We’ll come onto the first humans to climb mountains in another post, but long before people ever had the inclination to set foot up high, animals have found safety and plenty to sustain them on the upper grounds.
Many years ago I trekked up to the Kolahoi Glacier in Kashmir, India, north of Pahalgam, thinking I was all alone above the snow-line in a vast, icy expanse. A black horse suddenly ran out from behind a boulder and continued upwards though the ravine, its hooves skipping adeptly over the ice. I wasn’t sure if it was wild or domesticated, but it got me thinking about why it was up there. Was it hiding from danger, exploring, mating, or just lost? Or was it just mountaineering, enjoying the challenge of route-finding in the extreme terrain? It certainly seemed to be at home in that environment. Intriguing.
No land animal is more at home in the mountains than the ibex, in my opinion. Anyone who has seen David Attenborough’s Planet Earth II would have been astonished at the dexterity of ibexes climbing up and down vertical rock faces. Here’s a clip:
Here’s another clip from a different BBC documentary, of ibexes fearlessly licking salt off a sheer dam wall, effectively free-soloing on their “dextrous pincer-like hooves”:
And finally, here is a group I filmed near Les Houches in the Chamonix valley, France: