Climbing to nearly 15,000 feet exacts severe physical costs on nineteenth-century women travelers.
Evidence
It was not possible to remain long. One of the young men was seriously alarmed by bleeding from the lungs, and the intense dryness of the day and the rarefication of the air, at a height of nearly 15,000 feet, made respiration very painful. There is always water on the Peak, but it was frozen as hard as a rock, and the sucking of ice and snow increases thirst. We all suffered severely from the want of water, and the gasping for breath made our mouths and tongues so dry that articulation was difficult, and the speech of all unnatural. … From the summit were seen in unrivalled combination all the views which had rejoiced our eyes during the ascent. It was something at last to stand upon the storm-rent crown of this lonely sentinel of the Rocky Range, on one of the mightiest of the vertebrae of the backbone of the North American continent, and to see the waters start for both oceans. … Uplifted above love and hate and storms of passion, calm amidst the eternal silences, fanned by zephyrs and bathed in living blue, peace rested for that one bright day on the Peak, as if it were some region Where falls not rain, or hail, or any snow, Or ever wind blows loudly. — Isabella L. Bird, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, 117
Categorization
- XREF: Echoes the sublime-romantic peak experience in Wordsworth and the travel-writing tradition of scenic literature this reader is already immersed in.
Related
- She reached sublime summits only through terror and brute assistance, not skill (similarity 0.80)
- A woman could camp overnight at 11000 feet among wolves in 1873. (similarity 0.78)
- High-altitude solitude offers Victorian women a reprieve from human volatility. (similarity 0.78)