Mountaineering Tourism

Ghazali Musa, James Higham, Anna Thompson- Carr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317668732
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Industrie de l'hôtellerie, du voyage et du tourisme

In May 1993 the British Mountaineering Council met to discuss the future of high altitude tourism. Of concern to attendees were reports of queues on Everest and reference was made to mountaineer Peter Boardman calling Everest an 'amphitheater of the ego'. Issues raised included environmental and social responsibility and regulations to minimize impacts. In the years that have followed there has been a surge of interest in climbing Everest, with one day in 2012 seeing 234 climbers reach the summit. Participation in mountaineering tourism has surely escalated beyond the imagination of those who attended the meeting 20 years ago.

This book provides a critical and comprehensive analysis of all pertinent aspects and issues related to the development and the management of the growth area of mountaineering tourism. By doing so it explores the meaning of adventure and special reference to mountain-based adventure, the delivering of adventure experience and adventure learning and education. It further introduces examples of settings (alpine environments) where a general management framework could be applied as a baseline approach in mountaineering tourism development. Along with this general management framework, the book draws evidence from case studies derived from various mountaineering tourism development contexts worldwide, to highlight the diversity and uniqueness of management approaches, policies and practices.

Written by leading academics from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, this insightful book will provide students, researchers and academics with a better understanding of the unique aspects of tourism management and development of this growing form of adventure tourism across the world.

1	Mountaineering tourism
	Activity, people and place
	James Higham, Anna Thompson-Carr and Ghazali Musa

On 29 May 1953 two climbers in the ninth British Everest expedition, Sir Edmund Hillary (New Zealand) and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay (Nepal), became the first mountaineers to stand on the summit of Mt Everest. Four decades later, in December 1993, Myra Shackley published an article in Tourism Management entitled ‘No room at the top?’ in which she reported on a meeting about the future of high-altitude tourism hosted by the British Mountaineering Council at the Royal Geographical Society, London, in May of that year. Issues raised at the meeting included the need to ensure reciprocity between expeditions, trekking agencies and local communities, environmental and social responsibility and regulations to minimize impacts. The meeting attendees did not want to see mountains as ‘giant cash cows’ (Shackley 1993: 485) and a member of the United Nations Mountain Agenda group attending the meeting raised the issue of the effects of climate change.

What was notable about the meeting was that climbers, adventure tourism operators and international organizations addressed issues related to mountaineering tourism (commercial, guided and non-guided). Of concern to attendees at the meeting were reports of queues on Everest and Shackley commented that ‘On 12 May 1993, 38 mountaineers climbed Everest on the same day’ (Shackley 1993: 483). Reference was made to British mountaineer Peter Boardman calling Everest an ‘amphitheater of the ego’. It is only possible to speculate on what the British Mountaineering Council’s invitees would have thought about the surge of interest in climbing Everest (and the other Seven Summits) in the years that have followed. Nepal and Mu (this volume) note in reference to Mt Everest that ‘in 2012, a record 169 climbers reached the top on a single day from the Nepalese side’ on a day in which a total of 234 climbers summited Mt Everest. In the 20 years since the British Mountaineering Council meeting, participation in mountaineering tourism has surely escalated beyond the imagination of those who attended that meeting. This book seeks to critically address the development of mountaineering tourism phenomena, exploring the role of people – mountain tourists, mountaineers, porters, guides, support workers and local communities – and the social and environmental impacts of mountaineering tourism in doing so.

Defining mountains

Mountains are one of the major physical landforms on Earth. Defined primarily in terms of steepness and elevation, mountains are also now recognized by the United Nations as ‘fragile environments’ that are susceptible to human impact, subject to slow impact recovery rates and prone in fact to irreversible ecological damage (UNCED 1992). Mountains can be defined in physical terms that have been extensively measured and mapped, although the topography of the marine environment largely remains a mystery. The United National Environmental Programme provides various categorizations of mountains (Blyth et al. 2002) that capture the wide diversity of mountain environments in terms of topography and steepness, altitude and elevation, geology and geomorphology, ecology and biomass, and latitude and longitude.

