For me, the quickest route to an improved attitude is a change in altitude. I love mountains. Large black rounded boulders lazing around like sleeping animals, the sun strobing through the pines, off in the distance the razored mountaintops tangled in snow and clouds. The air is cold as a hammer and the remarkable beauty quickly erases any feeling of self-importance or vanity. We are gnats on the rump of the world! Like earth furniture, mountains can be found everywhere and we all know the most famous: the Alps, Urals, Pyrenees, Balkans. In the U.S.: Grand Tetons, Rockies, Appalachians, Sierra Nevadas.
Texas is not often counted when considering dramatic mountains, but mountains come in all sizes, shapes and temperaments. Texas mountain ranges are found in a desert ecology. Their mood is bleak and treacherous, glowering. Raked by a perpetual wind, when you peer out at the collage of blues, greys, whites, yellows and ochers, there’s no sympathy for the meek. No country for old men, this. It’s either death or life, take your pick. . .the mountains could care less! The principal peaks and mountain ranges of Texas are in the Trans-Pecos Region. Guadalupe Peak is the highest peak in Texas. It is located in Guadalupe Mountains National Park, part of the Guadalupe Mountain range in southeastern New Mexico and West Texas. It rises more than 3,000 feet above the arid floor of the Chihuahuan Desert. Probably the most well-known mountains in Texas are the Davis Mountains in Jeff Davis County. All Texans love the Chisos Mountains in Big Bend National Park. Then there are the Chinati Mountains in Presidio County and the Franklin Mountains in El Paso County.
There is no measure that tells you when a hill becomes a mountain. . .no minimum height. Any isolated upstanding mass may be called a mountain. In fact, some mountains never reach above sea level. The Mid-Atlantic Ridge stretches thousands of miles, rising almost 10,000 feet above the ocean floor, yet never reaches the light of day. Mountains may be the last refuge of nature, a place to escape man-made extermination. No shopping malls or parking lots, oil refineries or housing developments. The last stand.
Even though inanimate, mountains are born, live, flourish and die—like the rest of us. It’s just that time plays out on a different dimension, one that transcends biological markers. Just as we cannot sense the rotation of the earth, young and old in this context, are unfathomable to us. Mountains are described as ageless, timeless. . .yet, they constantly change. What mystical, primordial forces are at work? Where do mountains come from?
Volcanic mountains, like Mauna Loa (Hawaii), are among the biggest. This one rises almost 14,000 feet above sea level and about 32,000 feet above the sea floor. With its diameter of 60 miles it is the world’s largest mountain in terms of volume. Some volcanic mountains are loners, but others form gangs. One of the largest volcanic chains in the world is the Aleutian chain that forms a sweeping arc that stretches for over 1,000 miles. Volcanic mountains are extruded from deep within our planet’s molten center.
Erosional mountains are those carved from crustal uplifts, producing elevated plateaus which give themselves over to the power of rivers, rains, ice and wind (think Bryce Canyon in Utah). Erosional mountains are outliers of younger rock resting on an exposed floor of older rock. An example is Mount Monadnock in New Hampshire, which rises 1,800 feet above a “peneplane” and gives its name to such isolated structures (monadnocks). Long, slow processes that take eons to complete. A life-birth-death cycle that predates the existence of man.
Structural mountain ranges are by far the most numerous and extensive. The forces that form them are much different from how erosional mountains are made, being mostly from structural deformation and uplift activity. Dome mountains are the simplest type, pushed up out of the earth without intense folding—often associated with igneous intrusions (example: Black Hills of South Dakota). Fault block mountains may be formed in any kind of rock, usually by the forces of huge uplift and downsunk blocks near faults in the earth. The results can be very large and lumbering. The Sierra Nevadas represent the uplifted edge of a block of granite 400 miles long and 100 miles wide, for example.
Folded mountains have similar characteristics but belong to none of the categories above. Some of the old timers (Appalachians) are not as impressive as the younger ones (the Alps) but they all share common characteristics. Typically folded mountains are distributed in linear fashion along the margins (or former margins) of continents, which is a clue to their origin. They generally are formed of broad swaths of sedimentary rock, 6-8 miles thick. Often rocks on the bordering continents are only a tenth of this thickness, composed more often of carbonates and broken pieces of older rock.
Patterns in most folded chains tend to include distinctive igneous and metamorphic rock—great thicknesses of volcanic lava and vast granitic batholiths (the Cascades). Intense faulting and folding can also be found, the result of constant shifting of the earth’s crust and earthquakes. Repeated uplift and erosion is common, though no individual man is likely to witness it. Continental shield areas, now rather flat, represent ancient eroded mountain chains. We think it’s always been this way—the answer so much larger than our questions! Most mountain ranges are not simply lumps of rock sitting on the surface of the earth. . .they have deep roots of light rock extending far down below their normal depth. We all need anchors!
While the science of geology can be fascinating, it makes my head hurt! The best way to experience the enchanting power of mountains (and thus, to appreciate their technical origins) is to share one-on-one time with them. Hike them, camp them, climb them, photograph them—wrap yourself in their witchery. When we travel, we are drawn to them. Spending time in a rustic cabin, tucked among the silent outcroppings and granite sculptures of the high country under a heavy snowfall—well, it doesn’t get any better than that. Here lies a rare existence indeed.
It is here you will find sights, sounds and experiences unique to nature. Plants—found nowhere else on earth cling to life in the most formidable conditions—delicate and beautiful beyond description. A veinery of branches surrounds us at temperate altitudes, a soft scented forest floor, rich and curranty; bursting with life, burnished with wildflowers. Here most all the large mammals and predators go to live lives no longer possible in a once larger habitat. The haunting nighttime call of a wolf or the shriek of a bull elk searching for a mate are balanced by bewitching bird melodies, seldom heard at lower elevations. A chance wilderness meeting with bighorn sheep or a mountain fox has equivalent force. . .they stare at you with those little yellow flecks you find in animals’ eyes. . .the experience equally rare for them. After a moment of mutual wonder, it’s over. They vanish behind a crenellated rock; only your thoughts linger.
Most of the physical beauty found on earth I do believe is found in mountain country. In temperate climates, spectacular water falls, cascading down the fractured mountainside, dissolving into an ephemeral mist, flashing rainbows. An undiscovered valley, its rippled green meadows fed by springs with cold water coursing down, gathering into pools with floors of polished stones. Desert mountain ranges present a curious type of spirit world, the boundaries between life and death a porous and indistinct busy intersection. There they are: old, resilient, oddly magnificent. The land desires dryness, sun-beaten, silent and lonesome. The apartness, the otherness, home to creatures and plants at once strange and unknowable. You have to want to live here, and only the most successful hardened veterans do.
Yes, there is something intangible about mountains and all rugged country in general, something life affirming. I believe John Muir best captured this miracle when, in 1879, he penned in his daily journal:
“One learns that the world, though made, is being made; that this is still the morning of creation, that mountains and valleys long since conceived and now being born, channels traced for rivers, basins hollowed for lakes, that moraine soil is being ground and outspread for coming grasses. . .building particle on particle, cementing and crystalizing to make mountains, and valleys and plains. . .which like fluent, pulsing water, rise and fall and pass on through the ages in endless rhythm and beauty.”
Yep, time in a bottle!!