The Mountains are Calling and I Must Go

-John Muir

Of all Earth’s landscapes, none fixes our attention more than the mountains. Why are we drawn to them?

Mountains in Myth

In myth and religion, mountains represent the holy. This is simply because thy rise above the world of flawed, earthbound and suffering mortals. The Tibetan legend of the kingdom of Shambhala – a paradise lost in a valley behind unscalable mountains, where people live free from strife and disease – may spring from a place informed partly by fact.

In humanity’s foundational stories, dreams and visions, mountains loom high. The early muths depict the mountains as a symbolic link between earth and the divine – a rough elevtor to sacred realms of higher wisdom and insight.

Health at High Altitude

Altitude stimulates the production of red blood cells, improvung oxygen uptake in the tissues.

Living above 1300 meters reduces the risk of cardiovascular diseases and certain cancers.

Spending time above 800 meters reduces obesity, ageing and circulatory problems.

Moutnains and Self-Examination

Reinhold Messner expressed the following, when speaking to Hillary’s and Tenzig’s 1953 Everest Ascent:

“Their ambition was to stand on the summit. Mine was an adventure towards spiritual and ethical self-examination. We both succeeded. Hillary with his summit, and me with a new measure of myself”.

We must Go

Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilised people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home. That wilderness is a necessity and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timer and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

-John Muir