The Youth Yearn for the Mountains

There’s something quite fantastic about these mountains, I said to my friend Saffron as we fumbled over limestone and sucked at cola flavoured energy gel. It was a 6km or so hike to Lac Blanc from the cable car with around 560m elevation, and we were determined to get up and down within two hours.

“Imagine you’re like a monk in 1200 and you’re just bopping along this path and there’s literally like no one here and it’s just mountain” I say as another bus load of Americans slip slide and tussle their way past us on the descent, supported by their often green and uncomfortable looking sticks.

“Ideal scenario you are a monk in 1200 AD and you have an iPod.”

“Yeah nice Kate nice” says saffron. “Maybe listening to dubstep Kate”

“Monkstep” I say in between mouth breathing huffs.

I saw a video recently on TikTok of a millennial woman. She was around 32 I’d say and had brown hair tied in one of those ‘on-top-of-head’ buns. “What happened to Ibiza!!” She cried. “What happened to getting slaughtered on the strip in Magaluf with jelly shots precariously balanced on your tits and inhaled by sweaty boys in tank tops!!” “What happened to apple martinis in Kos and leaving the club with sticky-everything and bruises on your lips from snogging and falling from the stripper pole while dancing to Motel Hotel Holiday Inn by PitBull?!?”.

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I have paraphrased here and the specific details are not accurate to her experience (to the greatest extent of my current knowledge), but the sentiment rings true. 2018 was the last time life felt like this. The last time it was acceptable to Charlotte Crosby dangerpiss in a bush on a roundabout at 3am.

Something changed during the summer of 2026. The youth began to yearn for the mountains.

And there we were. Youth. Yearning - on the mountain. - for monkstep of all things.

Now I am far from a qualified hiker. You may be able to infer this from my reference above to “crampon sticks” and that I was sucking a gel 20 minutes into a 7% gradient hike - but the yearn is there. It is so deeply there. Every breath outwards sounds like ‘wow’. Imagine putting a shell to your ear to hear the sea but you put your ear to my mouth and you’ll just hear a breathy “holy shit this is beautiful” “wow” and “bloody hell” repetition cycle.

In my mind, the answer to this new-age problem where tequila shots are replaced by electrolytes and stilettos by Salomons is that we are all desperate for some form of grounding. Like airplanes struck by lighting we demand to be, else our fuel might combust (? - unsure of the physics here).

Also the threat of being filmed mid-bodyshot or acne-ridden snog has become far more significant with the advent of the TikTok age. This would certainly be an off-putting scenario to wake up to 500 reposts of a formative coming-of-age moment.

Now I dont think that yearning is a modern concept - far from. It’s the hidden ingredient to every good love story, a common theme across history and the most human and alive feeling that i believe one can ever possibly feel. It is simultaneously brilliant and terrible, but unlike most emotions, it signals to you what you actually want.

yearning (noun) - a feeling of deep or melancholy longing or need; a strong wish or desire [yur-ning]

We’ve all read about and have felt romantic to some extent. It’s the major theme of most love stories: Elizabeth Bennet & Mr Darcy, Heathcliff & Cathy, Gatsby & Daisy, Marianne & Connell..

But there is also that internal yearning where the end goal is a little less obvious.

Long before it was used in print, the ancestral root of the word, the Old English verb ġiernan, belonged to oral and written poetic literature. The most famous example of this is Beowulf. In the poem, an aging king and a grizzled warrior reflect on youth and bygone battles - “for years of his youth he would yearn at times... his heart surged full.” (Translated ofc). Surprisingly, the heartache that is being described here isn’t so romantic, rather it’s a longing for lost youth and their comrades fallen in battle. Youth yearning for youth.

I yearn. I think, a lot.

But im not sure what for.

My friends aren’t lost in battle and I’m not necessarily looking for my white knight - so what am I looking for? Where does this feeling come from?

Somehow mountains are part of the answer. I think i hate my phone and i hate ai. I hate that i use ai for my work and i feel like my hands are never dirty. Everything is so easy and i dont have to get grubby for anything - I dont have to dig my own potatoes, milk a cow or sew or knit or do ANYTHING practical. Now practicality is a luxury. I might decide to make a clay pot, or paint something, or run a marathon, or ski or sail or buy an allotment to cosplay medieval peasant.

But on the mountain, you regain a certain responsibility that we no longer feel down below. If i slip, i will fall and i will die. If i read the map wrong, i will get lost. If i do not bring water, i will become dehydrated. The mountain does not care that I have 5G, a university degree or an app that can identify the flower I am standing on. There are no shortcuts around the basic fact that I have a body, it has limits, and I am responsible for getting it home.

It is almost as through we are making an attempt to put friction back into our lives which are increasingly designed to remove it.

Humans have spent several centuries making things easier. This is, on almost every measurable level, a very good thing. I don’t actually want to milk a cow before breakfast, die of an infected splinter or spend February wondering whether the potato harvest will see me through until spring. I am extremely fond of central heating. I would also, for the avoidance of doubt, choose Spotify over the travelling lute player.

But there is something strange about reaching the logical conclusion of convenience. When everything is made effortless, effort itself begins to feel luxurious.

One of my favourite memories from this summer was our last day in Chamonix. We had been too lazy (hungover) to do any of our planned Saturday activities and decided instead to do a Via Ferrata on the Sunday morning before heading out. It was 5:30am when we got up, 7am at the mountain, 8:30am by the time I had finished genuinely the most terrifying climb of my life (pure vertical, lots of pegs missing, no one around and everything was wet thanks to the waterfall we were scaling). It was awesome. I genuinely thought i might die.

As soon as there is spare time on our hands, we are manufacturing inconvenience. It doesn’t have to be climbing a waterfall. People run marathons despite having cars. They knit jumpers we could buy for £25, grow tomatoes that somehow cost £14 each, and plunge into freezing lakes.

I think we yearn because there is a particular relief in encountering something that cannot be swiped away, outsourced, optimised or generated for us. A mountain asks very little about who you are online. It requires you only to put one foot in front of the other and pay attention.

I do not want to live in a different century. I do not want a different life. I think my yearning comes from wanting the feeling of being completely inside the one I already have. And to do something useful, and practical and normal that makes me feel like a human being rather than some odd internet creature.

Which is perhaps why, somewhere around kilometre four, my mind had produced a monk in 1200 AD with an iPod.

It wasn’t the monk I yearned for.

It was the lack of everything else.

Although I maintain that monkstep would have been excellent.

Kate xx

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