Mountaineering
Mountaineering, mountain climbing, or alpinism is a set of outdoor activities that involves ascending mountains. Mountaineering-related activities include traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas that have become sports in their own right. Indoor climbing, sport climbing, and bouldering are also considered variants of mountaineering by some, but are part of a wide group of mountain sports.
Unlike most sports, mountaineering lacks widely applied formal rules, regulations, and governance; mountaineers adhere to a large variety of techniques and philosophies when climbing mountains. Numerous local alpine clubs support mountaineers by hosting resources and social activities. A federation of alpine clubs, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, is the International Olympic Committee-recognized world organization for mountaineering and climbing. The consequences of mountaineering on the natural environment can be seen in terms of individual components of the environment and the location/zone of mountaineering activity. Mountaineering impacts communities on economic, political, social, and cultural levels, often leading to changes in people's worldviews influenced by globalization, specifically foreign cultures and lifestyles.
History
Early mountaineering
Humans have been present in mountains since prehistory. The remains of Ötzi, who lived in the 4th millennium BC, were found in a glacier in the Ötztal Alps. However, the highest mountains were rarely visited early on, and were often associated with supernatural or religious concepts. Nonetheless, there are many documented examples of people climbing mountains prior to the formal development of the sport in the 19th century, although many of these stories are sometimes considered fictional or legendary. A rare medieval example of mountaineering is the 1100 AD ascent of the Untersberg.The famous poet Petrarch describes his 26 April 1336 ascent of Mount Ventoux in one of his epistolae familiares, claiming to be inspired by Philip V of Macedon's ascent of Mount Haemo.
For most of antiquity, climbing mountains was a practical or symbolic activity, usually undertaken for economic, political, or religious purposes. A commonly cited example is the 1492 ascent of Mont Aiguille by Antoine de Ville, a French military officer and lord of Domjulien and Beaupré. Because ropes, ladders and iron hooks were used, and because it was the first climb of any technical difficulty to be officially verified, this ascent is widely recognized as being the birth of mountaineering.
In the Andes, around the late 1400s and early 1500s, many ascents were made of extremely high peaks by the Incas and their subjects. The highest they are known for certain to have climbed is 6739 m at the summit of Volcan Llullaillaco.
Conrad Gessner, a mid-16th Century physician, botanist and naturalist from Switzerland, is widely recognized as being the first person to hike and climb for sheer pleasure.
The Enlightenment and the Golden Age of Alpinism
The Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic era marked a change of attitudes towards high mountains. In 1757, Swiss scientist Horace-Bénédict de Saussure made the first of several unsuccessful attempts on Mont Blanc in France. He then offered a reward to anyone who could climb the mountain, which was claimed in 1786 by Jacques Balmat and Michel-Gabriel Paccard. The climb is usually considered an epochal event in the history of mountaineering, a symbolic mark of the birth of the sport.By the early 19th century, many of the alpine peaks were reached, including the Grossglockner in 1800, the Ortler in 1804, the Jungfrau in 1811, the Finsteraarhorn in 1812, and the Breithorn in 1813. In 1808, Marie Paradis became the first woman to climb Mont Blanc, followed in 1838 by Henriette d'Angeville.
The beginning of mountaineering as a sport in the UK is generally dated to the ascent of the Wetterhorn in 1854 by English mountaineer Sir Alfred Wills, who made mountaineering fashionable in Britain. This inaugurated what became known as the Golden Age of Alpinism, with the first mountaineering club – the Alpine Club – being founded in 1857.
One of the most dramatic events was the spectacular first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865 by a party led by English illustrator Edward Whymper, in which four of the party members fell to their deaths. By this point, the sport of mountaineering had largely reached its modern form, with a large body of professional guides, equipment, and methodologies.
In the early years of the "golden age", scientific pursuits were intermixed with the sport, such as by the physicist John Tyndall. In the later years, it shifted to a more competitive orientation as pure sportsmen came to dominate the London-based Alpine Club and alpine mountaineering overall. The first president of the Alpine Club, John Ball, is considered to be the discoverer of the Dolomites, which for decades were the focus of climbers like Paul Grohmann and Angelo Dibona. At that time, the edelweiss also established itself as a symbol of alpinists and mountaineers.
