To riff on the opening line of a Langston Hughes poem,
I’ve known mountains.

Adirondacks, Alps, Berkshires, Catskills, Dolomites, Pyrenees, the Mourne Mountains, the White Mountains, the Serra de Montsant, Croagh Patrick, Mont Ventoux, and good ole Breakneck Ridge on the Hudson . . . from walking up Overlook in the Catskills as a kid—a mere 3,140’ summit starting from a trailhead at 1,740’—to setting foot atop Mauna Kea, tallest of the five volcanoes that form the island of Hawaii with a height of 13,803’, I’ve always felt the irresistible upwards pull of mountains that flouts gravity’s
law.

Robert MacFarlane knows mountains too. And you should know MacFarlane. Since his 2003 debut, Mountains of the Mind, he has shown the world in book after book that he’s one of the very best non-fiction writers out there.

My introduction to his oeuvre came not by way of heights but depths; in 2021 I read Underland, a riveting account of MacFarlane’s journeys through what that other non-fiction master, John McPhee, calls “deep time,” namely, explorations of underground realms both natural and man-made. MacFarlane takes us into ancient burial chambers and a research center half a mile down where physicists try to spy dark matter’s shadow, Norwegian Sea caves decorated with Neolithic art and Onkalo, an ultra-modern Finnish tomb for nuclear waste, or, as MacFarlane describes it, “an experiment in post-human architecture” as it’s a facility “intended to outlast not only the people who designed it, but also the species that designed it.” His account of his expedition through the catacombs beneath Paris remains for this ever more claustrophobic narrator the most harrowing thing I’ve ever read with passages that literally made me physically uncomfortable.

MacFarlane is a real-life Indiana Jones; when he’s not hiking, climbing, or caving, he wears the robes of a Cambridge don, a Fellow of Emmanuel College where he teaches English literature as it intersects the environment.

His grandfather, Sir Edward Peck, was a British diplomat, but also an accomplished mountaineer. It was his grandfather—and, fittingly, his grandfather’s library—that hooked young Robert on heights. Here’s how Mountains of the Mind begins:

I was a twelve-year-old in my grandparents’ house in the Scottish Highlands when I first came across one of the great stories of mountaineering: The Fight For Everest, an account of the 1924 British expedition during which George Mallory and Andrew Irvine disappeared near the summit of Everest.

Asked how he cultivated such a sensitivity for describing nature, he answered: “I grew up in mountains . . . my heart is made of mountains and always will be.”

In terms of both his writing style and subject matter, MacFarlane strikes me as a cross between George Orwell and Jon Krakauer, but with a more lyrical flair than either of them. Clearly, by dint of disposition, let alone his job as a scholar, MacFarlane has a deep love and knowledge of poetry and he brings those sensibilities to his prose. Like a poet, he approaches writing at the granular level, deliberating over prepositions, conjunctions, and whether to use a definite article, an indefinite article, or no article at all. He has a favorite piece of punctuation: the em dash.

And I just like MacFarlane. From all that I’ve read and the interviews I’ve watched, I can tell he’s a good egg—definitely the kind of companion you’d want on the trail or on belay.

Mountains of the Mind explores the fascination with and sometimes fatal fixation on high places. For a book of modest length (including acknowledgements, my softcover edition runs 282 pages), MacFarlane packs its pages with a concise history of mountaineering, the geology of mountains, memorable
anecdotes, personal vignettes, and poetic insights. He introduces the romantic figure of George Mallory at the start then backtracks to trace the evolution of our relationship with mountains from lofty havens wherein dwelt gods and demons and only madmen would dare to venture to sought-after summits that draw thousands of trekkers every year.

