When did people start going to the beach for fun? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

For an answer about hiking mountains, the authoritative book you should consult is Susan R. Schrepfer's Nature's Altar's

The facts are: As a recreational sport, mountaineering starts in the mid 19th century; this is part and parcel of Victorian's love of motion and travel. (See the rise of bicycles and the literature on the 'Grand Tour' of Europe that reached a numerical peak in this time. Note, too, that travel by steam and rail is making travel faster, easier, and more comfortable than ever - tourism as an elite activity has begun.) Specialized gear for mountaineering won't arise until the twentieth century, and there is some awesome scholarship currently being written on outdoor gear industries [but for rock-climbing gear, and the start of Patagonia, you can check out passages in Andrew G. Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2007).]

If you are interested less in the wide-spread recreational phenomenon and more in earlier (and later!) individual explorers, Aaron Sach's The Humboldt Current covers the thoughts, motivations, and philosophies of a variety of explorers, not least of which are his title character, Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859) who explored a huge part of South America and for whom Humboldt Peak in Colorado is named, as well as two mountain ranges in Nevada.

Getting back to Schrepher, her awesome and fascinating gender-cum-environment interpretive analysis is that without a fixed tourist script (Such as Hal Rothmans argues were built into eco-tourism spots like the Grand Canyon and ski resorts, where one is 'supposed' to see/feel certain things), mountaineers imposed their own (gendered) visions on the environment. Through these conflicting visions, mountain climbing became a forum for a social debate over the meaning of wilderness, civilization, and gender roles over the course of the twentieth century

GENDER: She advances two distinct visions of the natural sublime that impelled climbers up mountains: imperialistic male sublimity and intimate, nourishing female sublimity. She asserts, “Working in relations to a nature visualized in feminine terms, men defined manhood as a counteridentity to both, seeing nature as simply alien, if not adversarial.”[Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars, 232; for male and female perspectives on the landscape (respectively), see Annette Kolodny, The Lay of the Land : Metaphor as Experience and History in American Life and Letters (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), and The Land Before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.)]

ENVIRONMENT: I'll just put this awesome quote here:

Mountains were North America's last and its first, wilderness. Last, because new settlers slipped around or hurried through the high ranges, leaving them islands of seemingly unknown lands, places of exotic peoples ripe for the rapacious curiosity of nineteenth-century travelers, who, in their mind's eye constructed the meeting of mountain and valley as the coincidence of two stages of history. And first, because it was the mountains that the United States initially and officially established as [legal] wildernesses. [Schrepfer, Nature’s Altars, 1-2]