Aconcagua: The Invention of Mountaineering on America’s Highest Peak

4. Fashioning Adventure: Creating Mountaineering in the 1980s

89 chapter four Fashioning Adventure Creating Mountaineering in the 1980s Tailoring the Image Dear Listeners, I am telling you about this “Fashion Mountain” Aconcagua. —radio beromuenster interview with dorly marmillod, c. 19531 In the 1986 mountaineering narrative, Seven Summits, the chapter about Aconcagua concludes at the top: “For at that moment, Frank Wells and Dick Bass were the two highest men standing on any point of land in the western hemisphere of the world. . . . ‘One down and six to go,’ Dick rejoined, and then he let out his Tarzan call. ‘Aah-eah-eaahhh’” (Bass et al. 1986, 104). This metaphorical voicing of white male supremacy over both nature and modernity, a call made popular through Hollywood’s ventriloquism of romanticized Western imperialism, ends the recounting of Frank Wells’s and Dick Bass’s successful ascent of Aconcagua in 1983, the first in their attempt to scale the highest peak on each of the seven continents . This shout of jubilation and triumph, however, did not just mark the taking of the topmost point in the Americas; it also signaled the setting in motion of drives toward other heights. It inaugurated the Seven Summits Route that Wells and Bass had set as their climbing goal, imprinted an image of Aconcagua on an international public, and targeted a bright new era in the mountaineering industry for Mendoza, Argentina. It was during this decade, the 1980s, in which Bass and Wells sought to make mountaineering history, that key global, regional, and national 90 • Chapter 4 circumstances came together to lay the groundwork for Mendoza’s development of a thriving mountaineering business. Growth and change in the international climbing market, advances in communications technology that brought the globe closer in terms of access to information, and newfound international awareness of Aconcagua, the highest peak of the Americas, coincided with an ambitious generation of Mendocino climbers emerging out of the 1980s to energize the local climbing scene and take advantage of the mountaineering capital held by the area. The 1980s marks a new beginning, or even a kind of contemporary origin for Mendocino mountaineering. It was not that prior to the 1980s locally based mountaineering was absent in Mendoza or, for that matter, that it did not participate at the international level. Previously, local mountaineering activity had first been represented by service providers and porters for foreign expeditions and later spearheaded by the military in both national and international arenas. However, both the service and military activities of Mendocino mountaineering differed radically from the nature of the civilian group of Mendocino climbers, or the Generation of the 80s, as I have come to call them, that came into ascendancy during that decade. This generation of young climbers was instrumental in popularizing climbing within the local area both for pleasure and as a profession. They also played essential roles in creating the economic and educational infrastructures to support the sport in Mendoza. Coincidental, or perhaps causal, to the Generation of the 80s coming of age was the end of the Argentine military dictatorship in 1983 and the subsequent “opening up” of the nation to new political, cultural, and economic forces. These national and regional moments of the 1980s intersected with a surge in international interest in mountaineering, innovations in gear, and changes in attitudes about the sport that would redefine Aconcagua’s position and reputation on the contemporary map of international mountaineering. This new mountaineering map would especially chart how the prominence of capital, the commodification of adventure, the effects of globalization, and the doggedness of modernist legacies would locate Aconcagua and Mendoza. Capital Endeavors “It’s our victory together,” Dick said between gasps. “You got me up— and I know you’ll get me down.” —dick bass to david breashears on everest summit (bass et al. 1986, 319) Creating Mountaineering in the 1980s • 91 Considering the forces at play in the dramatic outgrowth of the mountaineering industry on Aconcagua is to take a look at the kinds of negotiations and articulations that occur at a global-local-national nexus. Globalization, in its most generalized sense, can be understood as a worldwide network in which flows of commodities, information, people, and images are driven across national borders by the markets and finance capital of neoliberal economics. Within this grid, the sovereignty of the nation-state to provide services, protect rights, and anchor identity is undermined by machinations of transnational financial institutions, such as the International...