“The mountains are calling, and I must go,” wrote John Muir.

How do mountains call us?

Thoreau said it’s in the air: “There is something in the mountain air that feeds the spirit and inspires.”

So what is that “something”? I suppose there are as many answers to the question as there are people who love walking in the mountains. But for me?

Rebecca Solnit (Wanderlust) wrote that walking is “how the body measures itself against the earth.” Certainly seeing the mountains does that. “The earth is large,” said Solnit, “and we are not.” So mountains help us see our smallness next to nature’s grandeur. It’s a humbling thing. But there’s more.

One can climb a mountain. Something/someone small can conquer something large (if the mountain let’s you of course—the subject of my next blog). I’m pretty sure that’s why I do it. It’s not a contest with the mountain and certainly not with my hiking buddies but with myself (who I am now versus who I can become on this day, in this place).

Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two to summit Everest, said it best:

“It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.”

**Walking in the mountains can turn hazardous–my next blog.