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

7. The Dream Weaver: Performing Gender, Adventure, and Mountaineering

166 chapter seven The Dream Weaver Performing Gender, Adventure, and Mountaineering It has now become something of a truism that we are functioning in a world fundamentally characterized by objects in motion. —arjun appadurai (2000, 5) Mountaineering on Aconcagua is always about movement, the constant going up and coming down the mountain of people, mules, information, gossip, and materials. It is also about the flow of capitalism articulated through the narrative of adventure. How do these movements and flows constitute and plot Aconcagua? How do the differing natures of these bodies in motion reconfigure the ideological, affective, and economic understandings of mountaineering there? How do the presence and practices of international and local mountaineering bodies chart the topographies of gender, nation, adventure, tourism, and memory on the Americas’ highest peak? Where do these corporeal and discursive flows intersect with environmental concerns, indigenous rights, and tourism management within the Aconcagua Provincial Park? These were the queries that guided the ethnographic research that I carried out on Aconcagua during four climbing seasons and five trips to base camp over a period of six years, from 2000 to 2006, to consider twenty-first-century mountaineering and the dynamic mobility of the global, local, and national nexus it constructs every year in the central Andes of western Argentina. Dual Purposes Of the seven summits, Aconcagua offers the climber the best value in terms of altitude gained for effort expended. —ryan (2004, 19) Performing Gender, Adventure, and Mountaineering • 167 As part of the Seven Summits Route, Aconcagua has been touted as a “walk up,” a categorization that reworks its designation as one of seven prestigious peaks into one that is also technically available to novice enthusiasts. In terms of both experience and capital Aconcagua is taken to be extremely cost-effective. A guided expedition to Everest can cost from $35,000 to $75,000. The permit from the Nepalese government for a team with up to seven members can cost around $50,000. An Everest expedition requires a time expenditure of at least eight to nine weeks. From this comparative standard, Aconcagua, the second highest of the seven summits, would clearly be the budget-basement mountain. Expeditions on Aconcagua, after entering the park, generally take 15–20 days for a summit attempt and return. Aconcagua summit permits for foreign nationals during the high seasons of 2006 to 2008 were approximately $300 and by 2010–2011 a permit was approximately $1,000. The cost of a locally based expedition, which included airport transfers, overnight accommodation in Mendoza pre- and postexpedition, transfers to and from the Aconcagua Provincial Park, mule support, food during the expedition, tents, access to toilet facilities, and locally trained guides, was approximately $3,000–$6,000. With airfare from North America, Europe, Asia, or Australia, the approximate time of an Aconcagua trip is 28 days and the cost could range from $5,000–$9,000, quite a difference from the outlays of money and time that a sojourn to the Himalayas would incur. Aconcagua’s availability makes both the marketing and the practices of mountaineering on Aconcagua appear to be at cross purposes. Aconcagua ’s draw hinges on both its attractiveness as an elite mountaineering destination, as well as on its appeal to a wider, nonspecialized audience. The practices of mountaineering on Aconcagua also tend to both invoke and be in dissonance with traditional expectations about mountaineering adventure. In this sense Aconcagua mountaineering seems to be skirting a fine line between what might be considered mountaineering proper and adventure tourism. It reflects what Bayers (2003) calls postmodern adventure , in which mountaineering subjects are “feminized” by the subordinate position of preplanned and guided expeditions, and it illustrates the philosophical cleavages that Houston (2006) sees between the old school “with its circumspect notion of pilgrimage,” or escape from civilization, and the new school of mountaineering that expects all the conveniences and assistance that “civilization” can offer (153). Mendoza’s mountaineering industry has designed promotional strategies , whether it be through videos, pamphlets, posters, or websites, that represent Aconcagua as distant from the materiality of the everyday and 168 • Chapter 7 steeped in the latest mountain safety and techno jargon. Beedie (2003) finds that this kind of paradox in advertising that pits the idea of the extraordinary against the safety net of conveniences and technology associated with our daily urban sphere is a generalized result of the commodification of adventure. Within this paradoxical duality, Aconcagua...