The history of peak bagging

Abstract

This paper explores the history of peak bagging, a form of mountaineering with a distinct ethos based on the concept of summit list. Despite its steady expansion since its inception in Scotland in 1891, this discipline, which now counts tens of thousands of practitioners worldwide, has been surprisingly neglected by researchers. The initial section of the article examines the historical context of peak bagging's emergence from the late nineteenth-century British mountaineering milieu, as well as its international development in the early twentieth century. The text then proceeds to scrutinize the impact of the popularization of outdoor recreational activities in the decades following the end of the Second World War. I will subsequently demonstrate how the development of modern cartography, global positioning system, and, most importantly, the advent of the Internet, have given peak bagging its current form. In the next section, I’ll consider the prevailing trends within the discipline, with a particular focus on the race for records, be they speed records or the achievement of increasingly ambitious lists. The paper will conclude with a review of the principal challenges currently facing peak bagging.