Gender in Mountaineering

Gender in society is a difficult topic for me to express. Since I am a man and don’t have 100% liberal/progressive opinions, my opinion is moot, and counted as chauvinist, bias, and counter-productive to some. That being said, I do believe that given the right circumstances and attitudes, women can compete with men, and in…

This week I focused more on the online readings over the book and found “‘Wanting the Children and Wanting K2’:The incommensurability of motherhood and mountaineering in Britain and North America in the late twentieth century” very interesting and also a source of debate, for a couple of reasons. To begin my response, this is coming…

Week Five Response

Imperial ascent was certainly an interesting book to say the least. I do not know exactly to make of it honestly, some of the ideas I thought were overly aggressive. For instance I doubt that Dr.Cook’s aim of climbing Denali was to assert his masculinity, no doubt it in all probability was a subconscious factor…

Imperial Ascent

Imperial Ascent shows the development of mountaineering – where in the mind of climbers it has come from and where modern mountaineering is going.  And this is how Bayers sets up his book.  I found it hard in the beginning of the book to make the connection of imperialism and masculinity, until the section on…

The Mountain of Dancing Lamas

  While I enjoyed the history and nostalgia of Fallen Legends, I want to focus on the two accessory readings. These pieces complemented the theme of exploration that spoke to me in the opening chapters of Weaver’s and Isserman’s work and shed interesting non-climbing historical lights on the mountain realm. ‘The Mountain: A Political History…

Fallen Giants

At first, Fallen Giants proved to be a very dry and mundane read, with the first couple chapters introducing the readers to geographical data of the Himalayan region, as well as an abundance of uneventful historical details. At times it became quite difficult to keep reading, as Isserman and Weaver did very little to intrigue…

Fallen Giants

The reading of Fallen Giants by Weaver and Isserman was an intriguing read to say the least, one which I personally enjoyed more than any other reading. This reading was more substantial in my eyes and really provided a compressive history of mountaineering in the himalayas that I had so desired, which is due to…

Week Four

Exploration for the sake of understanding objects, specifically for scientific purposes, fueled the past’s interest in mountains. The Mountain describes how from the Enlightenment period to the present, the desire to make sense of an entity has taken over the minds of not only individuals on their quest for fulfillment but entire scientific communities. All…