Reading Response

White Spider & Cliffhangers

“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…

The Drama of Moutaineering

It is interesting to think of the many different dramatic accounts of mountaineering there really are out there. Really, there is no lack of abundance. People have ample opportunities to read these accounts of climbing mountains that are so extreme, that for some reason or another speak to people on another level because of the…

White Spider – Week 6 Reading Response

Drama on the Eiger The White Spider by Heinrich Harrer depicts many tails, both failures and achievements, as climbers over the last century attempted to climb the north face of the Eiger. As Harrer is one of the men to climb this route successfully and have lived to tell the tale, he writes to commemorate…

Week Six

For this week we had to read White Spider – a mountaineering classic and it has been rather helpful to me at least in decoding the enigmatic question we have all been asking since seminar began: why climb? White Spider does not hold all of the possible answers to this question. No, it is a…

Cliffhangers and White Spider

Cliffhangers starts right off by quickly pointing out that there is “an absence of actual regret.” among mountaineers who have survived catastrophes such as the 1996 massacre on Mt. Everest. While I thought that the proceeding analogue between mountain climbing and stage acting was very limited, I did see the merit in the observation that excitement in…

The White Spider

The article from Barcott and The White Spider could not have given more opposing views on mountaineering. Barcott claims that climbers are motivated by aspirations for authorship yet, The White Spider does not seem be a tale of the heroism of Harrer. Instead, it was history of the North Face of the Eiger, as well…

Week 5

In Imperial Ascent, the way masculinity is defined or the way it is not, tells a lot about the day and age in which mountaineering emerges as well as the culture that surrounds the sport as a whole. Every pastime has a story behind it, the origins that give meaning to the motives responsible for…

Women in the Mountains

Bayers, Imperial Ascent, provided a great insight into the way masculinity has dominated the mountaineering world, through analyzing various books. I’m not particularly a huge fan of “books on books”, as I find they tend to be very dry at times, however, I enjoyed the approach Bayers took and found it to be an interesting…

Week 5 Response

The idea of gender within the sport of mountaineering is an interesting idea that appears to reflect the thoughts of gender in society.  The main contention to this argument being the way that men and women are portrayed in the text Imperial Ascent and the reading by Susan Frohlick very differently.  Indeed, one can see that women and…

Wanting the Children & Wanting K2

I especially liked the reading regarding women, motherhood, and the workforce because it touches on an area that has not been talked about within discussions but is nonetheless a discussion that is now common and important within the workforce as more and more women enter the working world. What I found most interesting and something…