Word: mountains
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...mountain in Germany, the simple tragedy is wound about the theme of a poet looking for a dream, and a princess looking for reality...
...Mountain climbing came into its own 98 years ago, thanks largely to a London physician named Albert Smith who could not keep his enthusiasm to himself. Among the first ever to scale white-domed Mont Blanc, the highest (15,781 ft.) of Alpine peaks, Smith produced a play based on his trek. It was no great shakes as drama, but it caught on like the Wild West shows in the U.S., ran six years in London, and gave people who had never seen a mountain the urge to climb...
Although the Alps were far from the loftiest of mountains, they were the handiest for Europeans, and they made up in beauty what they lacked in sheer mass. Each year there was news of cave-ins, slips and deaths. But the danger seemed only to increase the fascination and the number of climbers. This summer, a record 100,000 enthusiasts (v. 66,000 last season) checked in at Alpine mountain cabins, equipped with ropes, poles and ice axes, for what turned out to be one of the most disastrous years in the sport's history...
...dark to avoid talk). But the news did not seem to discourage the growing number of enthusiasts. The Alpine Club of France has almost 40,000 members, those of Italy and Switzerland 100,000 each, with booming sales of books and magazines devoted solely to how to scale a mountain...
...best explanation of the calamitous 1949 season was simply that more people were climbing, and having more accidents. Another explanation: the long, hot summer had dried out slopes, increased the number of avalanches. One 18-year-old Briton who spent three days trapped on a mountain ledge-and lived to tell about it -was Timothy Smiley of Aberystwyth...