Switzerland Is the Place to Learn How to Climb

If you want to climb a mountain, Switzerland is the place to learn. The Swiss climb mountains the way they run trains and make watches. Nobody, with the possible exception of sheepherders in Nepal, do it better.

Instead of going to a ballgame or the beach on a day off, many Swiss go scale a peak or climb a rock.

Arnold Glatthard began climbing mountains around this neighborhood when he was 12 years old, 64 years ago. He has been a mountain guide for 54 of his 76 years.

Glatthard climbed mountains for fun because there was nothing else for kids to do in this village six miles across the mountains from Grindelwald in the Bernese Oberland. It wasn’t hard to find a good one to climb; 47 peaks of various heights surround the village. “All you needed,” he said, “were an old rope and some boots.”

Glatthard no longer works as a guide; if he goes up a mountain today he takes a helicopter. However, he still skis. In his youth he was an international star. He made Switzerland’s 1936 Olympic team but when he was ruled a professional because of his job as a ski instructor, he had to be content with training the British ski team.

Although he was Switzerland’s slalom champion and competed in eight world ski championships, Glatthard was better known as a mountain guide. A lot of climbers owe him their lives. Not only did he take hundreds of them safely up and down such peaks as the Matterhorn and Eiger, Glatthard in 1940 opened the first mountaineering school in Switzerland. Today, there are 45 such schools in this tiny country.

By the time he retired in 1983, Glatthard had helped train 13,200 climbers, many of whom became guides, the men mainly responsible for the success of Switzerland’s mountain climbing business. Before he climbed Mt. Everest with Edmund Hillary, Tensing Norgay went to Glatthard’s school and was a guide in this area.

While most tourists come to Switzerland to look at the scenery, thousands more come to climb a mountain, and most of them hire a guide to lead them up some of the highest and most famous peaks in the Alps. Many of the guides learned their trade in schools such as the one Glatthard started with 200 students in 1940.

Many Americans, about 100 a year, normally, Glatthard said, learn to climb here. About $325 buys them a week of training on a mountain, a room in a 4-star hotel, meals, guide fees and equipment. Glatthard said U.S. students usually stay three weeks and take a beginners’ course, a touring course and a week of real climbing on the peaks in the neighborhood. Students learn to cross a crevice, use an ice ax and actually practice a rescue on a glacier. Diplomas are given in rock, ice and granite climbing and for the use of a rope.

Among the 250 students in Scheller’s school this season was a boy of 7. That’s a little too young, Glatthard said; 14 is a better age to start learning to climb. About 50% of the students are women.

“Women are very good climbers,” Glatthard said. “In some ways they are better than men. I have more confidence with a woman on a rope than a man.”

Women are better than men on a mountain because they are not afraid, Scheller said. “You don’t need strength as much as technique.”