Mountains are prominent on local and global agendas as places of relatively undisturbed nature and important natural resources (Goode et al. 2000). Most notably mountains are catchments of fresh water through rainfall or glacial storage and release. From upland mountain regions issue the great freshwater riverways of the world – the Yangtze, Mekong and Ganges, Nile and Euphrates (to name a few) being the birthplaces of human civilizations. Mountains may provide resources for agriculture, forestry, energy generation and extractive industries such as mining. Given the diversity of mountain environments, they are also places of species and genetic diversity, all of which may be considered to offer ecosystem services to human communities and intrinsic ecocentric value for past, present and future generations (Næss 1989).

Indigenous and western cultures have been observed to develop symbolic, emotional and ancestral links with landscapes. This is particularly apparent if successive generations have inhabited an area, and a ‘sense of place’ or ‘insideness’ for the landscape has been observed amongst members of non-indigenous cultures (Tuan 1974; Relph 1976, 1985; Bender 1993; Crang 1998). For many indigenous people around the world, mountains hold a special significance. Aoraki is held in the same regards by Māori as Uluru in Australia is significant for the Anangu Pitjintjara people or Sagarmatha for the Nepalese Sherpa and Buddhist communities in Nepal.

Managing the indigenous, often intangible, values of mountain landscapes is a challenging problem for resource managers (Shackley 2001; Carr 2004; Digance 2003). Mountains may have spiritual or culturally significant values and meanings for landscape, that may or may not be shared with ‘outsiders’ such as tourists (Relph 1976, 1985; Atkins et al. 1998). One notable impact of mountaineering has been the loss of traditional mountain place names that reflected specific associations with traditional lands, through the practice of renaming mountains upon first ascents, for instance McKinley (Denali), Everest (Sagamartha or Chomolongma) and Aoraki Mt Cook. Many indigenous peoples now work as porters, guides or area managers in mountaineering tourism destinations around the world. There are also many instances of indigenous peoples who are mountaineers and mountaineering tourists.

The relationship between humanity and mountains has a fascinating history (Glacken 1967). In classical times, mountains were places of worship that were associated with the deities. In Ancient Greece, sports were performed at Olympia where mountains offered immediate proximity to the Gods. Mountains remain places of religious or secular importance (Goode et al. 2000). Environmental philosophy explains that the sacredness of nature was undermined by the advent of agriculture and sedentism, the earliest evidence of which comes from the fertile crescent of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, and was further eroded with the advent of industrialization (Oelschaeger 1991) and urbanization (Cronon 1995). Industrialization has greatly accelerated the humanizing of the Earth, transforming nature and reducing it to a human scale (Dubos 1972), or destroying nature altogether through largely unrestrained neoliberal capitalist ‘development’ (Harvey 2010).

One of the few major landforms that offered some resistance to this otherwise wholesale and continuing transformation was mountains. Viewed predominantly in the west as unproductive ‘wastelands’ (Hall 1992), most mountain regions were historically ignored in terms of agricultural development, and subject only to the least intensive forms of subsistence economy. European environmental philosophy at the time of colonization of North America in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries is informative. Wilderness areas survived in contemporary Europe at this time. Influenced by Judeo-Christian traditions (Oelschleager 1991) the colonists brought with them a value system based on survival to which untamed ‘wild’ nature was considered a threat. Morality and social order was considered to break down at the North American frontier, beyond which ‘forests swarmed with demons and evil spirits’ (Nash 1980). Mountain wilderness engendered feelings of insecurity and danger and were viewed as a ‘cursed and chaotic wasteland’ (Nash 1980) against which civilization was engaged in a ceaseless struggle.

