Since 1994, Chhetri and her sisters have run a trekking business in Pokhara. Chhetri, Nepal's first female trekking guide, is used to pioneering. She and her sisters started the first woman run restaurant in town. When that failed, they opened a lodge and expanded with the trekking service. Chhetri has trained over 70 Nepalese women to be guides.
Miriam Torres lives in a distant corner of the Peruvian Andes, in the shadow of one of South America's highest peaks. She boots up her computer and checks her e-mail before her first cup of coffee. "Normally, reading Mountain Forum messages is the first thing I do after arriving at the office," she says. Torres, who directs ecotourism and community projects in Huaraz, wrestles with many of the same problems faced by trek leaders in Nepal. How do you ensure that tourist dollars go to the towns on their path, and not just to the city-based tour agencies or hotels that do the booking? How do you keep tourist traffic from eroding fragile hillsides and denuding upland forests for firewood?
In 1994, Torres joined the Mountain Forum, an online resource dedicated to the concerns shared by
people in the hills. She was glad to find others like Chhetri. "What surprised me," Torres says, "is the sense of partnership and support we can get from asking any question, even to members of the Mountain Forum we don't know."
In recent years, people in widely scattered mountains - from Rai in Nepal to Quechua communities of Peru and the Appalachians in West Virginia - have found they share a good deal in common. Their concerns - which include increasing water scarcity, cultural erosion and political intrusions by flatlanders - form the basis of the High Summit.
Organized as a key event in the U.N.-sponsored International Year of Mountains, the Summit has been several years in the planning., set up during the International Year of Mountains in 2002.
