Science Friday
Hosted by Flora Lichtman and Ira Flatow
The mountaineering history behind "skimo," a new Winter Olympic event. Plus, research into a true alpine champion, the mountain goat.
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Hey, I'm Flora Lichtman, and you're listening to Science Friday. This weekend, the Winter Olympics begin in Milan, and there's a brand-new event: skimo.
One more, are you ready?
Thank you much.
So. It is go time. Here we go.
Skimo or ski mountaineering, it's a new event, but obviously, mountaineering is not. Here to guide us through the history of skimo and the science connection is Dr. Peter Hanson. He's a mountaineering expert and professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. He's also the author of the book The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Enlightenment. Hey, Peter.
Hi, nice to be here.
What's up with skimo? What is the deal with this sport?
Well, it's a new angle on an old activity. Two of them, actually, brought into combination. It's become a new sport over the last 30 years or so. And you start on skis, climbing up a mountain. And there's skins on the bottom of the ski so that you can go uphill on the ski, reach a point where you take them off, put them on your back, sprint or walk or climb up the slope for an extended period, then put the skis back on and ski down in a slalom that's a set part of the course.
This sounds very difficult. Can I just pop in to say, like, this sounds hard?
I mean, I've never tried it, so I can't say it from personal experience. But it looks that way. What really looks hard is to combine all these things together. Just climbing up with skins on the bottom of your skis, that people have done for a long time. Then to sprint up in your boots in the snow, that's not easy. And then having the endurance to then come back down. The sprint makes that very fast. It's one loop around. The relays go back and forth and around and around and around, and it's multiple laps. So there's a lot of coordination, agility, endurance, strength. Reminds a lot of things that makes it an interesting sport.
So obviously, you know, skimo is new at the Olympics, but as you said, mountaineering has been around. Tell us a little bit about the history of mountaineering. And I know that's a big question, and you've written a whole, many hundreds of pages book about it. But where does this story begin?
Well, the story of mountaineering as a sport kind of begins in the 18th century. People had been climbing in the mountains, living in the mountains, skiing across the mountains, or using snowshoes and crampons and other things to cross the Alps and other mountain ranges for a long time before then. But in the 18th century, people wanted to climb the mountains to do scientific research on them, about how high they were, what, could people survive a night on the snow overnight? Something they didn't really know. And they wanted to know which peak was the highest. And they were pretty sure by then that Mont Blanc was, but they needed to confirm this through a series of research. And so a guy named Jacques Baume is kind of abandoned by his companions in the snowfields,
and he spends the night overnight. He doesn't suffocate. People thought that snow would absorb all the oxygen, or it would, they didn't actually refer to in those terms. They just thought it would absorb all the air, and you wouldn't survive. He did. He came back down, and that convinced another doctor to go with him. And they completed the first ascent of Mont Blanc.
Are these early Alpine expeditions, you know, like a version of Shackleton or Darwin in the Galapagos, are they about understanding nature and our environment?
They are. Some of those ascents and attempts to climb the peak were kind of inspired by Horace Benedict de Saussure, a scientist or naturalist that would have called him at the time, who lived in Geneva. And Saussure goes to the top of Mont Blanc a year after the first ascent, and he takes up all his instruments to study the temperature, humidity, air pressure, everything. He uses himself as an instrument for, you know, his taste, smell, how they responded to things differently than at lower elevations and so forth. And he said, you know, he could barely taste anything at the top. He felt like a gourmet invited to a great banquet who couldn't actually enjoy the feast when he was on the summit. They really were interested
in all kinds of questions about science and nature. It was not divided into the kind of sub-disciplines that we know today as fields of science. This is why they were called natural historians or natural philosophers, because they studied everything. And so really, that kind of combination of climbing and science was part of the inspiration for Mountaineering and its origins.
And we know that other scientific expeditions, you know, from this time period were about planting a flag, right? They were about domination of a, quote, a new-to-me land, right?
In the 19th century, yes. Less so in the 18th century. By the 1850s, the planting the flag dynamic was extreme. That was the age of empires. So let's say, for example, in the 1850s, the peak now known as Mount Everest was determined to be the highest in the world. So the plans to ascend that peak were in large part about the British showing that they had domination over their empire. And over British India specifically. And that kind of motivation was still very prominent in the 1920s when they go to make the first expeditions to reach the peak. So that becomes a kind of high watermark for the flying the flag that extends into
this 1980s and then kind of still continues when some set of climbers make the first ascent by someone from that country. You know, they'll bring the flag on top, but it's less common now.
