I do the last half hour with my head down, counting steps in groups of twenty, because by then the count is the only conversation I have left. I started out with a headlamp. I crossed the damp woods, then the band of dwarf pine that scrapes the calves, then the zone where nothing grows anymore and the trail thins into a line of loose scree that shifts under the sole with every step. My breathing shortened without my noticing. My fingers swelled, the way they always do when I stay too many hours above eight thousand feet.
Six hundred feet below the ridge, I hear music.
What You Find at the Top After a Three-Hour Climb
A deck. Composite planking, a glass railing, a steel panel with the profiles of the peaks and their names etched above them, so nobody has to ask anybody anything. Inside a low building there’s a bar, the espresso machine hissing, a drinks fridge lit with LEDs. A trash can overflows with sandwich wrappers. A small line waits its turn to be photographed at the exact same spot on the railing, the one where the drop below is cleanest, and a kid is crying because his arms are cold.
I drink a coffee that tastes burnt and costs what it would downtown in Milan.
I feel nothing hostile toward those people. Many are up here for the first time in their lives, some have that shine in their eyes, a woman points out the valley floor to her husband and explains where they came up from. Their moment is real. The discomfort that settles on me while I drink is about something else, and it takes me a while to bring it into focus: the place I’ve arrived at was designed for people who arrive in ten minutes, and I walked into it carrying three hours of body that counts for nothing here. Neither way is worth more than the other. What changes is the object. They came up to see a view. I came up to do something that ends with the view, and I find it already set out on the table.
The Mountain, Redesigned
Anyone who designs a lift system works on a clear and legitimate problem: move as many people as possible into a difficult place, safely, in the least time. Every choice downstream of that problem is coherent. If visitors stay forty minutes, you need a bar. If they stay forty minutes in short sleeves, you need shelter from the wind. If they step off the gondola in city shoes, the ground under their feet has to be made predictable. If three hundred an hour step off, that ground has to be made predictable for three hundred people an hour.
What comes out of that chain is a place with the shape of high altitude and the function of a corridor. Nobody decided it in one go. It settled by successive additions, each one reasonable taken on its own.
Walkways, Decks, Parking Lots Above the Treeline
The walkway is the element that impresses me most. A passage that used to be a line of shifting stones, where everyone chose where to put a foot and got it wrong and corrected, becomes a continuous surface, four feet wide, non-slip, with handrails on both sides. A sign at the entrance declares twenty minutes. Below it, the scree field is still there, intact and off-limits.
The handrail is a device of meaning before it is a device of safety. It tells you nothing can happen to you here, and the moment nothing can happen to you, you have stopped being in the mountains and stepped inside a representation of them, faithful in its colors and its cold air, emptied of the one thing that made the place that place: the need to decide. A little lower, a parking lot with white lines painted over a leveled meadow. Higher up, the deck cantilevered over the drop, which exists to produce the image that circulates and brings more people up to produce the same image.
It took us a few years to get used to looking at mountains this way, as backdrops. Outdoor photography did its part in turning the landscape into a monument you pose in front of, and we wrote about it elsewhere, on how the aesthetic of trail running has changed. A cantilevered deck is that same idea poured in concrete.
Access That Isn’t Access
Here we arrive at the word the whole operation is defended with, and it has to be handled with intellectual honesty, because it’s a serious word. Accessibility exists, it has a precise meaning, and it produces results that matter. A trail made passable by a wheelchair, a one-wheeled trail chair carried up by six pairs of arms, a stretch with the grade softened so an eighty-year-old can reach the lake: these are real expansions, designed around one specific person and one specific body.
The lift that unloads hundreds of visitors an hour works on a different scale. Its unit of measure is flow, and you can see it in what gets optimized: dwell time and average spend. Rather than widening access to the mountain, that gondola opens access to a different object, which is a view with services attached. Both are legitimate. They’re sold under the same name, though, and that overlap of names is where I stop agreeing.
Because when the new object physically occupies the space of the old one, the old one stops existing even for the people who were looking for it. The ridge they built the deck on was the only ridge. There isn’t a second one, identical, held in reserve for whoever comes up on foot.
Effort as a Condition, Not an Obstacle
I have to say something that keeps me clear of any purity: I’ve used the lifts. I still use them. I’ve taken the gondola with my legs destroyed the day after a race, I’ve taken the chairlift because a storm was coming in, I rode the cable car to bring my mother to a place she’d otherwise never have seen, and I wouldn’t throw away a minute of that day. The people who come up in ten minutes stay outside the target, and so do the flip-flops, which in the title work as an image and in real life belong to somebody enjoying an afternoon exactly as they have every right to. The target is the industrial decision to build an altitude that asks nothing in return, and to go on calling it the mountain.
The body, climbing, does work that goes beyond moving you upward. The three hours dilute the elevation gain into your nervous system. You pass from the heat of the woods to the wind on the ridge one degree at a time, your eye learns that valley by looking at it from forty different angles while you come around it, your ear registers that the sound of water has gone quiet and now there’s only wind. Altitude enters slowly, and the body notices: above 6,500 feet your ventilation changes and so does the way you recover between one step and the next, and that readjustment takes days, as anyone who goes to run at altitude finds out. The gondola does all of it in ten minutes — or less — and delivers you to the summit with your body still parked at the lot.
Treating effort as friction to be removed is the premise behind every walkway above the treeline. Effort is the condition that produces the experience. Take it away and the view stays identical in its colors, its proportions, its light, and turns into a photograph you already watched scroll past on your phone the night before. Looking at something and seeing it are two different operations, and the second one is paid for in time spent with the body. Whoever comes up on foot arrives with that time already inside them, along with the thirst and three hours of counted steps.
I went back down along the ridge, on foot. Halfway down the slope I turned around: the deck was a pale line on the gray, tiny, and above me the lift cable went on whistling softly in the wind. Those people were already in the valley. I still had two hours of knees ahead of me, and it’s those two hours that don’t fit in the gondola.