How to Write About a Mountain Top Experience

CAROLYN’S COMPOSITIONS

HOW TO WRITE ABOUT

A MOUNTAIN TOP EXPERIENCE

Including Schoodic Mountain, Laurel Mountain,

and Stone Mountain

I recently spent a week researching mountaineering and writing about a mountain summit experience.

Not that I plan on becoming a mountaineer. However, a Madame Rosalie de Leval, a character in my novel, climbed Schoodic Mountain in Hancock County, Maine, as a means to view the expanse of land—200,000 acres—she had a tentative contract to purchase from top land speculators in 1791.

The writing will be a chapter in my novel-in-progress, and I wanted to use it at a book reading in Ligonier, Pennsylvania.

The ocean at Wallis Sands Beach, Rye, N. H.

I’ve always been an ocean person who never gave a thought to mountains. Since my husband’s retirement I’ve driven over and through the mountains of the Laurel and Chestnut ridges in  the northern Appalachian mountain chain in Southwestern Pennsylvania.  I even live in a foothill of Laurel Mountain (on the Laurel Ridge). Yet I never considered climbing Laurel Mountain, although Monte did one year with a peace group.

The Laurel Ridge from Kentuck Knob, PA

We drive through the mountains in New Hampshire, and have driven up Mt. Washington and Cadillac mountains, and by the accident of making a wrong I arrived at the ski slopes at Killington Mountain in Vermont. Our family lived five minutes away from Stone Mountain outside Atlanta, a gigantic rock outcropping that was identified as a mountain. Even having all these experiences I never had an attraction for mountains, and  I never considered becoming a mountaineer.

I finally climbed a mountain—Schoodic Mountain. I did it to