Adventurous travel: virgin peaks
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Scottish climbing adventurer Bruce Normand (left) on his climbing tour in China. Photos: Courtesy of Bruce Normand |
To strangers, Bruce Normand is a tall, wiry figure striding briskly around the Renmin University campus. The 43-year-old first arrived in China as a visiting professor in 2006, bringing his hobby with him. Normand has left his footprints on no less than 10 of China's peaks. His hobby is not cheap – for a 6,000 meter peak he expects to pay up to $5,000 per team for administration fees (including salary, peak fees and equipment) and official (environmental) fees. Unclimbed mountains run an additional $20,000. Yet the expense has never driven him away from coming to China to challenge what he calls "virgin mountains" (those with no record of being climbed before).
Normand's first climb was 4,000-meter Mt. Rainier in Washington state, US. Eighteen years later, he became the first Scotsman to summit K2. More recently, he climbed to the summit of four Xinjiang mountains in four weeks time.
Two-dimensional life
"I think life should have more than one dimension," the physics professor explains of his career versus his passion. "If I stay in the laboratory doing physics for two weeks time then I may hardly think anything creative, and I'll get bored with it soon." Normand has come to sense a commonality between what he often does in the lab and on mountain ranges. He believes that physics research is the search for new frontiers of knowledge, whereas mountaineering is the search for new frontiers of adventure. "It's also about introducing more new challenges to my life," he says.
China particularly intrigues Normand, as so many mountains lack documentation about their geology and terrain. Using Everest as an example, he points out how one can simply look up a 1975 expedition report to read all about the number of camps, the types of rocks, where ropes were laid, what the weather was like and how long it took to summit the mountain. Many mountains in China have no such catalogues of information.
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