With one foot on the slope and the other in the library, MacFarlane populates his book with minds as well as mountaineers. Along with Mallory, Irvine, Maurice Herzog, Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, there are quotes by John Ruskin (and, in his case, drawings), Emerson, Muir, Thoreau, Byron, Coleridge, Dickens, Goethe, Keats, Shelley, Tolkien, James Boswell, and Samuel Johnson. The book’s dedicatory epigram is a phrase from Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Many of those minds did some climbing or some sort of upwards trek. Appropriately, it was a poet who first climbed a mountain solely for the purpose of reaching its top. Famed Italian sonneteer Petrarch and—credit where it’s due—his brother Gherardo scaled Mont Ventoux in April of 1336, anticipating by over five centuries the celebrated reason George Mallory gave to a New York reporter in 1922 for returning to Mount Everest: Because it’s there. (This poet scaled “The Beast of Provence” with three of his pals in March of 2012.)

Mountains of the Mind is marvelously entertaining. I’ve read it twice. It contains so many fascinating stories. How can you not love lines like these, for example? “The book which undoubtedly made the deepest impression on me was Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna, dictated by Herzog from a hospital bed in 1951. He couldn’t write it himself because he had no fingers left.” MacFarlane relates that when he once fell into a crevasse walking atop a Swiss glacier he was whistling—most appropriately—“Break on through to the Other Side” by The Doors!

Looming nearer and larger like the very mountain he attempted to summit, George Mallory becomes the focus of the narrative. Drawing on many primary sources but most poignantly the letters Mallory wrote to his wife Ruth, MacFarlane chronicles the Himalayan expeditions Mallory made in 1921, 1922, and 1924, memorably and movingly tracing the doomed climber’s rendezvous with mountaineering legend.

Mallory’s body was found by the American climber Conrad Anker on May 1, 1999, 75 years after he and Irvine vanished, “enveloped in cloud” as the expedition’s geologist Noel Odell tantalizingly wrote; a boot (with the remains of a foot inside it) and a sock embroidered with “A.C. Irvine” were found by American mountaineer, photographer, and filmmaker Jimmy Chin and his National Geographic team in September 2024. The rest of Irvine’s body remains lost.

* * * * *

In my grandparents’ modest home in County Cavan, Ireland was a framed tinted lithograph of the Matterhorn. Fittingly, it hung high up near the ceiling. Incongruous as it may have been, this image of the most iconic Alp at the continent’s center adorning a kitchen on Europe’s fringe, it’s one of the furnishings most clearly etched in my memory. My grandparents never set foot in Switzerland. It was just a pretty picture and everyone knows that mountain.

In July of 2024, my friends and I spent a magical week trekking in Zermatt. At the heart of that famed Swiss valley rises the Matterhorn, its uppermost 4,000 feet an almost perfectly symmetrical pyramid, and the Matterhorn stood at the heart of our trip. A cable car from Zermatt ferried us to Schwarzsee station at 8,373’. From there we hiked to the Hörnlihütte, a mountain lodge and restaurant at the base of the Matterhorn’s pyramid that sits at 10,700’. Past the Hörnlihütte’s hospitality, the trail leads to the pyramid’s sheer rock face where the technical climb begins with a ladder of steel rungs set into the wall. My friend and I ascended those 40’ or so to a briefly walkable ledge with its modernist statue of madonna and child just to say we “climbed” the Matterhorn—a little. Then, after some grub and a well-earned hefeweizen on the Hörnlihütte’s sun-soaked deck, we hiked all the way back to Zermatt, a 10-hour odyssey round-trip and easily one of the best days of my life.

No lithograph does the Matterhorn justice. Neither Ruskin nor Sargent nor Albert Bierstadt’s famous “Sunrise on the Matterhorn” can fully convey that mountain’s imposing majesty. Up close or at a distance, you just have to see it to truly understand.

MacFarlane concludes his book with a feeling many experience as they rest to survey the hard-earned vista or pause for a brief look -around on a particularly scenic spot on the trail: “I thought of the snow falling across ridge on ridge of the invisible hills, and I thought too that there was nowhere at that moment that I would rather be.”

Exactly right.