Jeroen Guillermo Derkinderen Lombeyda
Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Quito derkinderen.jeroen@gmail.com
Data access on Nakala*: https://doi.org/10.34847/nkl.84cbt8g3
*This data set contains personal data. Users wishing to view the images must make a formal request to the author
Archival descriptions on AtoM Archival City, “EC-AEAP. Archives of the Asociación de Escalada y Andinismo de Pichincha”, ArchivalCity_RG_0012: http://atom.archivalcity.org/index.php/archivos-de-la-asociacion-de-escalada-y-andinismo-de-pichinchaArchival City, “EC-AENH. Archives of the Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes”, ArchivalCity_RG_0013: http://atom.archivalcity.org/index.php/archivos-de-la-agrupacion-excursionista-nuevos-horizontes Archival City, “EC-Meza. Archives of the Meza family”, ArchivalCity_RG_0014: http://atom.archivalcity.org/index.php/archivos-de-la-familia-meza |
Abstract
The location of Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, amidst several snow-capped volcanoes has attracted travellers, scientists and mountaineers over the centuries and led to the development of a thriving mountaineering community from the middle of the 20th century. The city has very diverse mountaineering collections that have been kept by federations, clubs, and mountaineers. To understand the scope and concerns of each of these collections, I visited a federation that functions on the provincial level (AEAP), a club archive (Nuevos Horizontes) and a family collection (Meza). None of these collections has been formally included in institutional archives, and thus they have remained out of the scope of researchers. As a part of Archival City project, this data paper contributes to better comprehension of Quito’s social and environmental history through a leisure activity.
Keywords: Ecuador, Quito, mountaineering, clubs, private archives
In Ecuador, the practice of climbing mountains in the Andean mountain range is known as andinismo[1]. Historically the activity revolved around science, mountaineers explored unknown peaks and conquered summits. Foreign scientists like Charles Marie de La Condamine, Alexander von Humboldt, and Edward Whymper attempted, and succeeded in climbing Ecuador’s volcanoes. The latter personality famously made the first ascent of mount Chimborazo (6.265 m) and many other 5,000 metre-peaks.
By the mid-20th century, mountaineering became a leisure activity. It was mostly practised by an urban, male, white, upper class population. Quito was built at 2,850 metres above sea level and is surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes; this region is known as the Central and Northern Sierra[2], and is a part of the tropical Northern Andes.[3] On the administrative level the city is situated in the Pichincha province. The Pichincha mountain range (the highest peak measures 4,784 m) dominates the western flank of the city.[4] The mountains provided ice, water and pasture lands, and were central to the local Andean cosmovision. Climbing clubs structured mountaineering activity and many of them maintained their archives. These documents a part of that structuring process and are the most important primary sources available for studying Quito’s mountaineering history. The number of climbing clubs fluctuated between two to a dozen from 1944 to 1980.
Although in the 19th century Quito’s surrounding mountains were considered inhospitable and dangerous places, and even an impediment for local development, by the mid-20th century this idea started to change. Mountainous spaces became more accessible, not only through trails and roads but also thanks to increasing activity by local andinistas. This transformation points to an important change in the relationship between the city and its natural surroundings. Local mountaineering archives document this shift in gaze and certainly reflect a facet of the city’s resilience. This movement is also characterised by a particular set of discourses and vocabulary (Muzzopappa & Villalta, 2011:31) which I tried to contextualise.
Quito’s 20th century mountaineering history has scarcely been studied and the few researchers that have attempted had to find their way through the labyrinth of club archives, which are consequently visited very seldom and are scattered over the northern part of the city.[5] This essay is part of the research I conducted on these archives in the framework of the Archival City project.[6] I have attempted to approach one of the multiple relationships between Quito, the capital city of Ecuador, and its surrounding mountains through local mountaineering club archives.
What I tried to understand is the ways in which these archives were imagined and what they are remnants of[7], particularly in their relationship with the city and its environment. At the same time, as is common with the archives of an institution, they encompass various gaps and blind corners resulting from shifts in power dynamics. After months or even years of being closed, not only because of the Covid pandemic, these archives were dusty and neglected, putting their conservation in danger and making consultation difficult. They are organised according to a chronological and thematic order but have not been perused by professional archivists. They do not have formal access protocols. The contrast with the idea of the archive as a “structuring structure” (Bourdieu, 2012: 462) appears considerable.
