Mountaineers are small black dots on the peaks of mountains to onlookers. A mountaineer is an athlete who summits the peaks of mountains for sport. Through the lens of Lesile Stephen, British mountaineer turned author of the book “The Playground of Europe”, this essay defines the characteristics of those who start at 3:00 A.M. to summit peaks of mountains before noon, braving wind, ice, glaciers, and the lights the Alps have to offer. Stephen compares mountain climbing as a sport to formal sports concluding that the beauty of climbing isn’t that climbers are the fittest or even the most skilled, but that climbers compete for the personal gain of summiting, and win when they complete the mission they set out to do, making hot a noble, albeit esoteric sect of athletes. No prize money or wealth drives them to compete. Stephen considers climbers humble because their
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He notes the awe of a cliff not just for size, but for the knowledge that he once struggled many hours to cross a cliff of that size, and looks to the far away peaks with reverence rather than just amazement of appreciation of beauty as would tourists. He frequently brings up that only mountaineers know the true size of mountains because feet and meters only measure distance, whereas climbers measure mountains in exertion and hours it takes to summit, which gives a person specific measurement in context. Stephen surprises readers who expect the picturesque pristine nature scene in the alps with a description of what it’s really like at the base—“sandwich papers and empty bottles and peasant women singing Stand Er Auf” (Stephen, 222), but that still as a mountaineer he looks at the alps in awe at the “imperishable majesty” (Stephen, 222) because of the memory of scrambling in rock and snow to
He notes the awe of a cliff not just for size, but for the knowledge that he once struggled many hours to cross a cliff of that size, and looks to the far away peaks with reverence rather than just amazement of appreciation of beauty as would tourists. He frequently brings up that only mountaineers know the true size of mountains because feet and meters only measure distance, whereas climbers measure mountains in exertion and hours it takes to summit, which gives a person specific measurement in context. Stephen surprises readers who expect the picturesque pristine nature scene in the alps with a description of what it’s really like at the base—“sandwich papers and empty bottles and peasant women singing Stand Er Auf” (Stephen, 222), but that still as a mountaineer he looks at the alps in awe at the “imperishable majesty” (Stephen, 222) because of the memory of scrambling in rock and snow to