Yesterday I met a wee Scotswoman who has lived in the western United States for more than 40 years but still has a lovely brogue’ish lilt to her speech. She lost her husband almost a year ago and since then, she said, has found great comfort in walking. “It’s when I think,” she said.

She lives in Spokane and strolls through neighborhoods, but putting her comment together with the spectacular mountain scenery we hiked through yesterday made me ponder what it would be like to have the Rockies at your disposal as a walking/thinking landscape.

At first it would distract. Hard to ponder anything in the face of such beauty. Hard to do much of anything but marvel. But in time, I suppose, even great beauty becomes ordinary. And then one’s eye would wander from the grand vistas to the small beauties: a swath of fog wrapped around a hillside in the morning chill or a stand of lupine beside a weathered tree stump. In time, these would be the prompts of productive ambling; these little things, small and lovely.