For my research, I accessed three documentation repositories that are a part of various layers of local mountaineering activity: a mountaineering club, a mountaineering federation, and a family archive, as these give an idea of the variety of documentation within mountaineering collections in Quito. The Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes[8] was the first mountaineering club in Quito, founded in 1944, and was undoubtedly for many years the most dominant. These archives contain documentation from 1945 up until the present and show the life of this sporting sociability. The Asociación de Excursionismo y Andinismo de Pichincha[9] was founded between 1966 and 1967 and grouped the main climbing clubs from Quito. It maintained a frequent correspondence with all the local mountaineering clubs and international mountaineering institutions.
Both organisations have folders ordered according to document type, for instance correspondence, and which are in chronological order. Finally, I also accessed a small private collection from the Meza family. This repository contains ample documentation on Digna Meza (1955-1980), an undervalued local climber who died climbing in Peru. I could access all these archives as I am a part of the local climbing community. Since the mountaineering community in Quito is fairly small, I had easy access to contacts and spaces. In exchange for access to those archives, I handed over the pictures I took of complete folders in digital format, a simple catalogue that can be managed by the clubs, and gave a talk on my work in these respective archives.
For this data paper, I decided to focus on types of documents that are representative for the different funds I researched. For the Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes I included images taken from five different folders and two photographic albums. The folders contained weekly meeting reports, mountaineering reports, access and member files; these types of documents can be found in most mountaineering club archives. For the Asociación de Excursionismo y Andinismo de Pichincha the selection included documents ranging from rescue reports, documentation from social events, communication with international organisations, and rules and regulations. As for the Meza Archive, I selected images from all memorabilia, artefacts, and mountaineering equipment. In addition, I included a part of the folder that contains information on Digna Meza as a mountaineer.
These images have been renamed according to the following codes: ACQ01_AENH_img_JD; ACQ01_AEAP_img_JD; ACQ01_meza_img_JD; where AC stands for Archival City; Q for Quito; 01 indicates the data set on Andeanism; AENH for Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes; AEAP Asociación de Excursionismo y Andinismo de Pichincha, and JD for Jeroen Derkinderen. With this selection of images (listed in the tables xlxs and csv part of the dataset “Archival City Quito-Records of Andeanism” stored on the Nakala Open Data platform), I hope to give an idea of which types of documents were kept by mountaineering clubs, federations and families and how these documents can be studied in order to encourage researchers to delve into Andean mountaineering history. The study of a leisure activity like mountaineering gives us, I argue, better understanding of Quito’s social and environmental history.
A few items of context
As the Archival City project states, Quito can count on a wide array of archives of which many are very ancient. Regarding mountaineering sociabilities the particularity lies in the segmented landscape of clubs, which stands in contrast to other Andean capitals such as Santiago de Chile or Bogota.[10] Also, sporting clubs have rarely been the subject of historical research (Maclean, 2013: 1687), let alone their archives. For this essay I perceive these archives as an integral part of city’s social tissue, as they open many related subjects: the relationships between the city and climate change, the social history of the city, and a part of the history of sport and leisure activities.
Quito is also home to an endless amount of private archives that encompass photographic collections, correspondence, press articles, institutional awards, and mountaineering equipment. As archives can be places of remembrance and memory (Nora, 2008: 24), private archives fulfil this function regarding quiteño mountaineering. Many of these collections are kept by families of deceased andinistas, but many local pioneers from the 1960s maintain their own archives. These testimonies form a central part of the mountaineering archives, in the broad sense of the term. As I have been working with oral history, I will also make some punctual references.
For this study I understand andinismo as a champ sportif (Bourdieu, 1978: 819-840), but not in the strict sense of the concept, since andinismo was not organised around competitions with clear-cut rules and clear results. Andinismo in Quito made up a particular field with power relations but was built in ways different from other popular sports like football or boxing. The unwritten rules on which climbs were considered important seemed to be ever changing. If a climb to Chimborazo was considered exceptional in 1950, this was not the case anymore by the 1980s. A vertical mountain like El Altar (5,319 m) was considered a rite of passage from the 1980s onwards. Quito had a particular set of climbs that in some way constituted a learning circuit, where ascents to nearby mountains like the Pichinchas, Pasochoa (4,200 m) or El Corazón (4,790 m), were considered key before moving on to more ambitious objectives like Cayambe (5,790 m), Antisana (5,704 m) or Chimborazo.
