In 2022, a German-Austrian psychiatric survey of alpine club members seemed to support this idea that the uphill impulse might be forged in neurosis. Of people who self-identified as regular or “extreme” mountaineers, those with preexisting psychological disorders were also more likely to push their climbing to extremes. Participants with experiences of anxiety or depression, high levels of stress, or with histories of eating disorders, obsessive-compulsive behavior or alcohol and drug abuse, tended to report climbing harder for longer. They took greater risks and were more intent on “sensation-seeking.” Although the study fell short of establishing the causal direction, the authors speculated that subjects may have been using excessive mountaineering as a form of “self-therapy.”

It’s contentious to suggest that these observations may signify a correlation between a desire to ascend and a penchant for self-destruction. Conjectures about the Freudian “death drive,” the idea that there exists within everyone a bodily instinct to return to a state of quiescence, would seem to contradict the much-documented pleasure that so many of us derive from mountain encounters.

What does seem more universally applicable is that one part of the highlands’ allure lies not in what the mountain is — but what it is not. In contrast to the lowlands, so utterly reshaped by society, the mountains permit only visitation. We covet them precisely because they resist our dominion. Sentinels of geological time, the peaks are often seen to embody a reassuring impassivity, aloof to the human ants playing in their shadow. Elevation, danger, sensory abundance: All of these facets of mountain country cultivate an aura of remoteness. Ascent is also departure. The mountain, in other words, is a place to regress, a sanctuary in the sky.