Switchbacks · Low Ground 低处

The way out of the valley did not go straight up. I had half expected it to — some clean line from the river to the ridge, the kind of line people draw for you when they say just get up and go. Instead, a few hundred paces above the shingle, I found an old path climbing the slope in long diagonals, joined by turns so sharp that at each one you stand facing almost exactly back the way you came.

Walkers call them switchbacks. Whoever cut this one knew the slope better than I did. A straight line up it would be too steep to walk; the path trades distance for gentleness. You go three times as far, and you arrive.

At every corner the amber trail turns to face the way it came. Every leg of it is still uphill. The dashed line is the direct route — shorter, and much easier to fall from.

What nobody tells you about switchbacks is the turns.

You climb a long leg in the thin April sun and feel, for the first time in months, something like progress. Then the path folds back on itself, and you are facing the river again, the shingle, the cairn with the tin box in it — the whole low country you thought you had left. It is very easy, at that moment, to believe you have failed. That you are going back down.

I stood at the third turn for a long time, thinking this. Then I took out the altimeter. A hundred and forty metres. At the last turn it had read a hundred and twenty.

The view was the same view. I was not at the same height.

The people who build paths like this have rules for walking them, and I copied them into the back of the field book. I believe them now in a way I did not when I wrote them down.

Do not cut the corners. On a real hillside, those who scramble straight up between the legs tear the ground and start small slides of stone. It feels faster. It is how people fall.

Measure in height, not in direction. If you ask only which way am I facing?, you will feel lost half the time.

Rest at the turns. The ground flattens there for a few steps, as if it had been made for stopping.

Look out, not only up. The turns are where the valley opens beneath you, and you can see the ground you have already crossed — more of it, always, than you thought.

The path took most of April. There is a slope at the head of the valley that you can take in at a single glance from below, and the switchbacks spend an hour on it, patiently, turn after turn. I used to think that was a kind of waste. I think now it is the only kindness a mountain knows how to show.