Expansion around the world
In the 19th century, the focus of mountaineering turned towards mountains beyond the Alps. One of the earliest mountain areas to be explored beyond the Alps in the 19th century were the mountains of Norway—particularly Jotunheimen—where British mountaineers such as William Cecil Slingsby, Harold Raeburn and Howard Priestman were early pioneers. Slingsby's book Norway, the Northern Playground contributed greatly to the popularization of mountaineering in Norway among the international mountaineering community. Around the turn of the century, a young generation of Norwegian mountaineers such as George Paus, Eilert Sundt and Kristian Tandberg appeared, and later founded Norsk Tindeklub, the third oldest mountaineering association in the world. By the turn of the 20th century, mountaineering had acquired a more international flavour.In 1897, Mount Saint Elias on the Alaska-Yukon border was summitted by the Duke of the Abruzzi and party. In 1879–1880, the exploration of the highest Andes in South America began when English mountaineer Edward Whymper climbed Chimborazo and explored the mountains of Ecuador. It took until the late 19th century for European explorers to penetrate Africa. Mount Kilimanjaro in Africa was climbed in 1889 by Austrian mountaineer Ludwig Purtscheller and German geologist Hans Meyer, Mount Kenya in 1899 by Halford Mackinder.
The last frontier: The Himalayas
The greatest mountain range to be conquered was the Himalayas in South Asia. They had initially been surveyed by the British Empire for military and strategic reasons. In 1892, Sir William Martin Conway explored the Karakoram Himalayas, and climbed a peak of. In 1895, Albert F. Mummery died while attempting Nanga Parbat, while in 1899 Douglas Freshfield took an expedition to the snowy regions of Sikkim.In 1899, 1903, 1906, and 1908, American mountaineer Fanny Bullock Workman made ascents in the Himalayas, including one of the Nun Kun peaks. A number of Gurkha sepoys were trained as expert mountaineers by Charles Granville Bruce, and a good deal of exploration was accomplished by them.
In 1902, the Eckenstein–Crowley Expedition, led by English mountaineer Oscar Eckenstein and English occultist Aleister Crowley was the first to attempt to scale K2. They reached before turning back due to weather and other mishaps. Undaunted, in 1905 Crowley led the first expedition to Kangchenjunga, the third highest mountain in the world, in an attempt which Isserman, Angas Weaver and Molenaar describe as "misguided" and "lamentable" due to Crowley's many failings as an expedition leader.
Eckenstein was also a pioneer in developing new equipment and climbing methods. He started using shorter ice axes that could be used single-handedly, designed the modern crampons, and improved on the nail patterns used for the climbing boots.
File:Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay.jpg|thumb|upright=1.2|Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay after successfully completing the first ascent of Mount Everest, 29 May 1953|alt=Image of Hillary and Norgay after ascending Mt Everest
By the 1950s, all the eight-thousanders but two had been climbed starting with Annapurna in 1950 by Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal on the 1950 French Annapurna expedition. The highest of these peaks Mount Everest was climbed in 1953 after the British had made several attempts in the 1920s; the 1922 expedition reached before being aborted on the third summit attempt after an avalanche killed seven porters. The 1924 expedition saw another height record achieved but still failed to reach the summit with confirmation when George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared on the final attempt. The summit was finally reached on 29 May 1953 by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay from the south side in Nepal.
Just a few months later, Hermann Buhl made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, on the 1953 German–Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition, completing the last 1,300 meters walking alone, self-medicating with pervitin, the vasodilator padutin, and a stimulant tea made from coca leaves. K2, the second-highest peak in the world, was first scaled in 1954 by Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni. In 1964, the final eight-thousander to be climbed was Shishapangma, the lowest of all the 8,000-metre peaks.
Reinhold Messner from the Dolomites mountain range was then the first to climb all eight-thousanders up to 1986, in addition to being the first without supplemental oxygen. In 1978 he climbed Mount Everest with Peter Habeler without supplemental oxygen, the first men to do so.