Piscators post got me thinking. Are Summit claims really that important that it’s worth all the bickering that the mountaineering community likes to engage in?
Overall I'd say mountaineers are pretty interested in history. Look at all the books that have been published on the subject. But plenty of them don't care one way or the other.
How do we really know who was first on the summit? Or a ski line? For example, the cascade miners certainly bagged a few for the view when they were digging holes all over the mountains.
We "know" by researching, by talking to old timers, by learning the general history of a place, by understanding the development of skills, and by making educated guesses. And if we're wrong, we hope that somebody will correct us (or point out why we could not possibly know). And then the burden of proof will be on the critic. That's the way it works in any field of human knowledge. Between not knowing anything and pretending to know everything is a huge amount of territory. It would be a shame--and a disservice to those who came before us--not to dive into it.
Last Question. Are skiers who skin up a mountain for turns considered ski mountaineers or is there some other criteria?
The criteria changes. I got a kick out of Rob Newcomb's statement at NSAS yesterday. He said that when he and his friends went skiing in the hills in the 1950s and 1960s, they called it "ski mountaineering." Today, we would call it "backcountry skiing." Newcomb said that in the old days if you had told him you were going backcountry skiing he would have thought you were looking for avalanche slopes to ski.
Ski mountaineering is what they called it in the old days, and to retroactively change the definition is something we shouldn't do without thinking carefully about it.
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BTW: My original post about wanting to tag the summit was a statement of my personal goals. I don't pay much attention to what other people do unless they're making some sort of historical claim.
