“Yet to listen is better than to speak. The talking tribe, I find, want sensation from the mountain – not in Keats’s sense. Beginners, not unnaturally, do the same – I did myself. They want the startling view, the horrid pinnacle – sips of beer and tea instead of milk. Yet often the mountain gives most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountains as one visits a friend, with no intention but to be with him.

Nan Shepherd, “Th

I aspire to be something more than a day hiker and peak bagger, and Nan Shepherd provides an exemplary model for what it means to simply pay attention to nature in The Living Mountain, a set of essays on her years spent getting to know the Cairngorm mountings in Scotland.