Attitudes toward Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 471

FIGURE 9.4 Tibetan Buddhist Monastery of Tengboche near the foot of Mount Everest in the Nepal
Himalaya at 3,873 m (12,715 ft). (Photo by E. Bernbaum.)
The Modern Period
The beginnings of the modern period of Western romantic adoration of mountains can
be found in the writings of Albrecht Von Haller, Thomas Gray, Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
and Horace Benedict de Saussure. By the nineteenth century, the beauty of mountains
was a common theme for poets and philosophers; scientists began to take a serious
interest in the origins of mountains and alpine phenomena, and popular accounts of
scientific findings were published in newspapers and periodicals; and mountains be-
came a favorite of landscape painters (Ruskin 1856; Lunn 1912; Rees 1975a, 1975b;
Schama 1995). By the 1860s, railways provided relatively easy access to the Alps. Tour-
ist resorts sprang up, and sanitariums were built to accommodate sufferers from con-
sumption (tuberculosis), since the dry clean air of the mountains was found to have
excellent therapeutic results (Barton 2008). The popular image of mountains was no
longer that of a cold, inhospitable land of horrors, but that of an attractive, healthy en-
vironment (Mathieu 2011).