Quest for the Sublime

When, how, why and where did adventure travel and ecotourism begin?

When I co-founded Mountain Travel in the early '70s I thought we were the pioneers in this space, but I was wrong. In fact the roots go much deeper.

I believe it can be traced to Switzerland, and the Romantic poets and artists who traveled there in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Lord Byron, Percy Shelly, Mary Shelly — who wrote Frankenstein there — William Wordsworth, John Ruskin and others, and with a concept they articulated as The Sublime.

It was one of the most profound revolutions in thought that ever occurred —- that transition from a loathing of Grand Nature to its celebration.It’s interesting that if you look back before this period there is virtually no literature that praises Grand Nature. Nothing in Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, or Milton ... it’s all about the human form, about delicate beauty, about ordered gardens and symmetrical patterns.

That’s because Nature was something to avoid, to fear, to conquer, to tame or plow. Mountains were the lairs of dragons and demons. The Alps were an icy semi-circle of teeth that bit off Italy from the rest of Europe.

When the original travelers on The Grand Tour crossed the Alps they closed the curtains of the carriage. Some even blindfolded themselves — The Alps were warts on the skin of the Earth; boils on its face.

So, when did they pull back the curtains?

Well, it could be traced to the Industrial Revolution, which motivated record numbers to leave farms and crowd to the cities. Suddenly places like London were dirty, smoggy, crime-ridden — this was the setting that gave Charles Dickens his work. People lost faith in God and humanity.

But when the poets traveled to Switzerland they found a landscape that was clean and green, dangerous and overwhelming, and it made them feel more alive, it made them believe in something powerful — and they called the feelings they evoked as:

“An Agreeable Kind of Horror” “A Magnificent Rudeness” “A Rapturous Terror” “The Architecture of the Infinite”

It was Rock and Awe ...

These were feelings on the other side of thought and language — this was the Sublime.

Byron and Shelly were the rock stars of their day, and they influenced millions to reconsider Nature, to appreciate mountains as places of validation and inspiration.

And there is a through-line from this original articulation to today, where Switzerland was ranked one of the most environmentally conscience countries on earth last year (the United States was ranked 39th), and in a Dutch Study that created the World Database of Happiness, Switzerland ranked near the top.

So, to truly understand the Romantics, I went to Switzerland, and steeped myself in as much as the culture as I could, and that included drinking ample amounts of the Swiss concoction, absinthe, the favorite drink of the Romantics. It was reputed to be hallucinogenic, toxic, it could drive you crazy, it could make you blind, and it could make you see ordinary objects in a whole new way. And, it was illegal for the past 100 years.But a recent study found that absinthe is really no more dangerous than high-octane alcohol, and so it recently became legal in Switzerland.

So, I heartily drank Absinthe without Malice, and it was sublime!

The HDTV special, “Richard Bangs’ Adventures with Purpose, Switzerland: Quest for the Sublime,” is airing on PBS nationwide now. Check local listings. And the companion book is available from Menasha Ridge Press.

Photos courtesy of Media Sherpa/John Canning.