Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CMC Senior Theses CMC Student Scholarship 2014 Summiting in the Last Wilderness: A Cultural and Environmental History of Mountaineering in Alaska Allison M. Barnwell Claremont McKenna College Recommended Citation Barnwell, Allison M., "Summiting in the Last Wilderness: A Cultural and Environmental History of Mountaineering in Alaska" (2014). CMC Senior Theses. Paper 858. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cmc_theses/858 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you by Scholarship@Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in this collection by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLEGE Summiting in the Last Wilderness: A Cultural and Environmental History of Mountaineering in Alaska SUBMITTED TO Professor Tamara Venit-Shelton AND DEAN NICHOLAS WARNER BY Allison Barnwell for SENIOR THESIS Fall, Spring 2014 April 28, 2014 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ……………………………. 2 ENVIRONMENT AND CLIMBERS ……………………………. 13 COLONIZING CLIMBERS ……………………………. 39 WOMEN CLIMBERS ……………………………. 61 CONCLUSION: A BETTER WAY TO CLIMB ……………………………. 83 BIBLIOGRAPHY ……………………………. 89 2 Introduction Climbers, backpackers, and skiers are an elite corps, you might say, in preserving the values of the environment. Who better knows that we need the wilderness to bring people closer to their original nature, that we need a place to be alone, where nature can bring us its good tidings. But we outdoor people know full well that we also need, for survival, the raw materials found in nature. Our backpacks of aluminum, our pitons of steel. We need synthetic fabrics and insulation- the products of petroleum. Even as we stand alone on some outcrop of rock looking at a landscape few may have ever seen, we know we are very much a part of the world of men and women, of industry and energy, of expanding demands on the fragile environment of the plant… There must be a balance.