" Like storm clouds, slowly, and then all at once, around the mountaintop an aesthetic appreciation had coalesced. “It became almost an obligatory mark of a vigorous public man of New England in those years that he had made the ascent of Mount Washington,” wrote the Watermans. The sentiment seems to have originated among city dwellers, for whom mountains were exotic. The people who lived at the base of the peaks—who were necessarily fixated on extracting economic and subsistence value from the land—were unlikely to ever climb them. "

― Robert Moor , On Trails: An Exploration