The Zenith of Mount Muztagh'ata

There wasn’t any hut, lodge, or indication for our arrival at the landmark, but our local guide smiled at us and drew “BC” into the snow with his shoe. We huddled together, guzzled water, and cheered for members of our group as each of us finally finished our trek to the base camp of Muztagh’ata. Through the shadows of clouds, we stared down the steep basin at the abandoned village in the grasslands below, where we began our journey.

I knew how tall the mountains stood, and we had felt how fierce their winds were, but none of us had empirically expected the profound power that they harness – not because of the volume of their earth, but because of their ability to shelter the scene of ecological peace below where we stood from conflicts ensuing on the other side of the peaks, in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Khazakstan. We’d been accurate in our predictions of the strenuousness of the difficult trek, but our most hopeful expectations of the hike’s reward, we discovered with astonishment, had been inhibited.

We spent several days on this edge of China and caught ourselves using slaphappy superlatives: “This is the best meal I’ve ever had!” “The hardest I’ve ever laughed!” “The clearest sky I’ve ever stargazed under!” In the light of what was actually the most powerful piece of nature most of us had seen, we perceived the world in awestruck disbelief. While our intensified appreciation of the serendipity of lamb skewers has worn off since lowering our elevation back to below 4,200 meters and breathing air with normal amounts of oxygen, we do remember to not limit the heights of our visions to our well-intentioned but erroneously narrow lenses of experience.