On April 9, a doctor in Hawaii was found guilty of trying to kill his wife while out on a seemingly romantic mountain hike. In February, an Austrian man was convicted of negligent manslaughter for leaving his girlfriend on the side of the Grossglockner mountain, where she died. Women online have responded to these news items by sharing their own stories of being abandoned by their boyfriends on hiking trails. And so a new iteration of “toxic masculinity” has caught the algorithm, with videos marked “#AlpineDivorce” racking up hundreds of thousands of views and features in The Guardian and The New York Times covering the phenomenon.
As with many internet coinages, “Alpine Divorce” has been applied to a wide range of otherwise unrelated behavior: Turning an argument into a breakup while on a long walk; getting too far ahead of a less experienced or fit romantic partner on a trail; making the wrong call in an emergency situation on a high-stakes mountaineering feat; and, well, murdering your significant other in the wilderness.