attempt to civilize them—they are too tall, too steep,
too wild, too cold. Now more than ever, it’s heartening
to find a landscape that cannot be tamed. No wonder
that mountains from Kinabalu to Kailash remain
objects of veneration.
As 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.
Once, in the Ethiopian Highlands, a family welcomed
me into their mud-walled hut as a storm broke over
the plateau. 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.
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. It would take many lifetimes to properly
explore the world’s great ranges, many more to tread
the obscure trails hidden among cliffs and clouds. Did
you know that the tablelands of Venezuela were the
inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World?
Or that no single point of little Lesotho sits below 4,500
feet? My own list grows.
And even when I’m tied to lower ground—when I’m
stuck, as now, behind a computer screen in England—I
can still retreat to the mountains in my mind. To that
place in India, under a cerulean sky. Because for me,
as for many, a traveling life will always defer to John
Muir’s simple invocation: “The mountains are calling
and I must go.”HENRY WISMAYER ( @henrywismayer) has written
for the New York Times Magazine, Washington Post,MA and Wall Street Journal.
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JUNE/JULY 2019MACHAPUCHARE,
NEPAL (22,943 FEET)An icon of the Nepalese
Himalaya, Machapuchare
is held sacred by Hindus
and off-limits to climbers.
Views of its twin “fishtail”
summits are nonetheless a
highlight of the legendary
Annapurna Circuit.ALPAMAYO, PERU
(19,511 FEET)Often described as the
most beautiful mountain
in the world, Alpamayo is a
soaring shark’s fin in Peru’s
Cordillera Blanca, one of
the best trekking regions
in South America. As the
peak is a technical climb,
most hikers are content
just to be in its presence.DAMAVAND, IRAN
(18,402 FEET)The highest volcano in
the Middle East is also its
loveliest: an archetypal
snowcapped cone, visible
on clear days from the
capital, Tehran. Damavand
can be climbed by deter-
mined amateurs.Peak Beauty
where I grew up in London. But my baptism came on
a gleeful school trip to north Wales spent bouldering
among the granite crannies of Snowdonia. By the time
a post-university trip took me from south to north up
the spine of the Andes, bookish curiosity had gradu-
ated into full-fledged passion.
In the years that followed, as I began to travel in
earnest, it became an obsession marked by euphoric
highs and crushing lows. 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. I’ve also contracted snow blindness in
Iran and almost fallen into a crevasse in Bolivia. 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.
An urge to ascend is not without its pitfalls.
Yet ask me to distill what it is about mountains
that so possesses people and I falter. 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 a high place: “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. 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.
This much is certain: the fever that gripped Mallory
is an urge more cultural than instinctive. For millen-
nia, our relationship with mountains was defined by
fear. They were perilous obstacles, best avoided. 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. Those
fearsome characteristics of peaks—the exposure,
the extremity, the potentially fatal consequences of
a misplaced foot—have now become reasons to go.
For me, however, the emotional draw of mountains
has always taken precedence over the pursuit of adren-
aline. 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. People talk of changing perspectives, of
senses heightening in the face of natural permanence
and grandeur. The world’s great mountains resist anyAlpamayo, in Peru,
has a distinctive fin
shape. Opposite:
Sunset lights up
India’s Nanda Devi.