Adventure Magazine

Chris Davis sits atop one of dozens of glorious granite needles in the European Alps.
"rising temperatures have made
glaciers more unstable; a
weather station at 3250m on
the Marmolada had recorded 23
straight days of temperatures
above 0 degrees Celsius."
But giving up a lifestyle that has given me so much is too
much of a sacrifice, personally. So I look for other ways to
reduce my carbon footprint. A huge chunk of greenhouse gas
emissions come from agriculture; in New Zealand, it’s almost
50 per cent. Red meat, in particular, leaves a large carbon
footprint, due to cows’ methane emissions.
A recent American study found that if every person in the
US cut their meat consumption by 25 per cent, annual
greenhouse gas emissions would fall by 1 per cent. So rule
number one is ‘eat less meat’ or, more particularly, ‘buy
less meat’; I have no problem eating a steak that someone
else won’t eat, for example, because it doesn’t contribute to
consumer demand.
Which brings me to the second rule: about a third of all food
produced is thrown out. This is not only offensively wasteful,
but it also scars the environment, given how much energy
and water it takes to grow, harvest, package and distribute
those billions of tonnes of food.
Rule number two is ‘no waste’, and it doesn’t just apply to my
food. Those who partake in the dirtbag lifestyle are familiar
with eating the leftovers on someone else’s plate in a cafe or
restaurant, or dumpster-diving, where the all-important smelltest
determines what might still be edible.
Nor does it apply to only food. The holes in my climbing
clothing are generally covered in duct tape, and I only ever
acquire clothing - usually second-hand - when my old ones
are well and truly beyond their retirement date.
When I travel, I tend to go for a long period on a one-way
ticket, rather than take several flights a year for a number
of shorter climbing holidays. When not travelling, I have a
further rule: unless the weather is apocalyptic, I don’t tend to
drive, and if we do drive to climbing crags, we car-pool.
Personal actions, of course, are insignificant in the grand
scheme of things unless they are done collectively. These
are all easy ways everyone can reduce their carbon footprint.
But climate change is already happening to such an extent
that it is irreversible. For alpine climbers, the seasons are
already no longer what they used to be. Warmer climes
mean thinner and vanishing snow bridges over glacier
crevasses, ever-wider bergschrund gaps between the ice
and the rockwall, and melting permafrost releasing clumps of
rock and soil that are normally frozen together.
The latter is thought to be behind the fate of the hut known as
the Bivouac de la Fourche, which was perched precariously
on the Kuffner Ridge on Mont Maudit, but which collapsed
into the Brenva Glacier in August. There was no cliff above it
that could have unleashed a hut-smashing rock-slide.
And then there’s glacial retreat, which makes some climbs
inaccessible due to an increasingly hostile moraine wall to
overcome. Even if you do make it, there might be an extra
25m of technical climbing just to reach what used to be the
start of the route.
I had arrived in France at the end of June, and quickly
jumped on some ice climbing objectives before the summer
temperatures made them unclimbable. The top section of
the classic Frendo Spur, on Aiguille du Midi, had already
deteriorated to black glacial ice instead of much friendlier
snow névé, which had already melted.
Within two weeks, the unofficial advice was not to climb on
certain mountains because getting there was too dangerous.
Crossing some glaciers had become a lottery, we were
told, rather than an exercise in skill and knowledge. And
attempting some routes was tempting fate: a huge boulder
on Cosmiques Arête fell down a few weeks after we’d
climbed it.
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