up on a mountain.

Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado. Photo credit: author.

"It is because they have so much to give and give it so lavishly... that men love the mountains and go back to them again and again." -Francis Younghusband

The mountains get into you. Down in your deepness. Can’t get them out. Got to get out to them. Oh, how big. Oh, how high. There is no resisting. There is only dreaming of days on the heights, and some reality of it, if you are persistent.

There can be adventure anywhere. There can be up-high, epic adventure, only in the mountains. How inexplicable. Yet you know, you ache for it.

There is a smell of pines, there is a taste of freshness, there is a feeling—how glorious it is!—of freedom. And you will run after it, if you are brave, and maybe careless. Once you are there, soak it up for me. Lay in the grass up high, where hundreds of elk run and skies have no man-made picture frame. Look at it, every bit of it, and then look again. You turn and turn and it is all somehow endless. Feel small. It is good for the soul.

That tired-feet, burnt-face sensation is a token of accomplishment. And the downhill will be fine. But now, you are in heaven’s foothills. You will sit and be blown wild by wind, and think how you could never leave. Not if someone dragged you. And you want to dote on an artist, because a maker of this—he must be thanked silly and then some. But you can’t come up with words that are good enough, nor a gift near equal to what you have from him.

Isaac Watts said it in an old hymn—“Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were an offering far too small.”

Far too small. And there is some perspective. Don’t lose it when you go back down. But I won’t make you leave. Stay in the clouds for a while if you like.