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The hidden wonders of the mountains

04.12.2014

It’s hell in the mountains. I know because I just got back from the Sierra Nevada: Alcazaba, Mulhacén, Veleta and a few other peaks in Spain. They’re not really high mountains, three and a half thousand metres… but high enough to be pretty unpleasant if they’ve a mind to. It was in June, when the rest of Andalucía was basking in sunshine; but I nearly had the brains blasted out of me by freezing wind on the high ridges. I also spent much of the time gripped by very reasonable fear… and the rest of it on the verge of physical collapse on account of the relentless exertion of dragging my bodyweight and backpack ever, so it seemed, upwards.

It was awful; the air was too thin; I wasn’t getting enough oxygen to my muscles or my brain; bits of me were hurting; I had suffered a bad night’s sleep and the next night would surely be worse.

The going was no fun either, for, as with most mountains, the terrain was composed mainly of millions of untidily scattered rocks as if they had been tipped there by some cosmic cataclysm… which of course they had. In some places they varied in size from big rats, through cats to the occasional large dog, and they all rocked and rolled and slipped and slithered and cracked us on the ankles as we tripped over them. Later it got worse, as the small ones became horses, and they went through hippos to cottages. Each one had to be scrambled over… and some of them rocked, and threatened to grind you like a seed in a mortar. You had to leap from one to the next, carefully checking your footholds and landing spot. And all the while the wicked wind was howling and catching in our packs, so that it tended to spin us round a little each time we lifted a foot.

To relieve the awfulness we bandied some banalities about, and then my friend Steve told me a joke. It was the one about the alternative practitioner and his dog. At sea level this is a pretty good joke; at 2 900 metres, with the euphoria that thin air induces, I was in serious danger of busting a gut.

Laughter revives you like nothing, and I trudged on up a little further. But it wasn’t long before my will started to dwindle again and I began to wonder once more what in the name of the Host we were doing here. It was hard and it hurt and the place was hideously ugly, devoid even of any plants. But I kept on going anyway, in the faintest of hopes that there might be something better awaiting us.

For there is beauty in this harsh world of rocks, but you have to attune your sensibilities to it, learn where to look, and how to wonder. The Sierra Nevada is not a chocolate-box, cuckoo-clock sort of a range of mountains; it’s far more subtle than that, much more of an acquired taste.

Later we crossed a large snowfield, and there, right in the middle, looking at us, stood a little black spider. We stopped, racked with wonder, and considered it and its presence in such an improbable spot. I could be mistaken but I took it to be a male tetragnatha, a species whose male has exaggerated jaws in order to discourage his mate from eating him after copulation. But even this did little to explain his lonely presence in a vast high altitude snowfield; something had gone wrong.

And here lies the beauty of mountains, not just the Sierra Nevada, but any mountains: they’re like people, they’re all different. When you are prostrated by fatigue, aching to your utmost bone, pinned down by foul weather in some hellish crevice amongst the loveless rocks, and wondering what in the name of the Host you are doing here… that is the moment when you spot your first pinguicula nevadensis.

It’s the hidden wonders of the mountains that finger the most delicate triggers of the soul and spirit. This is why each time you come down off the high mountains, or come home from the sea, you are different in the subtlest of ways, and it takes some time and re-acclimatization before you feel at ease with your fellow dweller in the plains. You are steeped in awe, attuned to wonder; you have experienced the sublime… for the sublime is as much in the tiny creatures that have their being in savage places, as in the majesty of mountains; in fact they are an intrinsic part of the majesty of mountains.