I remember when I saw my first mountain. It was more than 40 years ago but the memory is as clear to me as if it happened this morning.
I was probably 10 years old and there was a movie on television about Mt. Kilimanjaro, the fantastic mountain (19, 340 feet in elevation) looming high above the clouds. I remember being dumbfounded, asking my mother: "How could that be?" I lived in Ohio you see, and no mound of soil and rock and snow in my world reached into the sky, let alone up into clouds.
I remember another time when I was young and my parents were talking about driving from Ohio to Pennsylvania. They were concerned about driving “in the mountains.” It seemed that we were about to do something pretty daring, taking our 1960’s-era Mercury into such intimidating territory.
Today, from my home in Washington State, I can look east and see the Cascade Range, and I can look west and see the Olympic Mountains. I know those mountains, even many of the highest summits, like I know my own back yard.
On the trip Leah and I did recently to Nepal, we walked among the greatest mountains on the planet. I photographed the beautiful Himalayan goddess-mountain, Ama Dablam (22, 494 feet,) bathed in the amazing, warm light of a sunset.
As we trekked toward Mt. Everest, we crested Thokla Pass and walked quietly through an area filled with perhaps 100 rock cairns, memorials built at that high place to honor climbers who have died in these mountains. I photographed one of those memorials, then the weather in the valley below us changed and I shot a few more images. Only now, when I look at my pictures, do I realize that I was up above the clouds.
