From "Why Do We Leave Notes on Top of Mountains? It’s Personal/For centuries, people have left all sorts of notes in summit registers. I looked through 100 years of love letters and spontaneous exaltation, including my own family's, to find out why." (Outside).
You can see trends in handwriting styles (neat cursive, like the kind taught by nuns, giving way over time to chicken scratch), as well as music and literature (lots of Grateful Dead and Dharma Bums). Some writers refer to previous entries. Most seemed not to have thought about what they’d write until they arrived. Instead, the words left in registers are simply tactile evidence that someone was there at a certain point in time: alone, with friends, or with the people they love.
One register entry found by the author: "If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"
And — this isn't in the article, but — here's a quote from "The Dharma Bums": "Oh my God, sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth, I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."
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19 comments:
TIL Althouse runs a mountaintop....
Wish you were here has to be one of the entries
"Kilroy was here." Dude gets around. Obligatory.
I'm gonna need proof that the Neat Cursive Nun actually exists.
“This selfie’s gonna be greaaaaaa…….”
JSM
Getting to the top of a mountain puts you in a set of people. Anytime a set of people like this is created they want to make everyone with them feel together and united in a common cause.
The common cause has been survival for most of our biological history and development. The desire to be in a tribe and be accepted by the tribe is the strongest biological drive humans have.
Tribalism and the desire for belonging and acceptance in the group has manifested in many interesting ways now that we all can do things beyond mere survival.
"Sarcastic comments... about needing to quit smoking or arriving stoned" "...sociability is just a big smile and a big smile is nothing but teeth."
Stoned? Yes, Meth head? No.
"I wish I could just stay up here and rest and be kind."
Like the song says, 'You have to be cool to be kind'.
“Yessir, that's what, a series of monasteries for fellows to go and monastate and meditate in, we can have groups of shacks up in the Sierras or the High Cascades or even Ray says down in Mexico and have big wild gangs of pure holy men getting together to drink and talk and pray, think of the waves of salvation can flow out of nights like that, and finally have women, too, wives, small huts with religious families, like the old days of the Puritans. Who's to say the cops of America and the Republicans and Democrats are gonna tell everybody what to do?”
I just the other day read about the Japanese mtn climber Yoshitaro Shibasaki. In 1907 he was excited to get to the top of Mount Tsurugi, presumed to be the last mtn in Japan that hadn't been ascended before. When they got to the top they found an ancient sword, which apparently had been placed there at least a 1000 years earlier.
@Paddy O, "Tsurugi" in Japanese (剣) is an older word for "sword", so a Tsurugi at the top of Mount Tsurugi makes a lot of sense.
I remember it like it was yesterday using a dilapidated wooden out house about an hour past Kingman Arizona in 1966. One brilliant scribe lamented "here I sit so lonely hearted, tried to shit but only farted". Another wise man counseled "be like Dad not like sis lift the lid when you piss"
""If you are a single woman and made it this far to read these scribblings: I love you!! Marry me!"
Having done a lot of backpacking alone, and being terminally single, this is a common feeling I've had, hoping to meet a kindred female spirit out there when under that ecstatic heady dream that hiking alone brings, but this is an illusion, because the experience requires being alone, and is highly intensified by it. The experience is almost cruel in it's promise and fantasy.
RSM, I guess that clears up the mystery of how it got that name too! "Why are you calling it Tsurugi? Because I put my sword up there." Then the name stuck and they forgot about the actual sword!
Proposed to my wife on a Sierra peak.
She looked around and agreed.
Whatever happened to,"Leave it like you found it."
mikee said, "TIL Althouse runs a mountaintop...."
It is very reminiscent, isn't it? This is one of my favorite blogs (if you can't tell...), and Prof. Althouse should be congratulated not just for its creation, content, and diligence, but also I think for the service this blog provides to history.
Contained in the commentary of this blog is a snapshot of daily events and the thoughts of those living during them that will serve as a treasure trove for generations hence, so long as they are properly digitally preserved. Having read the diary of Samuel Pepys in its entirety and being familiar with others, what this blog provides is all too rare, and I'm sure that future readers will think so too. It's daily nature, subject matter, witticism, and the arguments engaged within are like a rhetorical Fayum Mummy Portrait giving people of the future a snapshot of the voices and thoughts of those making them.
In online discourse, most posts don't rise to the level of being labled "effortposting". The entirety of Althouse.blogspot.com is an effortpost, and every day at that.
We should all be grateful for this semantic "mountaintop". I know I am.
Rusty said "Whatever happened to,"Leave it like you found it."
Most mountains in the west have a registrar where people can sign in. Sometimes they are a booklet in an ammo can, or in a plastic water bottle, or (if official) in a piece if PVC pipe that plumber's use with a rubber o-ring to keep the weather out, and often tied with cable to a rock so it doesn't blow away. Invariably, people leave business cards, notes scratched on a piece of paper, or little mementos, like children's toys, a burnt roach, a bird's feather, or a bottle cap. I usually just record the date, who all is in the party (including of course, the dog(s)), ascent time, maybe some weather information. If it is a mountain I've done many times (e.g., Mt. Yamnuska in Kananaskis or Baldy mountain in the Bridger Range), I leave no record of my passing by.
In Norway the stone on mountains are placed as ways to claim future favor like coins thrown into wishing wells. I guess if you have climbed that high you better not waste the opportunity.
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