A matter of scale

I always knew Mount Everest was big. I’d heard the stats before: 29,028 feet. That’s five and a half miles above sea level. I know where sea level is; I have a grasp of how long five and a half miles is. Everest is big, I thought.

And then I moved here. The largest mountains we have here in Colorado are 14,000 feet plus, much larger than any mountains we had on the East Coast. Recently we rewatched “Himalaya With Michael Palin” (I’m obsessed with travel shows, especially ones that feature Michael Palin), and as he traveled I was reminded of the scale of Everest. He visited camps and monasteries, including Everest base camp, and all of those points were taller than anything we have here in Colorado. And as high as the mountains here appear to me, they are but midgets when compared with Everest and K2.
Now, as I drive west in the mornings and see the majestic frosted peaks before me – peaks that are more than an hour’s drive away from me and look just a short hop away – I think about the scale. I know how large these 14,000-foot peaks look to me; I try to double them in my mind. I wonder, do the people of Nepal and Bhutan even know what sky looks like? Had I never come here, I never would have come so close to appreciating the natural majesty of the world’s tallest mountain range.
Amazing.