The vertical west: climbing culture and western geography, 1946-2025

Abstract

"The Vertical West" traces the rise of climbing culture in the American West from the end of World War II to the recent past and considers the consequences of this development. It demonstrates that climbers engaged in a process of place-making during these decades that redefined the geography of the region and transformed how Americans thought about and interacted with western lands and peoples. Climbers claimed sites across the West as places for recreation, leisure, and adventure. They valued the region's vertical environments--mountains, rock spires, towers, cliffs, crags, and boulders--above all else. Through images, guidebooks, articles, and word-of-mouth climbers learned about more and more places to visit, while advances in transportation technologies and infrastructures made these places more accessible. Over time, these locations became important sites of cultural memory where climbers connected with the legends of their sport and created their own personal memories. The Vertical West, however, was layered on top of other Wests. At different sites across the region, climbers confronted Native peoples who had their own histories and meanings for the places climbers had claimed. So, too, climbers came into conflict with federal land managers charged with preserving and managing the region's high places for more than just recreation. "The Vertical West" reveals the powerful roles that place-making and memory play in America's outdoor recreation communities and the ways outdoor recreationists created new meanings for the West's high places during the second half of the twentieth century. Ultimately, it argues that to understand the challenges facing the region in the twenty-first century, we must understand how outdoor recreationists constructed their own geographies in the West and how these geographies map onto and are layered over other westerners' geographies.