Creation Corner
God’s Majestic Mountains
By Jim Doenges
Monthly Series: September 2006
Mountains are amazing things! They are what we within the Climbing For Christ community are all about — mountains and the people who live in and visit them.
In the USA there are dozens of separate mountain ranges, each unique: Brooks, Cascade, Sierra, San Juan, Sandia, Wind River, Big Horn, Adirondack, White, and many more. Major mountain ranges of the world — such as the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps — are well known. There are also hundreds of lesser-known ranges throughout the world, such as the Atlas Mountains; Caucasus, Carpathian, and Ural Mountains; Cordillera Blanca; Sierra Madre; Blues and Barisan Mountains; Koryak and Kolyma Ranges, the Verkhoyansk Range; the Zagros Mountains, and many, many more.
The decrease in temperature with elevation is a fundamental aspect of mountains. It is called the lapse rate or vertical temperature gradient. Lapse rates average 1.6 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit per 1,000 feet elevation gain. In mountains, however, this can vary greatly. For example, gradients are usually greater during the day than at night, greater in the summer than winter, and greater under clear than cloudy conditions. Temperature gradients are steeper in continental mountains than maritime mountains. Temperature gradients drive variable precipitation and create distinct vegetative zones on most mountains.
Mountains display the most rapid and striking changes in ecosystems of any region on earth because they rise upward into different layers of climate within small horizontal distances. The zones of different vegetation on mountain slopes provides every ascent and descent with a diversity that you would otherwise have to travel great distances north or south to experience. It is a wonderful characteristic of mountains. High in elevation or latitude is the land above the trees. Tundra is a Russian word meaning “treeless plain.” Far from being a desert, most alpine tundra has a spectacular array of miniature vegetation, and some animals spend their entire lives there. In a poem about Mount Monadnoc, the location of my first rock climb in New Hampshire, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote:
“So call no waste that barren cone
“Above the floral zone,
“Where forests starve.”
What is it about mountains that stir us? There are many things: grandeur; great views; the challenge, journey, and community within a climb; and a glimpse of something Divine and beyond man’s ability to lay low. Mountains are used as metaphors, motifs, and examples throughout art and literature. And, of course, mountains are home to many different people groups all around the world.
The love of God’s majestic mountain creation goes way back in time.
In a letter to a friend in 1541, Swiss Naturalist Conrad Gesner wrote: “I am resolved henceforth, most learned Avienus, that as long as it may please God to grant me life, I will ascend several mountains, or at least one, every year, at the season when the flowers are in their glory, partly for the sake of examining them, and partly for the sake of good bodily exercise and of mental delight. For how great a pleasure, think you, is it, how great delight for a man touched as he out to be, to wonder at the mass of the mountains as one gazes on the vastness, and to lift up one’s head as it were amongst the clouds? The understanding is deeply moved, I know not wherefore, but their amazing height, and is driven to think of the Great Architect who made them.” Gesner sounds like a member of Climbing For Christ!
Gesner’s student and successor at the University of Zurich was Josias Simler. He became professor of New Testament. In 1574, Simler authored the first book solely about the Alps, De Alpinus Commentarius, and published a treatise on snow and ice travel, including the use of crampons, alpine sticks (predecessors to the modern ice ax), and eye shades. Simler wrote that “lofty mountain are worthy of deep study. For everywhere you turn, they present to every sense a multitude of objects to excite and delight the mind. They offer problems to our intellect; they amaze our souls. They remind us of the infinite variety of creation, and offer an unequaled field for the observation of the processes of nature.” Another Climbing For Christ member!
In 1684, theologian Thomas Burnet asserted in his book, The Sacred Theory of the Earth, that “there is nothing that I look upon with more pleasure than the wide sea and the mountains of earth. There is something august and stately in the air of these things, that inspires the mind with great thoughts and passions. We do naturally, upon such occasions, think of God and his greatness: and whatsoever hath but the shadow and appearance of the infinite, as all things have that are too big for our comprehension, they fill and overbear the mind with their excess and cast it into a pleasing kind of stupor and admiration.”
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