Mountains

Thursday

Roger Kimball

The excellent wine of Mount Ventoux

On April 26, 1336, the poet Petrarch, accompanied by his younger brother, climbed up the windy slopes of Mount Ventoux in the Rhône Valley. He said that he was the first person to climb that Alps-adjacent peak, which isn’t quite true. But it may well be true that he was the first person to go mountain climbing for fun. Petrarch wrote about his outing in 1350 in a famous letter called “The Ascent of Mount Ventoux.” The twentieth-century German philosopher Hans Blumenberg (speaking of mountains) wrote that Petrarch’s climb marked “one of the great moments that oscillate indecisively between the epochs,” namely between the medieval world and the Renaissance. Today, we like mountains. They mean picnics, sight-seeing, natural beauty.

Ventoux

Thursday

Orson Fry

Falling in love with Montana

"You have a big mountain to climb!" is not the sort of text you eagerly await from your girlfriend’s father. But Billy, a true Southern gent, meant no ambiguity. As dawn cracked the alarms sounded in our Airbnb and six of us bundled into the back of the Dodge. A cool mist hung in the valley as “Baba O’Riley (Teenage Wasteland)” started up on the radio and got the blood running. At 6:15 a.m. we entered the shadow of Emigrant Peak, which at 10,921 feet, commands Montana’s Paradise Valley. Emigrant owes its name to Thomas Curry, a pioneer who struck gold in a creek on the east side of the mountain in 1863.

Montana

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

The joy of experiencing the Mountain West on horseback

In his introduction to Desert Solitaire Edward Abbey wrote: “you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail, you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not.” While what he says about driving, walking and crawling is true enough, my late friend Ed neglected to mention the alternative — and best — way to see and experience the Mountain West. That is on horseback, the optimal mode from the point of view of observational perspective as well as speed of travel.

horseback