Academic literature on the topic 'Mountaineering – Himalaya Mountains – History'

This chapter presents a Humboldtian history of mountaineering in the long nineteenth century and reviews the scientific progress and aesthetic reverence that became available through the embodied experience of the mountaineer. It mentions scholars Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz who defined the central premise of Anthropocene as challenges that were formerly deemed fundamental to the modern West. It also looks into Stacy Alaimo's observation of transcorporeal interchanges, which considers climbing mountains as a creative and performative undertaking. The chapter deals with recent theories of material ecocriticism that conceptualize mountaineering as an intimate exchange between the human and more-than-human world. It also emphasizes how mountaineering can become a creative act of perceiving the world with one's hands and feet.

This chapter studies the evolution of Alpine climbing in the mid-1800s and examines the ways in which Humboldtian writing and science, the Romantic sublime, and bodily sensations and disruptions shaped perceptions and representations of European forays to Alpine summits. It presents a brief overview of the history of Alpine development from antiquity to the present, with special consideration of British tourism in the Alps. The chapter recounts how mountaineering emerged as a sport of radical individualism that solidified and simultaneously challenged new models of masculinity and broadly affected patterns of tourism, leisure, and consumption by the end of the nineteenth century. It also mentions German climbers on the remote Similaun glacier who came across Ötzi the Iceman, a corpse that was remarkably well preserved in the ice in 1991. It points out how scientists concluded that Ötzi's body was dated to circa 3500 BC, which gives evidence that even in prehistoric times Neolithic humans regularly frequented the mountains.

The Kathmandu Valley was once a lake. Ancient stories tell us the valley was created when the Boddhisattva Manjushree came to worship a divine lotus planted in the lake long before by a messenger of the as yet unborn Buddha. Manjushree could not reach the lotus because of the deep waters, so with a sword he smote the rocks in a narrow gorge and drained the lake. Geological evidence supports the mythic lake that Manjushree is said to have emptied. The Kathmandu Valley is a basin at an altitude of approximately 4,000 feet between the lower and the middle hills of the Himalaya. As the Himalaya were shoved north into the Tibetan plateau, many valleys were created between the folds of the hills. If a landslide were to block the main exit from such a valley, it might begin to fill up with water from rivers and springs. Around two million years ago, it seems a large lake formed in this fashion in the Kathmandu Valley’s bowl of wooded hillsides. Long after, perhaps because of a big earthquake, or a series of jolts over many years, a channel opened a gorge at the west end of the valley. What would later be called the Bagmati River spilled out, finding its way down to what is now the Ganga and leaving the valley dry by around 10,000 years ago. There were, as far as we know, no people living in the path of any such Bagmati flood, so none were harmed. Instead, the draining of the valley led to the superb conditions the earliest settlers would eventually exploit: terraces and knolls, rich soil, springs, rivers, and shallow aquifers. It is enticing to imagine that the myth captures some distant human memory of the events that helped to create this perfect valley. We know these hills and mountains have been a crossroads for restless mankind since before any recorded history. Perhaps even for thousands of years before the oldest inscriptions give us hints about settlements and rulers in the valley, people were peacefully going about their business here.

Southeast Asia is a corner of the continent of Asia which ends in an assemblage of peninsulas, archipelagos, and partially enclosed seas. Towards the northwest, the physical contact of this region with the rest of Asia is via a mountainous region that includes the eastern Tibetan Plateau, the eastern Himalaya Mountains, the hills and plateaux of Assam (India) and of Yunnan (China). From this high region a number of large, elongated river basins run north–south or northwest–southeast. These are the basins of rivers such as the Irrawaddy, Salween, Chao Phraya, Mekong, and Sông Hóng (Red). An east–west traverse across the mainland part of Southeast Asia, therefore, is a repetition of alluvium-filled valleys of large rivers separated by mountain chains or plateaux. To the south and to the east are coastal plains, rocky peninsulas, and a number of deltas. Beyond lies the outer margin of Southeast Asia, the arcuate islands of Indonesia, and the Philippines with steep volcanic slopes, intermontane basins, and flat coastal plains of varying size. This assemblage of landforms has resulted from a combination of plate tectonics, Pleistocene history, Holocene geomorphic processes, and anthropogenic modifications of the landscape. Most of the world has been shaped by such a combination, but unlike the rest of the world, in Southeast Asia all four are important. The conventional wisdom of a primarily climate-driven tropical geomorphology is untenable here. The first two factors, plate tectonics and the Pleistocene history, have been discussed in Chapters 1 and 2 respectively. In the Holocene, Southeast Asia has been affected by the following phenomena: • The sea rose to its present level several thousand years ago. • The present natural vegetation, a major part of which includes a set of rainforest formations, achieved its distribution. • A hot and humid climate became the norm, except in the high altitudes and the extreme northern parts. • The dual monsoon systems blowing from the northeast in the northern hemispheric winter and from the southwest in the summer (and in general producing a large volume of precipitation) became strongly developed.