How the View from Above Is Different than the View from Below

A few weeks ago I hiked a trail I had never been on, although it was surrounded by trails and mountains that I had hiked many times, places that I thought I knew like the back of my hand. When I reached the top, with views in every direction, I had a hard time situating myself, could see familiar landmarks, but I was looking at them from a direction I had never seen before. It’s like looking at something upside down or backwards. (That’s Isabelle Lake, above, from below and the same lake, bottom, looking down on it from above).

To the south was the old Rollins Pass road, which I’ve traveled on in a jeep and which I’ve viewed from the valley below. There’s a trestle that hangs over the valley, one that was once used by trains but has now fallen apart. It’s a landmark, something for me to figure out where I am, but it took several minutes of coordinating all the other places in my viewscape to comprehend where I was in relation to all the other places I had been. It took me a while to realize that one of my favorite hikes was in the valley below, where I started at the old ghost town of Hessie and headed up to a meadow from which I could look south and upward and see the old trestle and the road.

I’ve been slightly disoriented lately, anyway, so I wasn’t sure I wanted my fixed landscape to be altered. I needed stability, one view that I could rely on. And yet I could see that there is no such thing, that every angle, whether from above or below, from south looking north or from west looking east, was different, made up of different planes of reality, like looking at a Cubist painting where the image is layered and your brain has to work to put all the layers together into something coherent.

And yet there was also a sense that my awareness of the world was getting larger, that it was encompassing new aspects of the landscape, folding them into my knowledge base. I just got more pieces of the puzzle, but the pieces, I’m starting to realize, are limitless. That’s both exciting and scary.

Comments

[shoney]

Wonderful--what a wonderful experience to have your "known view" altered.

[Sally]

Kathy, you are soooo lucky to have all these wonderfully beautiful places to hike a close distance from your house!! Great pictures! Wish I was there!

[Laurel]

I missed this post somehow . . . Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! I love getting high up in the mountains and looking down at familiar lakes and valleys from above; always exhilarating!