For these women, mountains were the peak experience

Since childhood, when my family spent two weeks every summer in the Colorado Rockies, going to the mountains has meant traveling to me. My mother was an avid mountaineer who never looked as happy as when she was boulder-hopping above the tree line. One summer, my brother and father climbed 14,255-foot Longs Peak, a feat I finally accomplished on my 40th birthday.

More than the sense of conquest or the health benefits, I love the onward-and-upward-through-life symbolism of mountain climbing.

When I travel I like to take roads that lead up -- to mountains. My most vivid memory of a 1995 bus trip through South America is crossing the Andes in the shadow of 22,834-foot Aconcagua, considered the tallest peak in the Western Hemisphere. Going to Alaska without seeing Denali or to India without stealing a glimpse of the Himalayas would have been unthinkable. And though I wasn’t up to conquering the 14,691-foot Matterhorn in Switzerland last year, I did try a bit of ice-climbing on a lower mountain nearby.

That little adventure in the Alps, led by a misogynistic Swiss guide who kept tugging on the rope that connected us and threatening to leave me behind, almost killed me. Afterward, too sore to roll over in bed, I could scarcely imagine what mountain climbing was like for Alpine pioneers before Velcro and microfleece, and how much harder it must have been for those rare women who wanted to see the world from mountaintops.

Naturally, “Women on High: Pioneers of Mountaineering,” by New Hampshire outdoorswoman Rebecca A. Brown, caught my eye. It tells the stories of a handful of variously eccentric, uniformly intrepid Victorian women climbers, beginning with Maria Paradis, who made it to the top of Mont Blanc in 1808 (22 years after that famous French peak was first conquered by men). Details of the Paradis trek differ, depending on the source (even her name appears variously as Maria or Marie), but Brown says that Paradis herself admitted that her guides half-pushed, half-carried her. That hardly mattered, because, just as she hoped, the notoriety she earned from the exploit brought her visitors and money.

Thirty years later, aristocratic French-born Henriette d’Angeville reached the summit of Mont Blanc more gracefully, dressed in ballooning wool trousers and a matching tunic, a black boa wrapped around her neck and a feathered beret on her head. In her kit she carried, among other things, cucumber face cream, a mirror and a carrier pigeon to be sent from the summit with news of her victory.

Tourists then were just starting to flock to the Alps, drawn by the romance of the landscape, but women generally took in the scenery from a safe distance. Even for men, mountain climbing was unconventional; for frail Victorian women it was deemed scandalous, dangerous and deleterious to their health (especially the health of their reproductive organs). Detractors of D’Angeville, who was in her 40s when she scaled Mont Blanc, called her a dried-up spinster with nothing but mountains to love. She went on to bag 21 virgin peaks in her climbing career.

Then there were Lucy Walker and Meta Brevoort, an Englishwoman and an American, who competed for the honor of being the first woman to stand atop the Matterhorn, still one of the most difficult climbs in the Alps. In the summer of 1871, Walker beat Brevoort to the summit, though the indomitable American accomplished a more difficult traverse of the mountain from Switzerland to Italy several weeks later and went on to pioneer winter climbing.

Gradually in the early 20th century, as Victorian strictures gave way to increased freedom -- in terms of clothing and athleticism, at least -- women climbers were more accepted (though the venerable Alpine Club in London remained a male bastion until it merged with the Ladies Alpine Club in the 1970s). The amazing Annie Smith Peck, an American climber and suffragette, was featured as the “new” woman in ads for Singer sewing machines.

She spent four grueling years, unchaperoned and ill equipped, trying to summit 22,205-foot Mt. Huascaran in Peru, then thought to be the highest in the Western Hemisphere. Only later, when scientific measurements proved Aconcagua higher by about 600 feet, did she find she’d bagged the wrong peak.

In a telephone interview, I asked author Brown which of her subjects she liked enough to invite to a dinner party. “I get the feeling they were all pretty tough characters,” she said. At times, while doing the research for the book, Brown wondered whether they were nuts, considering how dangerous and uncomfortable the endeavor was (and still is).

So why did they climb mountains? Each had her own answer, but their reasons were no different from those of men. Some, like Paradis and Peck, were publicity seekers; others were competitors like Walker and Brevoort. Others were simply athletes and adventurers who, Brown speculates, never lost -- or managed to reclaim -- the innate fearlessness that psychological researchers say tends to dissipate as little girls grow up.

None of them was nuts. “That’s just a catchall word for people with tremendous courage, drive and the ability to withstand severe physical discomfort,” Brown said. For me, they are inspirations in travel, because they never backed away from a road that led up.