I think those who write about climbing have made it appear that climbers have more of an altitude of conquest than they really do.
Probably the general public has that attitude more than people who really climb.
I don’t think that sort of conquest, of subduing a mountain, is accurate.
It’s more like Pogo’s attitude: “We have seen the enemy and they is us.” That we vanquished an enemy, none but ourselves.
— Dianne Roberts in Frances Gendlin, A Conversation with Jim Whittaker and Dianne Roberts, The Sierra Club Bulletin, 1978, Sierra Club, Vol. 63, p. 22 (via)