MONTHLY CHALLENGE | MOUNTAINS
The Mountains I Needed To See
I couldn’t leave the Alps in my imagination forever
I grew up where the land is rolling, not mountainous. Tall trees made it hard to see its undulations. I could get a beautiful view across a small, cleared farm, but big views — truly big views — were hard to come by.
The biggest view I got was in the summertime, when my family would rent a cottage by the beach. Looking out over the ocean is mesmerizing, but unlike the top of a hill, it doesn’t offer the same sense of arrival. The beach is a place where houses, bushes, and trees cease, water begins, and as far as you can see, nothing in your view rises above the height of a wave.
When I was a boy, my extended family would sometimes holiday in upstate New York. We would stay in cabins at a remote camp on an Adirondack pond. If one looked north from camp, over the pond, one could see past Potter Mountain (1,700 feet) to Little Blue Mountain (1,850 feet). Those aren’t tall by mountain standards, but as kids, they spelled excitement. We knew that at some point our parents would propose a day hike past the first, onwards to Little Blue.
It was a couple miles of meandering trails to get there. The mountain has a definitive peak with a granite overlook that drops…
