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Using the archives of the Alpine Club (the first alpine club in the world, founded in 1857), the obituaries published in its magazine Alpine Journal, and the accounts and autobiographies of English Victorian-era mountaineers, this article explores how members of the English mountaineering elite, also members of the social elite, codified mountaineering. It demonstrates how mountaineering gradually came to be symbolically marked as “superior” to sports, as the epitome of corporeal, intellectual, and moral excellence – or in other words, a practice that distinguishes its practitioners from athletes. A “spirit” of mountaineering, both a group spirit and an ethic of practice, is thus forged and prevails to this day.