The critical genres of environmental studies, eco-criticism, land and ethnicity, and the cultural history and construction of landscape are having quite the day, and rightly so. The related field of mountain studies, to adopt a designator encompassing a variety of approaches, is flourishing as well, and in ways related to some of the concerns of broader environmental writing. Witness the bounty in written work, both popular and scholarly, in the recent output of Hansen, Schaumann, della Dora, Ireton, Korenjak, Duffy, Buxton, Hollis, Shepherd, Macfarlane, and many more.1
A traditional focus of such attention is the mountain aesthetics deriving from Romanticism and later movements, with its obvious connection to the Golden Age of mountain climbing by Western Europeans. Nicolson argued for a decisive shift in the eighteenth century between ancient peoples’ dark and denigrating view and a more modern appreciation of mountain heights as sites of sublime experience. Her thesis,...