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Mountaineering is as old as time immemorial. It is noted in the Bible that Moses received the commandments on Mt. Sinai and Noah’s ark rested on Mt. Ararat, which proved the early existence of mountaineering. The search for pasture probably sent shepherds into the hills for the first time. In war, heights provided the best lookout posts, and Herodotus, Thucydides, Sallust, and Livy all described early military mountaineering. Later, man’s search for new experiences inspired climbers who appreciated above all the aesthetic aspects of their sport, that is the contemplation of the view from a lofty peak. In 1336, Petrarch climbed Mont Ventoux (6,273 ft.) in Provence. In 1492, Antoine de Ville climbed Mont Aiguille for no other reason than to get to the top. Leonardo da Vinci first made scientific use of mountaineering by climbing a mountain in the Alps in 1522, and afterwards showed the importance of the meteorological findings he had made.
Mountaineering
in a contemporary sense of sport was born when a young Genovese scientist,
Horace-Benedict de Saussure, called the “ Homer of Mountaineering”, on a
first visit to Chamonix, France in 1760, viewed Mont Blanc at 15,771 ft., the
tallest peak in Europe, and determined he would climbed to the top and be
responsible for its being climbed. He
offered prize money to the first ascent on Mont Blanc, but it was not until
1786, more than 25 years later, that a Chamonix doctor, Michael-Gabriel Paccard and his
porter Jacques Balmat claimed his money.
A year later de Saussure himself climbed to the summit of Mont Blanc.
The
British soon adopted mountain climbing as a sport, and, between 1854 and 1870,
Britons scaled every major peak in Europe (Alps).
In the next 30-year climbers ascended all most formidable peaks in North
and South America and Africa. They
finally turned their attention to the greatest mountain range on Earth, the
Himalayas.
If the Alps were the “playground of Europe” where the crafts were learned, it was natural that the ultimate challenge would be the world’s highest mountains, the Himalayas. The attempts to climb Everest began in 1921, and there were, in all, eleven expeditions to the mountain before it was finally won. Victory was won at last by a British group under col. John Hunt when, on May 29, 1953, Edmund Hillary of New Zealand and Tenzing Norgay, a sherpa guide, became the first men to reach the highest point on Earth.
