You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. . . . There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.
~ René Daumal
Is the view better from the bottom or the from the top? Is the best vantage the one from the mountain summit? Or is it more uplifting from the valley floor to gaze up at the high peaks?
The prevailing view is to climb higher. When you’re on top, you’re lord of the world. It’s become part of our cultural language: to be at the top of your game, always wanting to reach higher, to be above it all. There’s a whole cult in Colorado among people who try to climb every fourteener in the state—those mountains above 14,000 feet. Books are written about ascents—both successful and tragic.
It's true that we see things from above that we can’t see when we’re below, that we didn’t know existed. From the mountain top, you see the whole lay of the land and how it was formed: how rivers carved their way between mountains and hills; how lakes formed in the flat areas; how human settlements took root in the valley bottoms. You can see treeline clearly—the border where trees can’t go any higher and where the tundra begins. It becomes apparent that the mountains and valleys are like yin and yang; you can’t have one without the other;
From a plane, the view is even more revealing: the empty basin and ranges of the West, the neat agricultural grids of the Midwest, the rivers that knit together the country, the furrowed hills formed by water and ice (below).
Because my cabin is on the valley floor beneath Mount Meeker, I spend a lot of time looking up on this 13,900-foot mountain, with its symmetrical shape and sharp edges. No matter how low I feel, my heart soars when I turn my gaze upward.
Near my cabin is a rough trail that goes up Deer Mountain and is directly across from Mount Meeker (top). About halfway up the mountain is a perfect vantage point: I can look upward to the top of Mount Meeker but also down into the valley. I see the green pasture that leads to the cabins along Hwy. 7. Back behind me is the meadow encircled by the road and the randomly placed cabins, including mine. On a ridge across the valley is an A-frame house not visible from below. In fact, from here, I see more ridges, many with stone outcroppings, than I imagined from my cabin.
Looking up toward the dark gray mountain, I can see its granite flanks, the deep indentation in the middle of the mountain where a trace of snow lingers into August, the rocky knob that sticks out above the forest of trees, and the dense, mostly pine forest that descends down into the valley, where the aspens then take over.
I love the grand view. And yet from on top, you can’t see the small, intimate spaces: can’t see or hear the sound of the streams, can’t know what it feels like to be in the middle of an aspen grove, can’t see the flash of the hummingbirds or the dragonfly in the pond reeds, can’t feel the wind through the pine trees. From above, the world has been foreshortened and flattened; you become a little arrogant because you think you’ve seen it all and know all there is to know. And yet you don’t know the world intimately: the curl of the aspen leaf, the smell of the pines, the squeak of the chipmunk.
It’s important to get the larger view and expand your vision of the world. That way, when you go back down to the valley, you know how the world works. There’s a new map in your head that you can combine with all the other views and produce a vision of a world that is complex, one deserving of our awe. You know there’s more than one way to see the world, to view the same landscape. Gradually, we learn that there’s no fixed view. It all depends on where you’re standing.