Mountains of the Mind does an excellent job of articulating the way in which people have viewed mountains throughout history. Going from roughly the sixteenth or seventeenth century to the present (when the book was written), Macfarlane really portrayed well how the general public viewed and thought of mountains.

What was interesting and stuck out the most to me was how people had a really really negative view of mountains. I get that mountains would be feared and mostly uninhabited because of how difficult it is to live in them. But I did not know that people, in a sense, despised mountains. That they thought they were blemishes on the earth, like Macfarlane and Nicolson made note of, was not something I had ever considered. On this kind of depiction of mountains Macfarlane writes, “The politer inhabitants of the seventeenth century referred to mountains disapprovingly as ‘deserts’; they were also castigated as ‘boils’ on the earth’s complexion, ‘warts’, ‘wens’, ‘excrescences’, and even, with their labial ridges and vaginal valleys, ‘Nature’s pudenda’.” (p. 15) Certainly some of these descriptions of mountains are words that would never be attributed with them today, and especially not in Bozeman, Montana. In fact, I think people would be insulted if you called the mountains they lived around or explored boils or warts on the Earth, let alone talking about labial ridges.

But the change in how mountains were depicted and the gradual increase of men especially going to the mountains is an exciting thing to read about. Especially the reasons for why people began to go to the mountains and seek out higher and higher peeks. That feeling of vertigo and the understanding of the great risk that is being made while climbing mountains, even in the descriptions by Macfarlane is almost enough to make me want to leave and find higher peaks to climb. It is strangely simple, and even almost idiotic, that people are willing to risk life and limb just to go to a high place for no real gain. But the fact that people do it nonetheless, because the fear factor is worth it, and the view from the top is so exhilarating and freeing, the risks are outweighed by the experience. As I was reading about the motivation of people to go, I continually thought of John Muir who said, “The mountains are calling, and I must go.” There is an effectual call, to experience something outside of the natural element of what man was made for, the high that comes with high places. On one hand, choosing to go to dangerous, desolate, elevated places seems ludicrous, but on the other, why would you not go? It is worth it just to be there, above the world and on top of a peak.

The readings really point to that, how the man’s mindset has changed where people are willing to risk it all, like George Mallory did, to climb bigger, harder, and higher peaks, just because they are there, and they haven’t been climbed, or few have done it. It’s adventure, and speaks to people in a weird sort of way.