Fig 1-Map of Ecuador’s Central and Northern highlands
Archives of the Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes
Founded in 1944, Nuevos Horizontes responded to a particular concern in mountaineering and Latin American excursionist movements with a keen interest in geography and other sciences.[11] The oldest documents date from 1945, and the archives were moved to the different locations where the club had its headquarters until 1990, when Nuevos Horizontes built its own club house. It maintained financial independence through contributions from its members. The archive contains around 30 folders. For this project I consulted ten folders that cover the period until the early 1970s, since access to documentation from this period is relatively scant in comparison to that of the next decades. The club’s secretary was the person in charge of these archives. These archives document a part of the club’s activity thanks to the variety of documents preserved: meeting reports, climbing accounts, membership documentation, diverse written communications, photographic collections, and others.
As Quito’s most prominent mountaineering club, these archives document some of the dominant values and practices attributed to the legitimate way of practising the activity. Up until the early 1960s an andinista was male (and masculine), interested in the sciences, patriotic, took pictures with the national flag and sang the national anthem on the summits he conquered. Much of this vocabulary still characterises the activity today.[12] Landscapes became more and more cultural and a part of the Ecuadorian identity. In the 1960s the club seemed to open up to slightly broader social classes and women – often related to a male andinista. Andinismo remained elitist and Nuevos Horizontes was undoubtedly a social class marker (Maclean, 2013:1689). Access to the club was broadly documented, for instance, a new member needed to show their worth in the first months after his or her enrolment, but how this was evaluated remains unclear. In other documents like meeting reports, women’s voices rarely stood out.
One of the most abundant types of documentation was the climbing reports.[13] Initially these were long-winded literary machine-typed reports on conquests and hazardous enterprises. As certain climbs became more common, and thus symbolised a smaller gain in climbing status, these accounts shortened and even standard formats were adopted, which were filled in with differing attention. An echo of the initial excursionist character remained in these reports through the decades, as sections were included to make remarks about geographical interest and even local ethnicities.[14] Local mule-drivers, or arrieros, often of indigenous background, were frequently excluded from these reports. All these reports express a part of the stories climbers told themselves about themselves (Geertz, 1973:448). The main idea was that if a younger climber would like to try to repeat a certain climb, he or she could read the reports from older generations. How often this actually happened remains to be investigated. These accounts also raise questions on how mountains were seen, how routes or spaces were imagined, and to which imaginaires their aspirations responded.
In the folders sent and received it becomes clear which social circles Nuevos Horizontes was a part of. From local intellectuals to ambassadors and representatives of foreign mountaineering clubs, they all had regular correspondence with the club. Nuevos Horizontes maintained a close relationship with local news media, and in the first years it organised a radio program and could even count several journalists among its members. When foreign mountaineers visited Ecuador, a stop at Nuevos Horizontes seemed essential, as its members could serve as local guides. Foreign climbers were welcomed with open arms; local mountaineers were avid to hear stories from the Alps or even the Himalayas. As stated, Nuevos Horizontes was not only a mountaineering club, but an important place of sociability. The club organised all types of social events yearly for the families associated with the club.
Nuevos Horizontes regularly published short booklets in which we can observe a nascent mountaineering historiography. These accounts formed the origins of the activity and included accounts by La Condamine, Alexander von Humbold, Wilhelm Reiss and Alphons Stübel, Edward Whymper, Hans Meyer and Rodolf Reschreiter, and finally Nicolás Martínez. Nuevos Horizontes seemed to be placed as the legitimate heir of this grand scientific and mountaineering tradition.
