It’s for moments like this, as much as for the varied topography, that a love affair with high places is a quest without end. They turned out their meager larder, the mother roasting coffee, the father breaking bread, as the children glared at me, an alien in their midst. Once, in the Ethiopian Highlands, a family welcomed me into their mud-walled hut as a storm broke over the plateau. No wonder that mountains from Kinabalu to Kailash remain objects of veneration.Īs barriers to inherent progress, mountains have always forced travelers to slow down and mingle with the communities that cling to them and, more often than not, to avail themselves of a stranger’s kindness. Now more than ever, it’s heartening to find a landscape that cannot be tamed.
The world’s great mountains resist any attempt to civilize them-they are too tall, too steep, too wild, too cold. People talk of changing perspectives, of senses heightening in the face of natural permanence and grandeur. The act of ascending embodies escape the sight of the lowlands receding-houses reduced to child’s bricks, humans to ants-provides sweet refuge for the urban soul. Those fearsome characteristics of peaks-the exposure, the extremity, the potentially fatal consequences of a misplaced foot-have now become reasons to go.įor me, however, the emotional draw of mountains has always taken precedence over the pursuit of adrenaline. Only in the 18th century, as early holidaymakers realized that you can’t enjoy a view without having a vantage, did trepidation evolve into active adventuring. They were perilous obstacles, best avoided. For millennia, our relationship with mountains was defined by fear. This much is certain: the fever that gripped Mallory is an urge more cultural than instinctive. Photograph by Michael Melford, Nat Geo Image Collection Some of us just can’t help seeing a peak without wondering what might be visible from its summit, and we’re not sure why.ĭue to rockslide and subsequent erosion, the height of Mount Cook slowly decreases. The legendary climber George Mallory, speaking to a New York Times journalist before his ill-starred attempt on Everest in 1924, uttered perhaps the most celebrated explanation for the pull of high places: “Because it’s there.” That this glib refrain should have become so famous an explanation for summit fever-the default riposte to the lowlander’s question of “why?”-tells you all you need to know about the visceral, ambiguous allure of mountains. Yet ask me to distill what it is about mountains that so possesses people and I falter. An urge to ascend is not without its pitfalls. I once skidded 300 feet down a couloir on my ass in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, my progress halted only by the sudden, cartoonish interjection of a snowdrift. I’ve also contracted snow blindness in Iran and almost fallen into a crevasse in Bolivia. I’ve seen crystalline dawns break over the Peruvian cordilleras, spent nights beneath yak hides in a yurt among the Ala-Too steppes of Central Asia, sat mesmerized by the raging dance of Nyiragongo’s lava lake in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In the years that followed, as I began to travel in earnest, it became an obsession marked by euphoric highs and crushing lows. By the time a post-university trip took me from south to north up the spine of the Andes, bookish curiosity had graduated into full-fledged passion. But my baptism came on a gleeful school trip to north Wales spent bouldering among the granite crannies of Snowdonia. There wasn’t much altitude where I grew up in London.
My interest in mountains, whether climbing them or merely being in their vicinity, began with stories of heroic mountaineers. Chances are I’ll never reach it-an all but impassable box canyon, the Rishi Gorge, offers the only viable route in. I’ve been fortunate to glimpse it from afar, and, since then, I can see it daily in a panorama hung in a frame on a wall at home. Remote, awe-inspiring, transcendent, the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, a glacial basin in India’s Garhwal Himalaya, embodies everything that I love about mountain country.
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