As the natural landscape’s highest features, mountains occupy a pre-eminent position in travel writing, inspiring innumerable journeys and written accounts. Rich with symbolic and mythical associations, peaks offer travel destinations, structure narratives, and furnish the challenging goals of pilgrimages and quests. Summits, the loftiest places on earth, afford the culmination of one of the most popular of travel writing’s many sub-genres, mountaineering literature, a form now recognized with its own festivals and prizes, such as the Banff Mountain Literature Festival and the Boardman-Tasker Prize for Mountain Literature. Other types of mountain writing look beyond the summit, seeking to understand the broader meaning of the earth’s most elevated places.