“That’s a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I can’t justify it. I can’t say its for a good cause. All I can say is, look at the history of exploration; it’s full of vainglorious pursuits” was said to a reporter by Jon Krakauer (Barcott). With this in mind and this semesters themes, “vainglorious pursuits” seems an interesting way to describe mountaineering, especially in discussing “White Spider.” Is climbing for a good cause? Is climbing all just a vainglorious pursuit in which climbers just want to further their own lives despite possibly losing it, and hurting others? In last weeks discussion, the issue of gender and motherhood came about in mountaineering and whether a mother who climbed was being selfish and “vainglorious” in her pursuit of the summit, and it was questionable as to why fathers did not receive this same treatment, and Jon Krakauer in this article points out that the question of why climb, perplexes even an experienced climber that enjoys spending his time on a mountain.

At the end of Barcott’s article he writes “In a time of contaminated urbanity we’ve made them [mountains] the very symbol of purity, the last place unblemished by human scratch. We can pour our metaphor onto them, hype the latest ‘conquest’ by some mountaineer, but we speak more of ourselves than of the hills. The mountain doesn’t play games. It sits there, unmoved” (Barcott). To me this is one of the most philosophical ways to look at mountaineering, we talk so much about mountains, and their beauty, and their lack of contamination and blemishes, but in the end are we enjoying the mountains for ourselves rather than the unmoving mountain? The obsession with mountaineering and glorification of mountains could be a deeper rooted glorification of ourselves and our pursuits and our interests, rather than the actual mountain. Krakauer’s “vainglorious pursuits” that he tells the reporter about coincides with Barcott’s philosophy on the meaning we give to mountains and the conquests made by mountaineers.

Switching gears to the White Spider, in the chapter “The Wall of Life and Death,” Wellenkamp describes a rest the crew took and under his description Harrer writes “Everything had been said about the North Face, how big, how savage, how grim, how high, how magnificent it was; but no one before him has said that to rest on it was lovely, that one could enjoy the beauty of the scene from it at one’s leisure” (Harrer, pg. 197). Wellenkamp brings in a new element to mountaineering and mountains in itself, to be a mountaineer it can be seen that you have to always be moving, and going upwards or sleeping or eating for the next days journey, but Wellenkamp shows the beauty of just relaxing and enjoying the beauty of the mountain by resting, which some mountaineers might look at as a waste of time, and unproductive in the long run. Leisure on a mountaineering adventure is not the first thing many hear about when hearing stories of the pursuit of summit, but Wellenkamp brings that into this and brings in the beauty even when not being faced with constant struggle.