Hmm. Is it different today?
I would say yes, there's still a component of that because one of the scripts that people keep referring to is the man versus the mountain. But in a changing climate, it is almost impossible to continue to think about it in those terms without them seeming very problematic. And so some of the climbers see themselves as witnesses to climate change. It's not about the domination. They want to be able to document and explain how their own experience of being in nature is a model for how people should think in new ways about our relationship to the natural world.
You know, I've spent a little time hiking in the Alps and it's absolutely marvelous. Like I can't think of another word. And it's hard to imagine thinking of those climbs as domination because if you've been on a tall mountain, you know that you are but a speck.
Right. There's an effect of just have that experience and adopt an attitude of humility. You know, nature and the size of a peak can cut you down to size. You, you know, see how you're but a small piece of a larger whole. And that is a very common experience among climbers and others who go into these peaks. But it's one of the things that people find, some people problematic about the winter sports, the skiing and so forth, is that it's not very much about that. You know, you take the lift up and you ski down. And it seems more like the expression of the individual,
you know, in nature, but really cutting their way through the slopes and, and reaching speed and enjoyment and so forth. And that's all about their own individual, personal experience. Ski mountaineering is interesting because on a hill, they have to walk or run up. You know, they're not taking a lift. The ski mountaineers earn it.
Let's come down off the mountain for a second. Will you be watching? Do you have a ski dog in this race?
No, but I'll certainly be watching. Yeah. I mean, the sprints are those short things, maybe three minutes or so that'll be fun. And it's got that bump and run sort of, you know, elbows up potential for the competitors. But then the mixed double relay, to me, that's the really interesting one to watch. It's much longer. It might take a half an hour for it to do the race, because you do lap after lap after lap. But there's a tension and a, an interest to it. I think it'll open up an interest in the sport and new ways to see it in the Olympics.
Peter Hanson is a mountaineering expert and professor of history at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Peter, happy Olympics watching.
Thank you.
After the break, we meet the goat of mountaineering, the mountain goat. Stick around.
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Sure, humans can get up a mountain with the help of ropes, crampons, maybe a ski lift for me and some of the rest of us. But as you struggle towards the summit, you might find someone else already up there, a mountain goat, truly the goat of alpine ascent. Dr. Kevin White has made a career out of studying mountain goats in the mountains of Western North America, and he has a particular interest in the risks they face, from wolves to starvation to avalanches. He's a wildlife ecologist at the University of Alaska Southeast. Kevin, welcome to Science Friday.
Thank you for having me.
For people who don't have a perfect mental picture of the mountain goats you study, give us a description.
Yeah, so mountain goats are a remarkable species. They're an animal that weighs upwards of 350 pounds for males, females being smaller, more in the neighborhood of about 200 pounds. But what's particularly notable is their white woolly coat, a coat that really enables them to withstand extreme temperatures, down to 40 degrees below zero at times. It's eight to 10 inches long and white colored, so they're well camouflaged in snowy mountain environments.
They're very fluffy looking.
Yeah, that's correct. In fact, early explorers mistaken them for polar bears, which is a species that they were familiar with from traveling in the Arctic.
You know, I think of sort of iconic pictures of them on a tiny little ledge. Do you have a story from seeing them in the wild where you were wowed by their climbing abilities?
Yeah, many times. Sometimes you'll watch them tiptoeing across a steep mountain ledge and expecting that at any moment they might just slip, you know, because the environment has snow and ice and is really slippery. But they're just so amazingly sure-footed. And it's particularly fun to watch the young mountain goats that are born in mid-May. They're very precocious and oftentimes they form little bands and playing with each other, playing king of the mountain. And in these very precarious situations, but you know, they're just so amazing in their ability to balance and navigate in this type of what seems to us to be dangerous terrain.
As a parent, I'm thinking of my young little kids like trying to navigate a balance beam. And I'm like, ah. Are they born really with the ability to kind of get up these steep cliffs?
Well, initially, when they're born, of course, there's a period of a few days, week or so, when they're just really getting their their feet under them. And their moms are sort of hunkered down in a safe, protected area up in the cliffs. And it takes them a little bit of time just before they build up strength and start gaining some locomotory coordination. But it's an important part of their adaptations for living in those environments.
Do the mom goats look nervous?
I think that they're just kind of fearless in those types of environments. Like they just, their sense of risk and fear is quite different than ours, I would say.
