Attitudes toward Mountains - Mountain Geography: Physical and Human Dimensions - page 474

Some of the alpine clubs became very powerful financially, socially, and politically,
and it has been argued that expeditions in Africa, Asia, and South America were part of
the era of neocolonialism in the early twentieth century (Ellis 2001). The (British) Alpine
Club has supported a large number of projects, from polar exploration to the search
for the Yeti or Abominable Snowman. Its members have traditionally been among the
elite of British society. Hillary and Hunt, after climbing Mount Everest, were knighted
by the Queen. Most of these clubs have diversified now, but they are still powerful. A
good example in the United States is the Sierra Club, which now has a membership of
about 1.4 million. It employs full-time lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and has consider-
able political clout. One of its most impressive achievements was to galvanize public
opinion through a highly effective advertising campaign that forced the U.S. Congress to
block the proposed construction of dams on the Colorado River that would have flooded
parts of Grand Canyon National Park (Cohen 1988).
Mountains are no longer the private preserve of elitist clubs or of special-interest
groups, but a “cult of mountains” continues. This has been beautifully expressed by
Rene Dubos:
Man has now succeeded in humanizing most of the earth's surface but paradox-
ically, he is developing simultaneously a cult for wilderness. After having been
for so long frightened by the primeval forest, he has come to realize that its eer-
ie light evokes in him a mood of wonder that cannot be experienced in an orch-
ard or a garden. Likewise, he recognizes in the vastness of the ocean and in the
endless ebb and flow of its waves a mystic quality not found in humanized envir-
onments. His response to the thunderous silence of deep canyons, the solitude
of high mountains, the luminosity of the deserts is the expression of an aspect of
his fundamental being that is still in resonance with cosmic events, (DUBOS 1973:
772)
From a pastime pursued by a small group of aficionados, mountaineering has become
a major sport that has captured the attention of numerous people and become a source
of income for a growing number of guiding services who take clients to the summits of
the world's highest peaks, including Mount Everest, sometimes with devastating results
that get widespread publicity among the general public (Krakauer 1997). In addition to
developing a commercial side, mountain climbing has also become a highly competitive
endeavor, with races to see who can climb celebrated routes in the shortest time. Rock
climbing has spun off as a sport in itself, often practiced exclusively indoors on artifi-
cial walls. People now climb mountains around the world for a plethora of reasons, ran-
ging from the competitive to the contemplative, from the profane to the sacred (Bartlett
1993; Bernbaum 1997).
UNESCO's designation of “associative cultural landscapes” as a category of World
Heritage Site in 1992 has raised to prominence the cultural and spiritual significance
that people and traditions place on natural sites—in particular, sacred mountains such
as Tongariro in New Zealand, Uluru or Ayers Rock in Australia, and Taishan in China. In
the cases of Tongariro and Uluru, this designation has strengthened the role of indigen-
ous peoples in managing places that have special value for them in their natural states