Two dear friends are experiencing ongoing (and I assume scary) health challenges, so on my last hike I put a small string of prayer flags on the summit of a beautiful peak in the Olympic Mountains.
Though I always practice a leave-no-trace ethos in wild places, the prayer flags I left seemed appropriate in that instance. If another climber comes along, my guess is that he/she also will have no problem with the prayer flags -- perhaps even smile and enjoy their presence. If not, the climber can remove them. By the time someone else visits that summit, the winds and weather will have spread the prayers anyway.
So, that's me in the photo above, a peak called "The Brothers" in the distance. Below is an image I shot in 2007 on our first (of two) trips to the Himalaya, in Nepal. Prayer flags are common there on a high mountain pass, or even on Buddhist shrines in cities.
