The Mountain Air

People have been going to the high towns for the same reason since before the railroads made the trip easy: the air changes above a certain elevation, the pace changes with it, and the combination turns out to be the thing they needed without having known to ask for it. The towns in this issue sit variously above three thousand feet and above four, on plateaus and in mountain gaps and along ridge lines that the summer heat cannot quite reach, and they have been receiving visitors long enough that the arrangement feels settled, the porches already built, the roads already known, the rhythm of a morning walk and a long lunch and an evening on the porch already waiting to be resumed.

What they share is not scenery but temperament. The high towns are not destination resorts in the contemporary sense and have little interest in becoming them, since the founding bargain was always simpler: come up when the lowlands get difficult, stay as long as you can manage, go back down when you must. The regulars have been honoring that bargain for generations, and the towns have responded by staying largely as they are, which on a mountain is not inertia but policy.

The pieces here assume a traveler who already knows why the mountains matter and wants to know which month, which road, and how far ahead to book, which is to say they assume the reader has been thinking about this since last summer and is now ready to act on it. Come in the shoulder weeks if you can manage it. The towns are themselves then, and so, with any luck, are you.