This class has philosophized circles around mountains and the folks who climb them. The concept of risk (and mountaineers’ penchant for exposing themselves to it) has been vilified, romanticized, and dramatized in the literature we’ve read as a class. For my term-paper I’d like to focus on the objective risks of mountaineering, and how the perception of that risk has changed over the years. Some historical perspective will be valuable, for which I’ll rely mainly on trip essays and monographs such as Gaston Rebuffat’s Starlight and Storm and Art Davidson’s Minus 148°. A stark, unbiased account of most historical mountaineering accidents and incidents can be found in publications like Accidents in American Mountaineering (published by the American Alpine Club) and it’s foreign equivalents. The combination of first-hand, emotionally charged accounts and academic deconstructions of the same event should make for fascinating comparisons and offer insight toward risk as an entity in the mountains.