"We didn't have any big mountains of our own, so we borrowed other people's," quipped Stephen Venables, president of the Alpine Club, by way of explaining how the British came to the Alps and virtually invented the sport of mountaineering. Last summer, Venables and 300 members of the oldest climbing organization in the world converged on Switzerland for the Zermatt Extravaganza, part of a year-long celebration of the club's 150th anniversary; members of the Swiss, American, Japanese, and French Alpine Clubs, and the Himalayan Club of India, joined in as well. For three days, some of the most legendary names in climbing were breathing the same rarefied air, an event that would perhaps not happen again for another 50 years.

It's called the Alpine Club—not British—simply because it was the only one in the world when, in 1857, a dozen gentlemen formed a society dedicated to the esoteric pastime of climbing. Heading to the Alps, they teamed with local guides to brave the hitherto unscaled heights, and by 1865, 31 of the 39 major Alpine peaks had been ascended for the first time, all by Britons, inspiring members to light out for the unclimbed mountains of every continent.

True to form, Venables and his compatriots were up before sunrise on Friday, the first day of the Extravaganza, lured into the mountains. The epitome of British understatement, the group gathering on the slopes of the Breithorn—a 13,663-foot peak in the crenellated ridge spiking the skyline—neither looked nor acted the part of mountaineering legends. With his professorial air and wry wit, the bespectacled 53-year old Venables seems every inch the Oxford literature scholar, which is what he was when he began climbing. An acclaimed author, he was the first Briton to summit Mount Everest without the aid of bottled oxygen in 1988, only the second expedition ever to tackle the mountain's remote Kangshung Face, a tangle of terrain meringued with avalanche-prone snow. Alone, he bivouacked at 28,000 feet in subzero temperatures, resigned to the "probable loss," as he impassively recorded, of his frostbitten toes.

The prerequisites for full Alpine Club membership are straightforward, but far from simple: tackling "twenty respectable alpine routes" in big mountain ranges—like the Alps, the Andes, or the Himalaya—over three seasons. The easier voies normales—well-trodden routes—count less, and guided climbs not at all. Then there is the club's inner circle, the Alpine Climbing Group, for members climbing at the world's highest standards. Venables is a member. In the European grading system, that translates to routes rated extrêmement difficile (ED) or the rare abominablement difficile (ABO). The classic route up the Eiger's North Face, the infamous "Wall of Death"—a sunless rampart of black limestone 50 miles northeast of Zermatt, where more than 50 climbers have perished (including, tragically, the gifted American John Harlin II in 1966)—is graded ED.