Mums urged to go wild: 'We learn so much about ourselves by taking risks'

Poet and mountaineer Helen Mort says motherhood should not prevent women from getting in touch with their wild side or having adventures in the great outdoors

Thu, 21 Apr, 2022 - 18:00

Suzanne Harrington

Poet Helen Mort has been drawn to the mountains all her life. Her memoir, A Line Above The Sky, explores how motherhood has temporarily changed her desire to climb.

“It all began with my dad – the mountains were where he was happiest, and it quickly became where I was happiest too,” she says. “I grew up on the edge of the Peak District, so it’s in my blood. There’s a sense of perspective – I always get this feeling of life making sense when I’m high up.”

The ghost of Alison Hargreaves, the mountaineer who climbed Everest alone without oxygen, soloed all the Alps in a single season, climbed the Eiger while six months pregnant, and died aged 32 descending K2 in a storm, threads through Mort’s memoir.

“I’ve always been fascinated by Alison Hargreaves as an inspirational sportswoman and very relatable person – she struggled with what she was supposed to be doing in life,” she says. “There was a conflict between having an all-consuming passion for something and wanting to be a mother.”

Inevitably, Hargreaves was judged very differently from the male mountaineers who died on the same climb: “Nobody has the right to publicly judge decisions that a family has privately made, as Alison Hargreaves’ family did – it was a collective decision that she went back to climbing those big peaks,” says Mort. At the time of Hargreaves’ death, her children were aged six and four.

“I believe that male climbers struggle with these dilemmas and have the same tensions within the family about this – what differs is public judgement,” says Mort. It is, she says, damning to call a woman ‘selfish’ whether they’ve got children or not, “Yet we expect men to continue pursuing their own ambitions – we don’t expect men to sacrifice the things they did before, whereas we do seem to expect it of mothers.

“I’ve always defended the right of mothers to climb mountains and to go into those risky environments in the way that fathers do. I don’t see any difference when it comes to ethical considerations.”

Unlike Hargreaves, having her son – now aged three – has changed how Mort feels about mountaineering. She has put herself on hold.

“I’m not tempted to go on big expeditions - that would mean being away from home for months,” she says. In the book, she recounts a panic attack, being stuck on a ledge, unable to go up or down - something that had not happened pre-parenthood.

“I froze,” she says. “I started thinking, what would happen if I fell? What would happen to my son? It felt like a loss of confidence. Weirdly, I don’t get that feeling when my son is climbing – he likes scrambling up rocks, like a lot of little kids he’s a daredevil, and I feel almost more confident in his ability than my own. My greatest joy is being outdoors with him, being in the Peak District.”

Alison Hargreaves’ son Tom Ballard followed in his mother’s mountaineering footsteps. He was the first climber to solo six Alpine north faces in a single winter, but died 100 miles from her own place of death in the Pakistani Himalaya, three years ago aged 31.

“I don’t worry about my son climbing now,” says Mort. “But if he were to become someone like Tom Ballard, a world-class mountaineer doing winter ascents in the Himalaya, how would I feel about it then? Would I try and stop him? I don’t know. The fear is very natural, it’s making peace with it that’s hard. It’s so much harder to judge the risk when someone else is doing it, which is the paradox of the book.”

She considers Hargreaves’ hypothetical paradox: “I think she’d have been pleased and proud that her son had found the joy in mountains that she had, that connection – he followed the route that she did before she died. And obviously devastated that he died in the mountains. It’s reconciling those two things."

Mort pauses. “I love the idea of sharing the mountains with my son, of going on trips like I did with my own dad. I’d be bereft if I thought I could never do it again – I’d also feel angry, if someone told me I could never do it again.

“We learn so much about ourselves by taking risks. Measured risks, not recklessness. But by putting ourselves in wild places and wild situations, learning a skill like navigating, or running a marathon, or just going for a walk by ourselves – this is how we gain confidence.

“Especially outdoors – so many of us grow up with a man quite literally showing us the way, reading the map. It’s really empowering to find out what your body and mind are capable of, in beautiful wild places.

“Mothers are especially in touch with nature and wildness – giving birth is an animal experience, so it’s really powerful for mothers to connect with wild landscapes and have adventures. It’s so good for your mind, especially after lockdown. That sense of freedom is really important.”