In 1994, Nuevos Horizontes assembled several large-sized photographic albums to celebrate its 50th anniversary. With sometimes over 48 pictures and a few captions per page, the albums seem to focus on the social memory of the club.[15] During the first years members were interested in exploring the country, or excursionismo, but the main activity shifted to andinismo by the mid-1950s. These activities were an integral part of the geographical construction of the capital and its surroundings. These collections depict many themes and subjects: groups, individuals, landscapes, glaciers, geological formations, particular mountaineering practices, the construction of mountain huts, and international expeditions. In short, these documents form a visual dimension of the changing relationships between the city, the andinista, and the environment (Zografos,1992: 34). Because of their achronological character, these albums symbolise a link and continuity between past and present generations of Nuevos Horizontes mountaineers.[16] Additionally, a lot of the founding members, their children and grandchildren, maintain private collections. Notably the families of the photographers César Morejón (1909 – 2005) and José Sandoval Piedra (1917 – 1997) are very proud of their collections.[17]
The Nuevos Horizontes archives have a self-celebratory quality, as reports point to climbs completed by club members – and these were frequently commemorated. As stated, the club was very exclusive, leading to the need to form new clubs in the 1960s. Andinismo was structured by these clubs which then saw the need to converge, giving way to the foundation of the Asociación de Excursionismo y Andinismo de Pichincha.
Archives of the Asociación de Excursionismo y Andinismo de Pichincha
This archive was reorganised around 2015 and kept behind a climbing wall, so it is needless to mention the thick layers of dust that covered most of the boxes. I found three boxes that contained documentation from 1966, the year of the initial foundation, to 1990, out of a total of 40 boxes that mostly contained information from the year 2000 onward. Each box holds between three and six folders organised chronologically and by type of documentation. These included a wide variety of communications, financial reports, membership cards, meeting reports, regulations, and expedition proposals. As stated in the statutes of the Association, these archives were tended by the secretaries[18] and their contents depended heavily on these secretaries worked. Which type of documentation should be kept was not specified, and the selection depended on decisions on what was worth keeping and remembering (Zografos, 1992: 47).
The existence of these archives was naturalised and contained discourses on their own reasons of existence (Crespo & Tozzini, 2011:75). Formally, the Association belonged to the provincial main regulatory body (Concentración Deportiva de Pichincha), and the International Union of Alpine Associations (UIAA). The latter gave particular importance to the Association, considering it the most important mountaineering organisation in Ecuador.[19] The Association’s administration was composed of members from the different quiteño mountaineering clubs, and was a result of the institutionalisation of the activity. Independent mountaineers, that is to say, non-affiliated climbers, were excluded from these processes and archives.
The quantity of documentation on convergence events reveals some of the main activities of the Association: encampments for club members, football and ecuavoley[20], juvenile meetings, mountaineering confraternities, photographic contests, audio-visual screenings, and climbs for quiteño holidays.[21] These were some of the monthly activities of the organisation, and became an element of its political agenda. This was thought to promote a sense of community in a fragmented landscape of climbing clubs. Through specific events the Association also tried to promote a sense of legitimation, by naming the best male and female mountaineers of the year. Since mountaineering tended to be characterised by internal reward structures, the scope of these designations was probably somewhat limited (Hamilton, 1972: 285-308).
Two of the main concerns of the Association were the local mountaineering school (Escuela Provincial de Alta Montaña), founded in 1971, and the rescue organisation (Cuerpo de Socorro Andino), founded in the early 1970s. Both depended on funding from the Association, but named their own leaders. The mountaineering school’s main objective was to train instructors for the climbing clubs, and became a place for technical mountaineering.[22] The rescue entity named one club responsible for rescues per month.[23] Rescue records were kept and rescue team members all had their own files; the rescue teams were composed of ten to fifteen percent women. The production of documents depended heavily on the leaders of both institutions, and the archives contain many gaps. Both of these organisations put in place mechanisms to control access to the activity and they undoubtedly symbolised authority within the community.[24]
The Association gave the possibility to local mountaineers to propose projects for expeditions, most which to the Andean ranges of Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina. By the end of the 1980s an exchange program was set up with the German Alpine Club. As the association was part of a broad network of mountaineering clubs and institutions, its archives can help towards writing a transnational and connected history of the activity. The documents give an account of which ideas circulated, what knowledge on equipment was shared, and how aspirational imaginaries changed over time. This transnational dimension of mountaineering history has not yet been fully studied or understood.
