The question sometimes arises in mountain communities, “what is a mountain person?” Certainly, simply dwelling in the mountains or in a mountain town does not make one a ‘mountain person,’ just as residing in a city does not eliminate one’s mountain personhood, Jimmy Chin, for example, one of the world’s best known professional mountaineers and mountain photographers, lives with his wife and child in New York City. No two people will answer such a question the same, but here are a few of my own reflections and observations. Thanks are given to Chomolungma and Miyo Lungsangma that the question isn’t who is a mountain person. The answer to that can only be made by each mountain person for him or her self.
First, a mountain person is made, not born. Everyone arrives in this life a helpless hunk of flesh and blood with a brain one third the size of its parents’ and no more care for, appreciation of or love for mountains and harmonious mountain living than a Pacific bivalve mollusk. Mountain people have evolved in accordance to the demands of survival. In evolutionary terms, today’s mountain person is descended from the first amphibian creatures that finally got tired of fighting for a bit of oxygen below sea level and crawled up on land looking for more oxygen and just kept crawling toward high country without contemplating too carefully the fact that the higher you get the less oxygen there is. A mountain person, like all the other kinds, is not without contradictions but keeps on crawling, learning about the community of local humans, birds, beasts, trees, rivers, lakes, rocky mountain peaks, alpine meadows, ecosystems and water tables and, along the way, why a healthy forest and a hillside without structures on it are beautiful, and that nature’s beauty is an end in itself. It is a tradition as old as the climb from the sea to the highest peak and its journey up is not always pretty, easy, fast or chic. It’s a slow process that takes place at a mountainous pace and won’t be rushed.
It takes awhile for the most well-intentioned, dedicated mountain person to learn the value of organic respect for the priceless gifts that mountains offer those who live within, visit from time to time and gaze upon from the valley, a reverence perhaps best expressed by Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the first two people to summit Mt. Everest: “It’s not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.” A friend who lives in a city is fond of saying “…because I am a mountain woman” in attribution to some of her best, most transcendent experiences “…simply because of the feelings I get when I’m ‘there’ although I like to think it means I am also strong. I would think that anyone who has experienced being on a mountain, looking out on the world, would have these feelings….I love pure air even if it is thinner.”
Many years ago while living in a mountain town well-known for its mountain amenities and organic consciousness as well as social excess and shallow pretentiousness I was interviewed by a writer for a national publication. He commented that the town seemed to lack “soul.” I didn’t agree with him but acknowledged his point and replied, “Perhaps, but there are many soulful people here,” and I offered some names of people we both knew and a few he didn’t know but knew about. We concurred that those individuals in a town he viewed as soulless had soul.
A mountain person has soul.

Don’t you think?