Letters to the Editor
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Dragons
I knew the story of Whymper when I was little -- my mother told me about it so early that I can't remember when it was. I always knew that my mom had wanted to see the Matterhorn from when she was little. I had seen the mountain when I was young, and it was not as exciting to me as it had been to her some 15 years earlier. But she communicated her amazement and attraction to the mountains to me by then. Neither she nor I have ever wanted to go mountain climbing (at least that she would admit!) ourselves, but reading about it has been a shared experience. I had never thought of the idea that it wasn't automatic that people had to climb mountains. Of course people wanted to go to the top of the world!
But I recommend the book by Fergus Fleming: Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps. It presents the development of the idea that one might want to climb through the story of the Alpine mountaineers. Really riveting read. And it has pictures of the dragons that people thought once lived up there!