mountains | The Smart Set

Daisy Goodwill and the Montana Rockies

Darlene West — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 11:30:00 +0000

I remember a lake rimmed with lily pads; a meadow filled with sun. The uphill stretch of trail where I stepped round a bend and came eyeball to eyeball with a mountain goat. Now, the goat may have been a bighorn sheep. It wasn’t the curve of the horns, so much, or the softness of […]

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The Best Book in the World

David Kirby — Mon, 10 Aug 2020 12:37:04 +0000

After I finished Robert Macfarlane’s Landmarks, I couldn’t sleep. So I got up at 4:22 a.m., downloaded an image of its cover, uploaded the image to my Facebook page, and wrote, “This is the best book in the world.” Macfarlane is a nature writer, travel writer, and literary critic who is in large part responsible […]

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Climbing Brandon

Daniel Hudon — Mon, 28 Jan 2019 14:24:07 +0000

I wound up hiking Mt. Brandon by accident. But it is an accident in the same way a traveler stumbles on ruins he didn’t know he was looking for. On Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula, they say you don’t get lost, you discover. And wherever you go, someone has been there before, walking. So it was with […]

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Mist, Mountains, and Men

Benjamin Welton — Thu, 09 Nov 2017 16:47:40 +0000

One hundred years ago, President Woodrow Wilson went before the United States Senate and asked Congress for a declaration of war against the Central Powers. The impetus for this declaration was Wilhelmine Germany’s return to unrestricted submarine warfare in the Atlantic. Wilson, who had a year earlier campaigned on a promise of keeping the United […]

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Wild Life

Stefany Anne Golberg — Wed, 10 Dec 2014 16:12:43 +0000

The last earthly home of the mystic-naturalist John Muir was a 14-bedroom Victorian mansion on the fringes of Martinez, California. Before that Muir’s home had been the wilds of America, days spent roaming the peaks and valleys of the West. But in 1878, when Muir turned 40, his friends urged him to leave the mountain […]

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