The Silvia and Digna Meza Archives
The Meza family is from the provincial town of Cayambe and from a humble background. Both sisters belonged to a quiteño mountaineering club, Inti Ñan. Digna Meza (1955-1980) completed climbs in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and several Alpine countries – an impressive mountaineering curriculum at the time. She aspired to become a professional mountaineer and even followed mountain guide courses in Chamonix, France.[25] Digna was killed in a mountaineering accident on Yerupajá (6,635 m, in Peru’s Huayhuash range). She was probably one of the leading female mountaineers of her generation, but is often forgotten in official accounts of the activity.[26] Digna Meza’s closest sister, Silvia, and her husband, Fausto Peña, collected documentation on Digna’s life and her deadly accident.[27] The archive is rather small, but not unimportant and is an excellent example of a private archive. It is profoundly personal and truly intimate. It contains two folders, over three dozen mountaineering artefacts, and mountaineering memorabilia, ranging from newspaper articles to old crampons.
One folder contains diverse documentation on Digna from the 1970s and 1980s: photographs, many newspaper articles, and reports on the accident. In the opening texts, written by Silvia and Fausto, Digna is described as “authentic”, “admirable”, “magnificent”, “a model to follow”, and “…her tenacity allowed her to accomplish achievements very much ahead of her time for those years during which women fulfilled household tasks. She always knew ways to obtain respect from her peers, who were mostly men.”[28] Digna married very young to a quiteño mountaineer, Thelmo Valladares (1950-1978)[29], and her subsequent position as a young widow gave this gendered dimension other levels of complexity for the rather conservative and patriarchal quiteño society.
Although these texts are very celebratory, its gendered language indicates in many ways Digna’s difficult position as a female mountaineer. A second folder contains the correspondence between Digna, her friends, and her sister. I interviewed Silvia on two separate occasions to understand her place as a woman in quiteño mountaineering and to try to get to know her memory of Digna. The archive also contained many framed pennants, newspaper articles, photographs, medals, and institutional awards. In a museum-like glass cabinet Silvia keeps climbing equipment: sunglasses, mountaineering boots, camping equipment, and torches. These little altars of memory are quite common among local mountaineers.
Not surprisingly one of the central themes in this archive is Digna’s disappearance on Yerupajá. The mountain is still rarely climbed due to its high technical difficulty, and attempting to scale it was certainly considered an act of madness at the time.[30] The accident was broadly discussed in 1980. Stories centred on Digna as a female mountaineer and on the tragedy of the loss of a young female life. She died at 24 years of age, together with an Argentine mountaineer, Daniel Sagalowsky; one element particularly worth noting is that they attempted the climb out of season, in October 1980.[31] A rescue party was sent from Quito and a Peruvian group also attempted to search for the bodies, but none of them succeeded; however, they produced ample reports on their rescue operations. This archive certainly raises questions on mountaineering and gender, social class, and the relationships between Quito, nearby towns, and mountaineering.
Short conclusions
The Archival City project gave me the possibility to study an institutional archive of the Asociación de Excursionismo y Andinismo de Pichincha, a sportive sociability, from the Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes, and a private archive belonging to the Meza family. I tried to understand the wherefore of these collections. They relate climbs, build values and practises, and give a sense and meaning to the activity. Since mountaineering has been subject to changing and undefined rules, which could be called into question at any time, these archives recount diffuse and changing power structures characterised by a desire for authority and legitimation.
The club archives are certainly a symptom of these phenomena. At the same time, these documents contain silences and shadows; to fully understand the scope of the activity, these archives need to be studied critically and complemented with private collections, and oral history. Currently we live at a time when many of these collections can be lost, although many elderly mountaineering pioneers still remember the Golden days.
Quiteño andinismo made very few interventions in the surrounding mountains like the Pichincha range. This changed with the construction of a cable car from the city to Cruz Loma (4,000m) in 2005. As tourism has become a bigger industry, the city has ceased listening to the social groups that have close connections to the mountains, among them the andinistas.
