The Names of Mountains

An unnamed tributary to the upper Sheenjek River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Alaska.

In the Rockies of Colorado, where I spent a lot of time during my formative years, one of the things I loved (still do actually) was standing atop a mountain with my Dad. My Dad is a fan of mountains, and of geography, and of the names of landscape features. From the summit of any given peak in the Colorado, my father can point around in a 360 degree circle and name just about every substantial peak in sight. “Look there’s Mt. Democrat, Bross, Lincoln, and to the west you can see the collegiate fourteeners: Princeton, Yale, Harvard… Oh, and there’s Mt. Massive, that one with the long summit ridge, no the just to the west, there. And wow you can just see the Sangre de Cristos, Crestone Needle and Peak are just visible on the horizon.”

You get the idea, when it comes to mountain names in Colorado, my Dad knows his stuff. Now, however, I spend way more time in the Brooks Range than I do in the Rockies. I’d love to get my Dad up on a Brooks Range Peak, because I’d like to play his game. “Look Dad, there is a tall mountain over there, it doesn’t have a name. And there is another tall mountain, that one with the long vertical snow field? Got it? Yeah, that one doesn’t have a name either. And see that whole range of tall mountains just visible far the west? Nope, those don’t have names. And neither does this valley we are looking over, it’s just another unnamed tributary…”

The Brooks Range is a place largely without names. Look at a topo map of the region and there are few lables. The big rivers, but not the small tributaries, have titles. A few of the notable peaks might be graced with a name, but the vast majority of the maps are a sea of wordless topographic lines.

I like those empty maps, such potential for exploration wrapped in those narrow lines.

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