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The phenomenon of rapid growth in tourism is found in mountain regions all over the world. For instance, every year in the Indian Himalayas, more than 250,000 Hindu Pilgrim, 25,000 trekkers, and 75 mountaineering expeditions (Demiston 1996) climb to the sacred source of the Ganges River, the Gangotri glacier. They deplete local forests for firewood, trample riparian vegetation, and strew litter. Even worse, this tourism frequently induces poorly planned, land-intensive development.

Mountains are often used as a metaphor for stability and strength, but their ecosystem is inherently weak and has limited tolerance for human activityand above all for aggressive tourism. The higher and more remote they are the more fragile they can be. The ecology of tourism is a sad narrative of negatives, losses of flora and fauna, degradation of mountain slopes, trails polluted with garbage, overburdened landscapes and unseemly …