Mountain is Calling
This image symbolized one of my proudest moments after completing my backpacking journey from Diamond Head trailhead to Elfin Lakes and Opal Cone with my hiking group.
Rating: Difficult
Distance: 35 km
Elevation Gain: ~750 m
Highest Point: 1,736 m
Pounding the trail for hours or even days on unsteady terrains with 40lbs backpack can take a toll in our body mentally and physically, but why I always drawn to mountains? …
I've discovered beautiful rice fields and mountains as soon as I could ride my bike. I still remember when my Mom woke me up at 5 AM on weekends, sometimes 4, so I could join my bike gang. Rice fields were on our right and left, mountains were surrounding us, and the air was always so crisp and fresh. I recognized this in my childhood drawing too. Many of us loved drawing and painting mountains with trees, lakes and rivers. I often still have this question whenever I go for hikes and my trail runs.
Mountains help us being closer to ourselves. "But mountains also make you humble. They remind us how much we need to experience beauty, and how rarely we do; of how crushing it can be not to get where you always longed to go, and how that disappointment can make you deeper. They remind us how carelessly we surrender our privacy and our solitude..." - Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail.
I suppose what the mountains seduce us with, in the end, is the promise of solitude – the chance to get where hardly anyone gets to go, up high, to the top, alone. Among the high peaks, the promise whispers, you will finally have a chance to think for yourself, to be an individual, beholden to no one, and nothing, and no event." - Ian Brown, The Globe and Mail.