories of the declaration, says. ‘Alongside scientists studying these mountains, and the communities that live here, it is those of us who return year after year to these mountains, to work and to train, who can see with our own eyes the extraordinary pace of changes to mountain glaciers, snow and permafrost. These changes are not only aesthetic, of course. They also pose new dangers to climbers in terms of unstable terrain. But the much more profound impacts are the dangers these changes pose to the people and nature that rely on these mountains, for water, for livelihoods, for habitat.’

Climate impacts across the world’s cryosphere are fast outpacing scientists’ previous projections, with the fight to save summer ice in the Arctic declared essentially lost earlier this year, and revised forecasts suggesting Antarctica is vulnerable to devastating and permanent impacts at just 1.5°C of temperature rise. At 2°C of warming, glaciers in the Alps, the Andes, Patagonia, Iceland, Scandinavia, the North American Rockies and New Zealand are all set to disappear completely, while according to ICIMOD’s latest report Water, Ice Society, and Ecosystems in the Hindu Kush Himalaya around half of glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalaya would be gone. That even just half might remain is unlikely: our current emissions trajectory sets us on course to smash through the ‘safe’ 1.5°C ceiling. At the currently plausible 4°C of warming, 80% of glaciers in the HKH will vanish by the end of the century. While glacier loss worldwide will devastate local communities and result in sea-level rise, the consensus is that the consequences of glacier loss, more erratic snowfall and permafrost thawing for people and nature in the hugely populated and bio-diverse HKH region, where 12 of the world’s major rivers originate, will be nothing short of catastrophic.

‘Nowhere is safe from climate impacts,’ says ICIMOD’s deputy director general Izabella Koziell. ‘But the Hindu Kush Himalaya holds the third largest frozen body of water on the planet, which provides freshwater services to a quarter of humanity. A staggering half of that population already suffer malnutrition. In the past two years alone we’ve already seen devastating climate-driven humanitarian disasters unfold in this region – in Afghanistan’s droughts, and Pakistan’s floods: a chilling illustration of what our scientists say will be one of the key climate impacts in our region – the issue of ‘too much water, too little water.’ The magnitude of the humanitarian catastrophe that will unfold should the reliable water supply that flows from these mountains be lost – undermining the food and water security of two billion people in Asia – is almost beyond imagining. Yet this is what the science tells us will happen unless world leaders act decisively now.’ 

The case for action is compelling. With very low emissions, most glaciers and snowpack can be preserved for water resources, with scientists saying losses would begin to slow slightly around 2040, with glaciers stabilising sometime in the next century. And the support alpinists have given the campaign has been unequivocal with over 2,000 signatories in the first 48 hours, including Kenton Cool, Rebecca Stephens, Peter Hillary, Wolfgang Nairz, Reinhold Messner, the glaciologist and alpinist Patrick Wagnon, Jamling Tenzing, Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, Lakpa Dendi Sherpa, documentary-filmmaker Craig Leeson, and Pemba Sherpa. Other backers include the Nepal Mountaineering Association, the Mountain Research Initiative, the UN Mountain Partnership, and the UIAA.

‘It’s amazing to have had this strong early support from the climbing community,’ says Izabella Koziell. ‘But it feels like we’re barely scratching the surface with what might be possible, in terms of the leadership role alpinists might be able to play at this crucial moment,’ says Koziell. ‘Not just because of their tenacity and influence, but most of all because of their unrivalled intimacy with mountains and mountain people. Many climbers’ lives have often been if not profoundly transformed then at least hugely enriched by encounters with the landscapes and cultures of the Hindu Kush Himalaya. These experiences give them an intrinsic awareness of how much we stand to lose unless we check emissions that are threatening lives, livelihoods and cultures.

^{Visible changes seen in the terminus of glacier AX010 from 1978 to 2008. Situated in the Shorong Himal, this glacier has lost almost half its surface area in just the last three decades. (Alton Byers)}

^{The terminus of the Rikha Samba glacier between 1974 and 2010. The rate of loss has only accelerated since then. (Alton Byers)}

‘It’s hard to have spent any time among such communities too and not be struck by the sheer injustice of what we’re seeing unfold across this region: of the lives of peoples who have trodden so lightly on the Earth for generations being destroyed as a consequence of political and business choices being taken millions of miles away.'

ICIMOD, for its part, is reinventing itself to rise to the challenge of supporting communities and governments in the region that will confront the impacts of the changing climate. The organisation has completely reconfigured its portfolio in order to reduce the region’s vulnerability to disaster risks: biodiversity loss; and water, energy and food insecurity. This work runs from installing early-warning systems to forewarn communities of floods and encouraging governments to share data across national boundaries, to advancing the rights and recognition of nomadic communities and the role of rangelands, to identifying incentives for communities to protect biodiversity and forests.

Critically, the organisation is setting out to build an advocacy voice that is commensurate with the region’s importance and peril. Because, despite how much hangs in the balance in terms of human population alone, knowledge of the consequences of continued climate inaction on the Hindu Kush Himalaya globally remains low. There was no mention of mountain impacts at all within the draft text of this year’s critical Global Stocktake process, an integral of the Paris Agreement under the framework of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

In collaboration with and on behalf of its eight regional member countries – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal and Pakistan – the organisation is setting out to change that lobbying at global fora: for faster action on mitigation globally; for the urgent scaling up of adaptation and ecosystem restoration funds; and programmes and for the mobilisation of loss and damage finance.

^{ICIMOD glaciologist Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa in the lap of Ed Hillary in 1992.}

^{And with his grandfather Kanchha Sherpa. (Tenzing Chogyal Sherpa)}

In seeking to strengthen its impact, ICIMOD is also looking outwards, exploring the creation of a new regional political mechanism, akin to the models used by the Alpine or Carpathian Convention, with the aim of accelerating political change through closer collaboration among countries to build greater resilience to these issues, many of which are trans-boundary, such as floods, and in securing greater prominence and negotiating power for the region.

‘For 40 years, ICIMOD has acted as a knowledge centre for the region, generating and sharing evidence to our member countries to support their policy processes, and this remains our primary work,’ says Koziell. ‘However, with humanity standing at such a crossroads, and our cryosphere being so central to that, our board, donors, regional member countries and stakeholders were all unanimous that ICIMOD should start to take a much more assertive role.

‘I believe that at this moment all of us are being called to go beyond ‘business-as-usual’ – and that it’s for all of use whatever platform we have to urge governments and businesses to transform how we power our lives, feed ourselves, move around so that Earth can sustain life. The science is clear – there really is no time left. Perhaps this transformation will be humanity’s greatest summit yet.’

• To sign the declaration go to icimod.org/SaveOurSnow and share your story of impacts using the hashtag #SaveOurSnow.