These archives are remnants of the relations between Quito and its mountains. These were initially far away, inaccessible, and dangerous. The imagined distance to the mountains gradually diminished and these transformed into spaces of conquest, exploits, fulfilment, adventure, tourism, but also of social and gendered struggles. Mountaineering still is an integral part of metropolitan leisure activities and cannot be seen as being distinct from Quito’s history. These archives are not only a piece of the history of a social group, or a mountaineering community, but of a particular environment and historical context.
References
Archives and primary sources
Archives of the Agrupación Excursionista Nuevos Horizontes
Archives of the Asociación de Escalada y Andinismo de Pichincha
The Meza family archives
Bermeo, Jack. Ascensiones a las altas cumbres del Ecuador. Quito, s/f.
El Comercio, April 1958
Interview with Fabián and Eugenia del Cármen Sandoval, Quito, November 24th 2020.
Interview with Silvia Meza, Quito, November 13th 2020 and November 20th 2020.
Martínez, Nicolás. Pioneros y precursores del andinismo ecuatoriano. Quito: Abya-Yala, 1994.
Sandoval Piedra, José. En pos de Nuevos Horizontes. Tomo I. Quito: Ed. Mercedario “Tirso de Molina”, 1951.
Secondary sources
Aguirre, Patricio. 2013. Montañas y sujetos: una aproximación a las construcciones simbólicas y sociales del andinismo en el Ecuador. Tesis de licenciatura, Quito: PUCE.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1978. “Sport and social class.” Theory and methods/Théorie et méthodes, 17 (6) : 819-840.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 2000. Esquisse d’une théorie de la practique. Paris : Éditions du Seuil.
Cook, Terry. 2013. “Evidence, memory, identity, and community: four shifting archival paradigms.” Arch Sci 13: 95–120.
Crespo, Carolina & Tozzini María Alma. 2011. “De pasados presentes: hacia una etnografía de archivos.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología, 47 (1): 69-90.
Derkinderen, Jeroen & Madera, Sara. 2018, 50 años de Montañismo en Ecuador. Quito: Club de Andinismo Politécnico.
Dobson, Miriam & Ziemann, Benjamin. 2009. Reading primary sources. New York: Routletdge.
Echevarría, Evelio. 2018. The Andes: The complete History of Mountaineering in High South America. Joseph Reidhead & Company Publishers.
Franch-Pardo, Iván; Pere Sunyer Martín; Pedro Sergio Urquijo Torres & Diana Laura Jiménez Rodríguez. 2018. “Excursionismo y geografía en el México posrevolucionario: el Club de Exploraciones de México”. Investigaciones Geográficas, 97: 1-17.
Geertz, Clifford. 1973.The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books.
Hamilton, Lawrence C. 1979. “Modern American Rock Climbing: Some Aspects of Social Change”, The Pacific Sociological Review, 22 (3) : 285-308.
Knapp, Gregory. 2018. “Strategically relevant Andean Environments”. In The Andean World, edited by Seligmann, Linda J. & Fine-Dare Kathleen S. pp: 17-28, London: Routledge.
Maclean, Malcolm. 2013. “A Gap but Not an Absence: Clubs and Sports Historiography.” The International Journal of the History of Sport, 30 (14):1687-1698.
Muzzopappa, Eva & Villalta Carla. 2011. “Los documentos como campo. Reflexiones teórico-metodológicas sobre un enfoque etnográfico de archivos y documentos estatales.” Revista Colombiana de Antropología, 47 (1) : 13-42.
Nora, Pierre 2008. Pierre Nora en Les Lieux de Mémoire. Trad. Laura Masello, Ediciones Trilce.
Pérez, Carla. 2010. “Digna Meza, en el reino afable de las cumbres,” Revista Montaña, 28 : 73-76.
Stoler, Ann Laura. 2009. Along the archival grain. Thinking through colonial ontologies. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Walter, Doris. 2003. La domestication de la nature dans les Andes péruviennes. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Zeitlyn, David. 2012. “Anthropology in and of the Archives: Possible Futures and Contingent Pasts. Archives as Anthropological Surrogate.” Annual Review of Anthropology, 41 :461–80.
Zografos, Stamatis. 2019. Architecture and Fire. A Psychoanalytic Approach to Conservation. London: University College.
