Mountaineering Quiz

The sport of mountaineering involves ascending mountains and includes activities such as traditional outdoor climbing, skiing, and traversing via ferratas. Women's participation in mountaineering has grown, but the gender gap is still pronounced in terms of quantitative engagement. Competitive mountaineering has a higher success rate for females than males. Unlike most sports, mountaineering lacks widely applied formal rules, regulations, and governance. The International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA) is the International Olympic Committee-recognized world organization for mountaineering and climbing. Mountaineering impacts communities on economic, political, social and cultural levels. Humans have been present in mountains since prehistory, but the highest mountains were rarely visited early on, and were often associated with supernatural or religious concepts. The Age of Enlightenment and the Romantic era marked a change of attitudes towards high mountains. The emergence of the middle-class in the 19th and 20th centuries resulted in mass interest in mountaineering. Mountaineering techniques vary greatly depending on location, season, and the particular route a mountaineer chooses to climb. The term "walk-up" or "trek" is used to describe terrain in which no technical equipment is needed. Alpine rock climbing involves technical skills including the ability to place anchors into the rock to safely ascend a mountain. For extremely vertical rocks, or to overcome certain logistical challenges, climbers may use aid climbing techniques. Compacted snow conditions allow mountaineers to progress on foot, frequently requiring crampons to travel efficiently and safely over snow and ice.Mountaineering Techniques and Hazards

• Mountaineers climb in different styles such as expedition style and alpine style.
• Mountaineers may choose to form a rope team, attach everyone together with a rope, and secure themselves by attaching the rope to anchors.
• Anchors include snow stakes, pickets, flukes, buried equipment or rocks, and carved out bollards.
• Crevasses pose a grave danger to a climber who is not roped in. Members of the rope team may proceed with a crevasse rescue to pull the fallen climber from the crevasse.
• For extremely slippery or steep snow, ice, and mixed rock and ice terrain, climbers must use more advanced techniques, called ice climbing or mixed climbing.
• Shelter is a very important aspect of safety for the climber as weather in the mountains may be very unpredictable.
• Mountaineers use a few different forms of shelter such as alpine shelters, arctic shelters, tents, bivouac sacks, and mountain huts.
• Climbers face two types of hazards, objective (mountain-based) and subjective (human-based).
• Objective hazards relate to the environment, and may include inclement weather conditions, dangerous terrain, duration of exposure, and other environmental conditions.
• Subjective hazards relate to a climber's poor judgement, poor planning, lack of skills, faulty analysis and conclusions, or inadequate conditioning.
• Mountaineers face dangers such as loose or falling rocks, falling ice, snow-avalanches, falls from ice slopes, falls down snow slopes, falls into crevasses, and the dangers from altitude and weather.
• The best treatment for altitude sickness is to descend immediately. Common symptoms of altitude sickness include severe headache, sleep problems, nausea, lack of appetite, lethargy, and body ache.