Mountains have figured in human history ever since it was written down. Biblical stories describe Noah on Ararat, Moses on Sinai and Jesus on the Mount of Olives 1. Other religions feature mountains as central characters, such as Buddhism which describes “Mount Sumeru“ as the “cosmological centre of the Hindu-Buddhist universe“.
Long before history was recorded, people of the late Pleistocene age (approximately 126,000 to 12,000 years ago) left evidence of their existence in the Bale Mountains of Ethiopia. Earlier than that, human remains, dating from the middle Pleistocene period (about 160,000 years ago in this case) have been found in a Tibetan cave at high altitude.
It is not altogether certain who first wrote about climbing mountains for reasons other than survival, such as to admire the view. The Italian poet Petrarch did just that in 1336, and was “moved to wonder” by climbing Mont Ventoux in France. Leonardo de Vinci wrote of exploring mountains, perhaps Monte Rosa near Zermatt in Switzerland in the 15th Century. Conrad Gesner, a Swiss naturalist, declared in 1541 that he climbed mountains, not only to examine flowers, but also “to provide noble exercise for my body at the same time as enjoyment for my soul”. 2
Horace Bénédict de Saussure, a scientist, was perhaps the founder of mountaineering (at least the Alpine version) when he became obsessed with Mont Blanc and offered a reward for the first to climb it, and although Michel Paccard and Jacques Balmat got to the top first in 1786, Saussure made the third summit a year later.
We’ll take a deeper dive into some Mont Blanc history in the next post.
1 The Age of Mountaineering, James Ramsey Ullman
2 Killing Dragons, Fergus Fleming