[1] Mountaineering is the term that usually describes the activity of scaling mountains in the broad sense. Climbing is often used in English as a synonym, although it can also refer to rock climbing, I use it as a synonym. Andinismo is the term used locally, and stands in contrast to alpinism, the word employed to describe the activity in Europe and the Anglo-Saxon world.
[2] Fig. 1 contains a map with the major mountains of the Ecuadorian Central and Northern Sierra.
[3] The Andes can be divided in many ways, one of them divides the Andes into the Northern regions (Ecuador, Colombia and Venezuela), which are more humid, and the Southern Andes (usually Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina) which is generally drier. These climatological phenomena have major impactson the climbing season. See Echevarría, 2018: 19-37, and Knapp, 2018: 23.
[4] Its two most prominent peaks are the active volcano Guagua Pichincha (4,776 m) and Rucu Pichincha (4,696 m).
[5] Historically elites and middle classes have inhabited the centre and the north of the city. See, for instance: Aguirre, 2013.
[6] This short essay is a summarised version of a more extensive report for my work from November 2020 until February 2021.
[7] The exercise to see archives not only as biased entities has been completed in different contexts, see for instance Stoler, 2009: 20.
[8] This translates as the Excursionist Group New Horizons. I will abbreviate this name into Nuevos Horizontes.
[9] This name could be translated as the Excursionist and Andeanist Association of Pichincha, I will refer to it as the Association.
[10] Quito counted over a dozen climbing clubs in the 1970s, Santiago and Bogata had fewer clubs. See Echevarría, 2018: 326-332.
[11] Nuevos Horizontes was not the oldest mountaineering club of Ecuador. The first climbing club was founded near Ambato, the Club Andino, by local pioneer Nicolás Martínez (1874-1934) in the early 1930s, see: Martínez, 1994: 52. See for a good example of Mexican excursionism: Franch-Pardo & al., 2018. See for the foundation of climbing clubs in other Latin American countries: Echevarría, 2018: 155-158.
[12] The idea of conquering a summit is still frequently referred to up until this day.
[13] See, for instance, images ACQ01_AENH_img015_JD up to ACQ01_AENH_img074_JD, and ACQ01_AENH_img081JD to ACQ01_AENH_img087JD.
[14] Nuevos Horizontes Archives, Folder: Informes 1962-1963.
[15] Stamis Zografos states that memory depends first on social group, and not necessarily time. Zografos, 1992: 47.
[16] Zografos, Architecture and Fire, 34.
[17] I visited the families several times, and completed interviews with César Morejón (grandchild of one of the founders of Nuevos Horizontes) on November 16th 2020 and the children of José Sandoval on November 24th 2020.
[18] See for instance ACQ01_AEAP_img051_JD.
[19] The UIAA was founded in 1932 with the objective of connecting mountaineering associations from several countries.
[20] Ecuavoley is the Ecuadorian version of volleyball, it is played with three team members instead of five.
[21] See, for instance images ACQ01_AEAP_img069_JD and ACQ01_AEAP_img070_JD.
[22] Technical mountaineering is the term used to describe steep and vertical mountaineering, where more than two points of contact (i.e. crampons and ice axes) are needed on snow, ice, and rock.
[23] See, for instance: images ACQ01_AEAP_img090_JD to ACQ01_AEAP_img102_JD.
[24] See also: ACQ01_AEAP_img057_JD to ACQ01_AEAP_img065_JD
[25] This assumption is heavily contested in Ecuadorian mountaineering circles.
[26] One particular exception is Carla Pérez, “Digna Meza, en el reino afable de las cumbres,” Revista Montaña 28, Septiembre 2010.
[27] See images ACQ01_meza_img013_JD to ACQ01_meza_img064_JD.
[28] See image ACQ01_meza_img020_JD.
[29] Thelmo died also very young to pancreatitis.
[30] Interview with Silvia Meza, Quito, November 13th 2020.
[31] The climbing season in the Cordillera del Huayhuash is usually between late May and early September. Meza Archive, see images: ACQ01_meza_img024_JD to ACQ01_meza_img040_JD.
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Annalaura Turiano (20 juin 2023). An inquiry into Quito’s mountaineering archives, ca. 1944-1980. Archival City. Consulté le 18 février 2025 à l’adresse https://doi.org/10.58079/beto
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