Article August 15, 2011 Issue

Taking in the whole view

By Robin Hoagland

©Bernd Bieder/imagebroker.net/Photolibrary.com

You might be asking yourself what a girl who grew up on the gently rolling plains of the Midwestern United States could know about mountaintops. To be honest, not much . . . until I finally found myself on one when I was in college. And then. Well, it was the view that I hadn’t anticipated.

Before my climb, I’d been looking up at those immense rock formations, thinking about how much effort it would take to get to the summit. Now I was looking out from them, and that changed everything. There was nothing to obstruct what I saw in any direction, and I could see ten, maybe a hundred times further than I’d seen before.

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