In Other News, the World is Awesome

How was your weekend? Good? Yeah, probably not as good as mine.

As fate would have it, I was blessed with the rare chance to go on a UNH Outing Club trip—my first ever hike to the summit of Mount Washington. While standing in dorm room with my phone in my hand last Wednesday, I received an email offering an open spot to the first person to respond. Naturally, I pounced on that shit, and scored the last seat in the blink of an eye.

Having never really hiked a mountain before (save one trek up Manadnock when I was like, fourteen, but that doesn’t count), I was a little unsure what to expect, but what I saw that day opened my eyes to a world of beauty beyond what I had ever seen. Now, this isn’t the sort of “news” that you’d expect to see in a newspaper or anything, but it’s definitely relevant to everybody who reads it.

At the summit, the view was breathtaking, if I could only ever use that word once. We looked out on the horizon, where a pale white ocean of clouds stretched over the surrounding land, only permeated by other mountains that resembled the crests of waves frozen in time, and I couldn’t help but imagine majestic whales gracefully weaving in and out of their peaks. I’m still not sure if the tears in my eyes were because of my utter amazement or the 40-to-60-mile-per-hour gusts of wind, but it could have been from some culmination of the two.

I’d love to show you pictures of what I saw, but that would only defeat the purpose of what I am trying to say here. Pictures tend to desensitize us to this sort of natural beauty; why climb to the top when you can Google Search thousands of photos and see the same sight through an Instragram filter? Don’t cheat yourself by thinking that the view on a laptop is as good as the real thing. Go climb a mountain. Go see stuff. Wake up.