In his eight books on mountain travel and mountaineering, his extensive writing for and editing of mountaineering periodicals, and his leadership of societies dedicated to mountain exploration, Douglas W. Freshfield represents the learned gentleman of independent means, zealously dedicated to his avocation. "With the passing of the great pioneer," the editor of the Alpine Journal remarked at Freshfield's death in 1934, "comes the close of an epoch in Mountaineering History; Freshfield was a survivor--probably the sole--of the so-called Golden Age." Freshfield's perspectives were those of the well--placed Victorian, yet much of the information in his works on the Caucasus Mountains and the Himalayas would remain significant into the mid twentieth century. His later writings, in particular, would realize the ideal of what Freshfield called, in his article "On Mountains and Mankind" (1905), the merger of "a man of science and a man of letters."

Douglas William Freshfield was born in...