“Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home.”

-John Muir, Scottish naturalist and mountaineer, 1838-1914

This quote appears in the first paragraph of John Muir’s essay The Wild Parks and Forest Reservations of the West. Muir was an early advocate for protecting and preserving the natural landscape of the American West, and he wrote many books and essays describing his travels. In this quote, Muir is describing a modern phenomenon in which people feel the need to escape society and find happiness in the natural world. He’s also tapping into verticality by mentioning the mountains. We all seek to escape the surface of the earth, and the mountains are one way to achieve this. When he refers to the mountains as home, he’s honing in on the idea that the mountains allow us to achieve verticality. The mountains allow us to feel complete, and for Muir, that is something worth preserving.