Opinion – É Logo Ali: Mountaineering asks for responsibility, says president of Clube Alpino Paulista

Since we started publishing this blog, we have repeated many times that adventure tourism can be for everyone, in one way or another. But we also seek to alert the unwary to the importance of safety, always, and in all activities — whether walking through the nearest square or climbing Everest. And this is one of the main concerns of most pioneers who have a lot of trouble to tell. People like Fábio Alberti Cascino, 61, an educator from São Paulo who presides over CAP (Clube Alpino Paulista), one of the oldest institutions for training and promoting mountaineering in Brazil, founded by Domingos Giobbi in 1959.

“CAP was born as a group of people who sought to open routes and trails, things that practically did not exist in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s”, says Cascino. These people, for the most part, had mountaineering experience in Europe, from which the name “alpine” originated, even if at most the Andes of neighboring countries, rather than the European Alps, are atonic. “It might sound snobby, but it was the spirit that guided the project,” he adds.

“From the opening of imports in the 1990s, equipment that we didn’t have here before began to enter, and that’s when the explosion of people practicing mountaineering began,” he recalls. Even with the exponential increase in interest in the activity, the club has always maintained a reduced number of members. “Today we only have 45 members, as the number is always linked to our ability to train people, which is the focus of CAP”, he explains.

This focus translates into the club’s mission, which is to train new mountaineers, instructors and guides; exploration and opening of roads and trails; conquest of summits in Brazil and abroad and conservation, preservation and promotion of free access to mountains and their environments.

What worries more experienced people, says Cascino, is the fact that easy access to modern equipment gives the impression to many who are not aware that filling up with varied and state-of-the-art gadgets is enough to head out to the trails and mountains techniques, often without qualified guides for the task. So getting into trouble is just a misstep.

In addition to the race for nature generated as a response to the confinement of the months at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, “there is an ideological movement, which is of the essence of capitalism, which includes the exploitation by the media of promoting the concept of the ‘adventure of living. ‘” he says. “In this concept, the idea is hammered out that, in order to survive, one always has to be throwing oneself into some adventure, that to live is to constantly take risks, it is a marketing that was born as a business posture, but that ends up pushing people to this also in nature”, he argues.

For him, the luck of this crowd that throws itself headlong without knowing exactly where it will end up is that the Brazilian environment has no extremes. “Here we won’t have snow avalanches, nor large loose rocks, at most, if the person gets lost, he will spend a very cold night and be rescued the next day, with rare exceptions”, he evaluates. As an example of the danger caused by ignorance, Cascino recalls the case of the self-styled “messianic coach and influencer” Pablo Marçal (now candidate for president by the Pros), who invented to take a group of 67 inexperienced people to the peak of the Marins, in the middle of January, season of heavy rains in the region, defying the wrath of the elements with a religiously based harangue and motivational platitudes.

To avoid greater tragedies and unnecessary expense to rescue teams (“An hour by helicopter to rescue a mountain top does not cost less than R$10,000”, he points out), Cascino defends greater dialogue between companies, guides, mountaineers, managers of the target areas and parks and the State, to define limits and rules for the activity, but without plastering. “They have even tried to pass laws in Congress to regulate the activity with absurd requirements, but this is not feasible and we managed to overturn it”, he recalls.

Cascino also emphasizes that it is essential to always keep in mind that mountaineering is an activity that involves risks. “Requiring insurance from anyone entering a mountain area is a way of making people think twice that they might be getting into something that is not their responsibility,” he explains. In addition, he mentions the importance of reminding the would-be adventurer that he has to know how to use the right equipment, have adequate physical preparation for that activity and, above all, detail the difficulties involved.

As you can see, something that seems very obvious and just a matter of common sense. But this one, the reader is well aware, is not included in the backpack.