I spend so much of my life looking at mountains. I’ve spent most of my life living in the mountains, but that’s not what fascinates me the most — it’s the distant mountains. I stare and stare, looking south at the Catskills or looking west towards the many hills in Schoharie County or the Taconics to the east. Or up in Plattsburgh, it’s the Adirondack Mountains to the south and the east, and the Green Mountains to the east.

Mountains are just piles of rock pushed up by the glaciers. When your up in them most of the time they aren’t particularly special. They usually have lousy soil for farming, and it’s difficult to build buildings on them. They are good places for timber and wild life, and for those tough enough to try their hand at farming them.

There also is a human element to mountains. People work to conqueror them. They try their hardest to farm them, to climb them, to build highways up and over them. Sometimes quite unsuccessfully. As humans, it’s our job not only to conqueror but to protect them. We sometimes do a good job at that other times it left to their rugged terrain to protect themselves.

None of that ends my fascination with mountains. They are just so beautiful as those big blue hills in the distance, tinted that color for the atmosphere. Mountains always are something that are calling you to explore and at the same time, reminding you how truly small you are in comparison. They also are a challenge to climb them and do something bigger.

I spend most of my time in the mountains. But there are always mountains where I’m not on or that I have not conquered. There always are distant hills unexplored. I will go there some day, and I will climb them. I will see more how mountain people live, how the farm and embrace the land. Yet, for now I will just look into the distance.