Adventure tourism brings together travel, sport, and outdoor recreation.
It might be considered a growing subset of tourism
(Christiansen 1990; Trauer 1999), but its experiential engagement
makes it distinctive within the broader context. The topic is too huge
and diverse for one article, so this paper focuses on adventure tourism
in mountains, or “mountain adventure tourism” from this point on.
The paper aims to explore ways that mountaineering and tourism
appear to be merging. The distinctiveness of the former is, arguably,
becoming subsumed by the latter within a more broadly defined consumer
culture (Chaney 1996).