What special adaptations do they have? How how do they do it?
Right. One of the key things relates to their hooves. They have what we call a hard keratinous sheath. And so keratin is the material that our fingernails are made of. And typically, the material that we think of is hooves being composed of. And so then that surrounds a soft pad, similar to what dogs have. What that enables them to do is they can use that hard sheath that's sort of surrounding the soft pad to dig in and gain purchase, like in a crack on a cliff, for example. But then if it's a wet, slabby surface, they can just use that pad to grip.
The perfect climbing boot, it sounds like.
Yeah, exactly.
Is there anything besides those toe pads? I mean, is it also like how their body's built?
So they have very strong, muscular shoulders and they're narrow bodied. And so their narrow body morphology enables them, as you might expect, to walk on like a narrow ledge. And they have a very gymnastic capacity. Like, you wouldn't necessarily think that until you watch them long enough and see their ability to leap or sometimes maneuver. In some instances, if it's a really narrow cliff that just dead ends, they might really slowly, like, kind of. Rise up on their hind feet and then spin around and then go back the way that they came to get out of this kind of situation. Of course, they have just extraordinary balance as you might expect.
It sounds like they have the goat version of an Alex Honnold body, the guy who just scaled the building on Netflix.
That's right. You know, actually, one of my early favorite memories about mountain goats involves a famous climber that preceded Alex Honnold named Galen Rau. And he was climbing in an area called the Cirque du Enclamebleau in the Northwest Territories. And he was talking about this observation he had of a mountain goat that they watched climb. What he, you know, said was like a 5'9" pitch, which is something that climbers might generally be roped up on and just sort of being amazed at their ability to scale some of these cliff faces that are pretty challenging even for humans.
I know that part of your work centers on avalanches. How much of a risk are avalanches to mountain goats? And is that like one of the top threats?
Yeah, that's a great question. Some of the key risks to mountain goats involve predation, and that's sort of why animals are using these steep rugged terrains to avoid the risk of predation by wolves or bears, for example. And then malnutrition can be a significant source of mortality if you have severe winter conditions. Disease seems to play a relatively minor role. And we always knew that avalanches were a factor that influenced mountain goats, but it wasn't until our recent studies that we really realized how impactful that was. And it's an interesting situation because mountain goats are able to avoid
the risk of one source of mortality predation by inhabiting steep rugged terrain. But then that puts them at the risk of avalanches. What we learned is that avalanches comprise about 35% of all mortality, is about one third. And in severe years, over 20% of a population can be killed by avalanches.
Does changing climate make for more avalanches? Like, do you see more avalanches as the climate warms?
Yeah, that's a great, a great question and something that there's been some work done in different mountain ranges, like globally.
There's different circumstances that can create bad avalanche conditions. And so if you can have a huge amount of snow that's deposited in a giant storm, and that can create instabilities and cause an avalanche. But you can also have a warm event where it might rain on the surface of the snow, then freeze and create a really slick surface. And then you can have relatively modest amount of snow that's deposited on that and also create an avalanche. And so sometimes avalanches occur when there's a lot of snow, but sometimes it can occur in years when there's not necessarily a lot of snow. And so it's hard to say at this stage, until more studies are done, exactly how we might expect avalanches, frequency and occurrence to change going into the
future in our particular area.
I can't let you leave without hearing a story. Will you tell me about your most memorable experience with a mountain goat?
One of the most remarkable things that happened involves an instance where we radio collar a female mountain goat. During the wintertime, the mountain goat ended up dying due to malnutrition. And in the spring, a black bear came along and found the mountain goat that died and was scavenging on it. In the course of scavenging on it, took the radio collar off of the mountain goat and put it on and then wandered off with this mountain goat radio collar, including crossing glaciers. And we ended up tracking it for a year and a half. And eventually, the collar released as scheduled, and we found it in a salmonberry patch.
That's really shocking that the bear was like, you know what, I'm gonna put this on. Let me, what do I, what do I look like with this on? Let's try it.
That's right. Yeah, bears are just so curious, you know, they just sort of try anything. It was hard to believe at first until we finally put all the puzzle pieces together and figured out exactly what happened. Yeah.
Dr. Kevin White is a wildlife ecologist at the University of Alaska Southeast. He's based in Haynes, Alaska. Thank you for listening. You listeners really are the goat, and we want to hear from you. The listener line is always open for your bleats, 8774 SciFry. This episode was produced by Charles Burquist. I'm Flora Lichtman. We'll see you next time.
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