The Sisterhood of the Mountaineering Pants

August 8th, 2011 • BY

Georgia Engelhard, early 1900s peak bagger and rule breaker. Photo: Courtesy Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies

While they look fairly harmless in this vintage shot, Georgia Engelhard was best know for her scandalous pants. Mountaineering pants, that is.

She was one of the first women to ditch the dictated flowing Victorian climbing skirts in the early 1900s and don pants while powering up mountains, an activity she did with fervor. She once summited a peak near Mt. Rainier in a half day and also bagged 24 summits in the Selkirks in just three weeks.

As women like Engelhard, who was the namesake niece of the famed paintress Georgia O’Keefe and photographer Alfred Stieglitz, took to wearing pants, many looked on disapprovingly. An article in the Banff Crag and Canyon in 1920 reported that “The young women who strut about the street and dine in the hotels dressed in riding togs, should be soundly spanked and sent to bed…Pants are made for men and not for women. Women are made for men and not for pants.”

Now a new art exhibit in Glacier National Park celebrates the daring fashion direction of those brave women who decided it was time to stand up and wear the pants on the mountain. The “Breeches of Misconduct,” which was unveiled atop the park’s Rogers Pass on July 16th to help celebrate the park’s 125th anniversary, encourages visitors to pose for photos standing in an oversized steel replica of Engelhard’s pants with the vaulting Mount Tupper as a backdrop. The pants were conceived by Parks Canada artist Rob Buchanan and executed by metal worker Rob Maraun based on a pattern created by local seamstress Wendy Lucas. Viva la pants!

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Erinn Morgan

About

After a 10-year career as an award-winning New York City-based editor launching and redesigning urban, style-driven magazines, Erinn Morgan left her downtown Manhattan digs after September 11th, 2001, in search of a less encumbered, freelance lifestyle. A life-changing, two-year-long trek around the country in a motorhome eventually landed her in Durango, Colo., which she now calls home. Her writing has appeared in numerous— More about this author →