Guest lecture Prof Kerry Mummery, "Why People Climb Mountains?

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### Corrected Transcript

00:00:02

The last time we were together, we were talking about, well, the last person I mentioned was Albert Mummery, who was a Victorian climber from the end of the 1800s. I mentioned him because he was really the first person to advocate for a different way of seeing and understanding the sport and the recreation that those mostly men were doing in the European Alps in the mid-1800s. We talked about understanding sport or recreation as a culture, that we have to look at how that activity signifies to its participants.

00:00:38

And for most people at the turn of the century, or at the mid-century rather, when these Alpine sports were being elaborated, they saw what they were doing in the first instance as something that was intimately linked with science—scientism. That was the dominant discourse of what it was that they were doing. That's the way that they framed it; that's the way that they understood it. Another, or residual sort of discourse, was Romanticism, and both of those discourses accounted for the large amounts of literature that was produced. But the third one we discussed was athleticism, and it was sort of an emergent discourse. It wasn't the dominant one, and it slowly came out as the century wore towards the end. By the end of that century, in fact, it was probably the dominant discourse and has been that way ever since.

00:01:43

I just brought in Albert Mummery's most famous book. It's called My Climbs in the Alps and Caucasus, and let me just quickly read to you this last passage of the preface. He throws it down right at the beginning by saying this: "I fear no contributions to science or topography or learning of any sort are to be found sandwiched between a story of crags and screes, of driving storm and perfect weather. To tell the truth, I have only the vaguest idea of the delights they now all know what that is, and for playing tables as their very name is an abomination to those who think—to those who think with me—who regard mountaineering as unmixed play. These pages are alone addressed."

00:02:20

The consequences of him thinking this way are twofold. First, it got him kicked out of the Alpine Club. These were radical ideas for the mid to late 1800s, and so they removed him and his membership. He had to go and do his thing by himself, and he did. He did some extraordinary things, and he wrote about them, like many of them did. The second thing was that he was killed tragically in an avalanche on Nanga Parbat, which is the ninth highest mountain in the world in Pakistan. Now, go far back, look on your map—see if you can find that one.

00:02:55

I want to talk more about this discourse, which has now become the dominant discourse, not just for mountaineering but for most mountain sports. If you walk into a Chapters and walk through any magazine racks and look at all the representations of mountains and what folks are doing in them, it's all extreme. It's all pushing the limits. But to do that in a contemporary sense, I thought it would be better to talk about or have an expert come in and talk about motivations and psychology, and that person is definitely not me.

00:03:21

So, it's with that pleasure that I get to introduce the Dean of the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation, Carrie M., who is a relative. Thanks, Zach. My family is from Brandon, Manitoba, and my undergraduate degree is actually in zoology and environmental science. During that time, I took a Pleistocene geomorphology course, and the only thing I really remember from that—because this was a few decades ago—is that the flattest piece of land in the world is between Portage la Prairie and Winnipeg. So, basically, I'm from an area very close to the flattest piece of land in the world, which was the outflow of the then-glacial Lake Agassiz.

00:04:36

I did my PhD here in sport and exercise psychology at the University of Alberta, and then when I finished here, I moved to Australia to be gainfully employed for a period of time as a professor, eventually a professor in Queensland. While I was there, I got an email from a Mummery from Chicago, and he wanted to know my lineage and everything so he could add to the family tree. By me giving him all my details, including my daughters and my parents, he sent me a full family tree, which didn't mean much to me at that point because it was hundreds of years, many generations, and really, my understanding of my family goes back not any further than my grandparents, which is probably fairly similar.

00:05:53

When I moved to Australia, I lived right at the tip of the Great Barrier Reef. I could be out snorkeling and diving on the Great Barrier Reef in about 20 minutes in my boat. We had a 17-kilometer-long beach right near our house, and the coldest day of the year was usually about 20 to 24 degrees. Everyone in Australia said, "Why did you move here? You lived in Alberta; it's such a beautiful place—mountains, skiing, the Rockies." I'm going, "Beaches, Great Barrier Reef." So, the Australians thought Alberta was great, and then I moved back, and everyone said, "Why did you move back?" So, we always think the grass is always greener on each side.

00:07:00

The first question Zach asked me is, "Are you related to Frederick Mummery?" And I said, "Well, yeah, I am. I can actually prove it to you if you go through this massive document." So, I did prove it, and now, thanks to that, a man that I never really knew of, other than urban legend, I always seem to be the preface for anytime I talk about mountains, especially with Zach.

00:07:34

So, Zach, how exactly do we define a mountain again in this course? Because I know in the module, we have a definition of a mountain. So, what is a mountain again? Yeah, what's a mountain? I used to live in Saskatoon. There's Mount Blackstrap. Anyone from Saskatoon here? Is Mount Blackstrap a mountain? It's really a landfill, right? But maybe ski Mount Blackstrap. It's a landform with high relative relief. So, how many people here have climbed the mountain? Oh, that's pretty good. So, I guess the question would be, why did you climb that mountain? Was it a big deal, or was it just a little bump, and you just got to the top because it seemed to be better than being at the bottom?

