These photographs were taken on Hafelekarspitze (Hafelekar Peak), a mountain in the Austrian Alps right above Innsbruck. The following is an excerpt from a piece I wrote for Past@Present, the UMass Amherst Department of History’s blog, about this trip to the Alps.
In November 2019 I went to Innsbruck, Austria, to attend the Annual Conference of the Austrian Association for American Studies hosted by the University of Innsbruck. The theme of the conference was Mediating Mountains. The conference organizers, in their call for papers, wrote: “Mountains are not only objects of reflection that mirror, archive, and project human and cultural investments, but they can also be conceived of as ‘hyperobjects’ that affect the ways we come to think about existence, earth, and society.” At the conference and in the months since, I have been thinking about orogenesis, or the creation of mountains, quite a bit. Both the geologic movement of tectonic plates, which I know well from my days as a science teacher, but also in terms of the processes by which societies construct their mountains.
After the conference ended, I took a funicular and two cable cars up Hafelekar Peak, part of the Nordkette, or North Chain. I trudged through the snow to summit the 7,657-foot tall mountain. A Gipfelkreuz, or summit cross, greeted me at the top and signaled the primary religion of the community thousands of feet below. I could see before me all of the Inn Valley, the River Inn, and the city of Innsbruck. I also saw the elevated train tracks heading south through a mountain pass to Italy, which I would be on the next day.
There is a tension between the Romantic gaze of mountains as unreachable, unknowable symbols of nature’s power, and the modern gaze of mountains as controlled and managed landscapes. I was standing on Hafelekar Peak in my conference skirt and was carried most of the way there by machines. I also arrived and departed Innsbruck via machine. The construction of the railroads and trains which have transported myself and many others in and out of the Alps opened up the area to tourism and outdoor recreation.
But looking down from the cable car at the landscape below, I saw evidence of a massive avalanche in the form of hundreds of flattened trees, and was reminded of the awesome power of the mountains. They also dictate human movement through the Alps, forcing us to jump from valley to valley. The train that I took the next day from Innsbruck south, headed for Verona, went through the Brenner Pass. Despite technological advancements, and indeed many tunnels have been carved straight through the rock, for the most part humans must react to the physical mass and resulting weather systems of the mountains.
You can check out the full piece and read more about my time in Italy (including visiting a museum dedicated to mountaineering and climbing!) here.
HAFELEKAR PEAK, AUSTRIA
Anderson, B. M. (2012). “The Construction of an Alpine Landscape: Building, Representing and Affecting the Eastern Alps, c. 1885–1914.” Journal of Cultural Geography, 29(2), 155–183.
Austrian Association for American Studies. (2019). AAAS Conference 2019. Mediating Mountains. Universität Innsbruck. Retrieved from here.
Debarbieux, B., & Rudaz, G. (2015). The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present (J. M. Todd, Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Morton, T. (2013). Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, J. E. T. (2011). Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.