What is the difference between hill walking, hiking, climbing and mountaineering?
Hiking is a common term for walking, or trekking anywhere. Hill Walking is hiking or trekking in low to medium height mountains, i.e. until 1500 – 2000 meters. Mountaineering is a hiking or trekking above the 2000 meters. Mountaineering generally means passing glaciers, snow fields etc… Climbing is the real work, where scrambling stops, may happen during a hike or a trek.
Hiking doesn’t necessarily imply going up a mountain. In England, we do a lot of hill walking, and we have small crags people ascend without ropes. Rock climbing is on higher crags and uses ropes. Mountaineering involves all that as well as tackling snow, ice and rock with ice axes and crampons. What is the distinction between free and artificial climbing? The English have always been proponents of free climbing. Unlike Continental climbers, we were very reluctant to use pitons hammered into the rocks [which leaves marks]. We thought that was cheating. But if we wanted to climb to the same standard, we had to learn. Britons discovered how to jam pebbles into cracks in the rock and later developed the idea into nuts and wedges. The last man takes them out. In the past, climbers have left a great deal of debris in their wake, most infamously on Everest. Is anything being done about this? Everybody now is more ethical and green. European teams are required to bring down their equipment, p
