Mr. Fitzwilliams is an ardent supporter of keeping the wild wild, but he is well aware that if the Forest Service becomes increasingly responsible for fatalities on mountains, they will have to act to mitigate such risks — and since more and more individuals are heading into the mountains for self-discovery and the peculiar breed of ecstasy the mountains provide, injuries and deaths are also increasing.

The political response in Colorado has been predictable. Local sheriffs and senators and governors are calling deaths in the mountains “unprecedented,” and demanding more signs, “better” trails and other intrusions.

So far, the argument for preserving the “wilderness experience” has kept these changes at bay. But if the Forest Service (or national parks) assume greater risk for visitor safety, they will be forced to institute a range of solutions to reduce their liability — like apps that guide us along virtual routes or keep us on trail as though we were in car lanes, or other “soft” intrusions.

Of course, if American policymakers and citizens conflate urban and wild space — as the French have already done on Mont Blanc — we will see more and more lawsuits against the Forest Service, or another agency, for failing to protect individuals when they are in a natural setting.

Around the country, parks are getting sued for wild animal attacks on visitors within their boundaries, for falling trees or for not warning visitors for the most obvious of risks, such as rivers flooding during storms. These cases indicate a population out of touch with natural danger. If this trend continues, the mountains will have undergone as radical a transformation as they did in the 18th century, when they morphed from ominous landscapes of gloom to topographies of heroic conquest.

The origins of mountain climbing lay in the middle of the 19th century. Before that, they were seen as landscapes of evil otherness, where the tempestuous gods exercised their wrath. The curious ventured not.

After the 1850s, climbing became for some a way to “overcome the self” or “experience the sublime.” As townspeople and shepherds found their way to the tops of the Alps, the ability to thwart death and overcome human limitation in mountainous landscapes became valued — but that value assumed an environment of risk. A hero needs adversity, and the extreme conditions and danger of the mountains provided that. Later, in the middle of the 20th century, the literature of the golden era of big Himalayan climbing lionized first ascensionists because they, like great generals or explorers, navigated risk successfully.