Mountains were to the fore in the profound changes of modern environmental consciousness (Oelschlaeger 1991), inspired by the nineteenth century works of Henry David Thoreau and, some decades later, John Muir and Aldo Leopold (Oelschlaeger 1991; Grumbine 1994). Their works raised a consciousness of the complexity of the relationship between humanity and nature, drawing attention to concerns about the transformation of wilderness, nature conservation and sustainability (Dubos 1972). With the rise of European Romanticism, mountains came to be conceived as sublime nature – places of unimaginable beauty. Wilderness philosophy arose from the growing divinity of mountainous nature (Oelschlaeger 1991).

The influence of European Romanticism influenced the later colonization of New Zealand in the early nineteenth century. Initially wild nature was considered a threat to European settlement of New Zealand (‘anti-Wilderness’). However, while lowland areas were systematically cleared for agricultural production (Hall and Higham 2000), early Europeans also marvelled at the sublime nature of the Southern Alps. Fiordland, with ‘its girdle of high mountains and waterfalls is … an inspiration … to every beholder’ (James McKerrow 1862, cited by Easdale 1988). Mountains were considered places of sublime nature; manifestations of the unimaginable beauty of nature. Hall (1992) charts the course of nature protection from ‘wastelands to world heritage’; a philosophical transition that brought utility value to mountain conservation areas through recreation and tourism. Clearly mountains represent a complex interplay of physical and cultural dimensions (Cronon 1995).

In terms of this interplay, it is of little surprise that the cultural values associated with ‘wild nature’ are the subject of intense debate (Sarkar 2012). Fundamentally contrasting perspectives arise in the North and South, and between Europe and the new world (neo-Europe). The European context is one of historically cultural landscapes in which nature is tended and cultivated (Sarkar 2012). The relative abundance of wild nature in the new world, when colonized during the modern and Romantic periods (Glacken 1967; Oelschlaeger 1991) was associated with the deification of wild nature, commonly conceived in terms of the complete separation of nature and humanity. This required the ruthless and systematic removal of indigenous First Nation peoples from their land (Brown 1970). Human values associated with wild nature may be understood in many ways (Brennan and Lo 2010). Anthropocentrism ascribes human demand value to wild nature, which may be protected to provide ecosystem services (fresh water, hydro-electric power generation) and/or opportunities for recreation and tourism (Hall 1992). Biocentrism attributes intrinsic value to all living entities (human and non-human animals), while ecocentrism goes further to accommodate biological (living species) and non-biological nature (geological features, wild rivers) in ethical and moral deliberations (Sarkar 2012). The purist forms of ecocentrism (e.g. ‘deep ecology’) accommodate consideration of inter-generational equity and justice (Næss 1989).

Mountains, mountaineering and tourism

Mountains have been prominent in the post-war global tourism development (Britton 1991), which has brought anthropocentric values to the fore (Mowforth and Munt 2008). Tourism has been a driving force in what is described as capitalism’s ‘ecological phase’ (O’Connor 1994), which has been implicated in the commodification of natural resources in regions around the globe (Bandy 1996; West and Carrier 2004). Accelerating since the 1980s due to expanding influence of neoliberal economic policies, nature-based tourism has rapidly developed into a mass-produced capitalist industry (Harvey 2010). Neoliberal capitalist systems are expressed through free market economic principles including deregulation of natural resource governance, marketization and privatization (Cater 2006; Castree 2008; Duffy 2010; Fletcher 2011). These principles have formed an underpinning to the systematic commodification of nature, and the transformation of nature in commodified tourism ‘products’ (Mowforth and Munt 2008; Neves 2004, 2010).

Nature-based tourism is understood by Fletcher (2011) to solve various capitalist contradictions, creating new forms of natural capital, and presenting a spatial fix by bringing new forms of development to regions of the world that had previously r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Mountaineering tourism: activity, people and place
• Part I Activity
• Part II People
• Part III Place
• Index