We have thousands of human-written stories, discussions, interviews and reviews from today through the past 20+ years. Find them here:

Search the site Search

Hike

July 18, 2006 at 8:51 AM

When I am moving among the mountains, traveling across great distances, Creation's expansive qualities begin to have an effect on me. It swallows me whole. It engulfs me with untouched grace, and its raw elements are the music in my ears; the wind through the valleys, the water moving downward, and the inhabitants of the sky and land are all I hear.

I am small. I am fragile. Yet, I am capable of amazing things, both good and evil. Under the open and ever changing sky, my mind clears and unfolds, and I begin to think about... About? I begin to Think. Think. The mind absorbs and meditates freely, as my feet move in cadence to the steady breathing of my laboring lungs.

I crave it. I crave solitude and simplicity and sweat and beauty. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear of hearing.

Excellent pics Emily!

Neil

Wow, that is gorgeous. I love hiking for those reasons as well.
Fab pics!
Where is the fireweed flower in its life cycle right now?
Beautiful photos! Clean air and untrammeled nature! I wish I could be there with you.
Greetings,
you are capable of evil?
Sigh. Another day , another pedestal...
Cheers,
Buri
gorgeous photos. nice dropshadow behind them, too.
Thanks, guys. It's easy to take pretty pictures where I live.

Bill, we had such a late spring, the fireweed hasn't begun yet. (Yeah!)

Buri, our capabilities astonish me.

Ah it's so beautiful. I had to put it on the front page! :)
Beautiful photos. Where taken?
To me it looks like a giant reclaimed strip mine:) It depends on what you're used to I guess.
Actually, Alaska used to be flat until they strip mined, and now we have these beautiful mountains and canyons. Let's bring strip mining to Oklahoma, too!

Okay really. These photos were taken along the Skyline trail in the Chugach mountains (Kenai Peninsula, AK). The intermittent trail ascends to a horseshoe-shaped ridge and traces nine peaks over twelve miles.

If you look at a USGS topo map from the 50s, everything is fine, but if you look at one from the 70s you see there's literally not two miles of continuous ridge anywhere in eastern ky that hasn't been removed by strip mining. I remembered going to a place in the mountains with my father near where he grew up that has a certain rock formation. Twenty years later I got directions to it and hiked back up and there's the formation in the middle of what could be a golf course.

You can see some of the mining from the roads but you don't get the real picture. Once you get up into it though and look where you can't see from roads you can see, and it looks like your pictures. Only grasses and scrub brush, because there's no topsoil. In the 70s there was a huge movement to get them to stop a certain kind of it at least, which was fairly successful. The impetus came mostly from outside, since the average kentuckian in the area was too deprived to have any idea what was happening much less what to do about it (read Night Comes to the Cumberlands). In the latest maps they don't show it. They treat it as if the contours are original. Not a good idea.