00:08:55

I indeed have climbed a mountain once. I think that's probably the only one I'm going to climb, and I'll talk a little bit about it later. But really, I said that my undergraduate degree was in zoology and environmental science, but my master's degree and PhD are in the area of sports psychology. So, I really use mountains just as a metaphor for understanding motivation—why people do things. My interest in psychology has been manifold, but really, it's just trying to understand why people behave in certain ways.

00:10:10

I did have another quote that I subsequently misplaced, which was a quote by a Native American chief who was asked why indigenous peoples typically don't climb the high mountains, and his answer was somewhat equally simplistic: "Because there's nothing there. So, why do you want to get to the top of the mountain? There's really nothing there except the top of the mountain." So, it always interests me why people do things.

00:11:30

Two years ago, my wife and I did a big road trip. We revisited a trip we took 35 years before when we were engaged as very young people. We took my 1974 Volvo, which was even old at that time, and we drove down to California from Saskatoon. We ended up in Yosemite National Park in California. Absolutely beautiful. That's the Half Dome, the big granite structure. I remember when I was quite young, and it was actually on our first go-around, we didn't get to Yosemite, but we did get to Yellowstone. I was in my 20s, and at that point, I had this relatively naive perception that natural beauty is something Canada has, and very few other places in the world have it.

00:13:22

I see this what I thought was a power line. Well, really, they put a power line up here? That's just destroying the aesthetic beauty of the place. It's strung between two cliffs with about a 3,000-foot, almost a kilometer, vertical drop underneath that power line. So, we got a little closer, and it wasn't a power line; it was a slackline. We saw a number of young people getting ready to go slacklining over the gorge. I couldn't even get close enough to take a picture to show you the relief.

00:15:13

Two days before we were at Taft Point watching the people slackline, Dean Potter, in a wingsuit, jumped off Taft Point to do the glide. You know, how you look like a flying squirrel with him and a mate. They hit the wall, and they both died two days before we were there. I'm just reading this, and I'm going, "Well, that's amazing."

00:19:02

Dean Potter said, "I made it happen. That's what was going on in my mind—the power of will, making things happen. There's amazing energy. I could do anything up there. It's as pure as it gets. There's nothing but my stripped-down body walking my path. I feel like I'm climbing out of a darker place. There's nothing—one of the deeper lows I've been in in my life. I was kind of resentful of being divorced, getting dumped, and stuff, but the whole world's kind of opening up to me."

00:21:06

What drives that sort of extreme behavior? What's the motivation behind it? I think we can look at that because it's not only that sort of extreme behavior. Zach sort of said that it's one of the primary discourses in mountain studies now—athleticism. But certainly, there are over 300 people who have died climbing Mount Everest. Most recently, there was an Australian woman from Monash University, a lecturer in political science, who died trying to accomplish these great feats and challenges.

00:24:01

The concept of intrinsic motivation is really based on people's behavior where there's no visible, tangible reward for doing what they do. Dean Potter wasn't going to get millions of dollars, though I assume he was relatively wealthy because of his exploits, but he wasn't driven for that reward or punishment. That really started out very early on with effectance motivation from White and personal causation from Deci and Ryan. It's about whether you are the origin of your behavior or whether you're a pawn of someone else's behavior.

00:27:02

Flow is where you're at an optimal balance of ability and challenge. It's a situation that people would love to be in. You're immersed in the activity; it can be art, it can be sports, it can be anything that you're doing. You lose the sense of time; you lose the sense of self. You're so immersed in it without the need for external reward or external punishment. You are engrossed in the activity.

00:30:07

Dean Potter became really popular by rock climbing, and then he really made his mark by free climbing. Free climbing is not climbing with any type of protection. You're on the rock wall by yourself. If you fall, you will fall. There's no rope, nothing. Then he took it to the next level by climbing things that were so hard that the chances of him falling were so great that he started wearing a BASE jumping parachute as a backpack. He would climb until he fell off, and then when he knew he was going to fall off, he just gave himself a good push, fell, and then pulled the chute.

00:33:30

Why do people climb mountains? Well, a lot of it is basically around intrinsic motivation—the need to gradually and systematically increase the challenge as the skills go and accomplish that outcome and get yourself into a flow area. Other theories would say something a little different. They could say that there is a need to achieve, that there's an inherent personality trait. I like the flow theory. I really like this idea of matching and getting yourself into a zone where you feel very motivated.

00:36:41

I did climb a mountain once. This is the top of Mount Athabasca. I'm over here on the left in the orange. On the right is Zach Robinson. He was helpful enough to get me up to the top, and he was helpful enough to make sure I got back down. What would I say was the reason that I climbed the mountain? I don't think at any point I was in flow because I don't think I had any particular skills. Mount Athabasca is not a skilled climb. It's really just a bit of a challenging walk. You've got crampons; you've got ropes; you've got a few other things. But really, it was just, you know, I could say I did it. I felt good about doing it.

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