“The true blessing of the mountains is not that they provide a challenge or a contest, something to be overcome and dominated (although this is how many people have approached them). It is that they offer something gentler and infinitely more powerful: they make us ready to credit marvels – whether it is the dark swirl which water makes beneath a plate of ice, or the feel of the soft pelts of moss which form on the lee sides of boulders and trees. Being in the mountains reignites our astonishment at the simplest transactions of the physical world: a snowflake a millionth of an ounce in weight falling on to one’s outstretched palm, water patiently carving a runnel in a face of granite, the apparently motiveless shift of a stone in a scree-filled gully. Tu put a hand down and feel the ridges and score in a rock where a glaciers has passed, to hear how a hillside comes alive with moving water after a rain shower, to see late summer light filling miles of landscape like an inexhaustible liquid – none of these is a trivial experience. Mountains returns to us priceless capacity for wonder which can so insensibly be leached away by modern existence, and they urge us to apply that wonder to our own everyday lives.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination
“The unknown is so inflammatory to the imagination because it is an imaginatively malleable space: a projection-screen onto which a culture or an individual can throw their fears and their aspirations. Like Echo’s cave, the unknown will answer back with whatever you shout at it.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: A History of a Fascination
From our base in Talkeetna, we waited. There is a saying that less than 30% of all tourists catch a glimpse of the mountain. And that is far less in summer. So many people around us pointed to the lesser peaks–some without snow on them at all– saying, “Look, there is Denali.” I heard several people talking about taking the train through Denali National Park–that is also not possible. There is so much unknown about this place. And the guides do not try to clear up people’s misconceptions. For good reason.
You know when the mountain comes out because everyone–I mean everyone– stops everything they are doing to look. Even old timers. It is such an awe-inspiring moment.
One of the lucky moments of my life–not only did the mountain finally come out after weeks of hiding, but it stayed out for our 48 hours in Talkeetna.
I have loved mountains all my life–but nothing could have prepared me for my first glimpse of Denali. More spectacular than Everest. More than Mont Blanc. It just rises out of nowhere in the greatest vertical on earth.
知者樂水 仁者樂山 知者動 仁者靜 知者樂 仁者壽
The wise delight in water while the virtuous delight in the mountains.
A wise person is active and enjoys change while a virtue person seeks serenity and enjoys long life (accepting this as they come)
In an enlightened empire, both the wise and the virtuous are necessary. (All the Japanese glosses on this passage that I looked at do not position virtue above wisdom but rather stress that both types of people serve a necessary function in the world).
We flew with Talkeetna Air– whose “flight-seeing” business grew out of their steady work delivery alpinists to base camp.
“Maps do not take account of time, only of space.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains Of The Mind: A History Of A Fascination
Flights landed at the 5600 foot level of the Ruth Glacier, located in the Sheldon Amphitheater.
It was incredible to see the extent of the Ruth Glacier and the way it carved the landscape…
Landing on the glacier was worth every penny.
“There is something august and stately in the Air of these things,’ he wrote after the Simplon crossing, ‘that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions … as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their Excess, and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and imagination.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit
And then our return to a watery world in wildflower season in Alaska.
Native Corporation run Talkeetna Lodge–a slice of heaven
Dewdrop World 