As you may know, I’ve spent a considerable amount of my life in mountains. If not through guiding (which seems a lifetime ago now!), then spending time at my A Little Cabin in the Alps.

Flying over the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan — Even when I was working in Iraq, I loved being able to get out into the mountains of Kurdistan and, more latterly, *flying over the Hindu Kush in Afghanistan in a small single-engined plane* to visit some remote offices for the humanitarian organisation I was working with.

You get the drift! A couple of weeks ago, I was in my cabin in the mountains of north-west Italy, and although doing some housekeeping there, I was also spending quite some time just “re-connecting” with the mountains and nature at this time of the year.

I was also drawn to spending time thinking of the way we humans have settled - or tried to - in the mountains, particularly in the Cervo Valley.

Living in the mountains can sometimes sound idyllic (for those of us that don’t live there year round!) but a remote rural lifestyle isn’t for everyone.

What I wanted to try to portray through photos, was the magnitude and permanence of the mountains compared to the, often, temporary and fragile nature of human settlement and presence.

I recently came across a beautiful YouTube channel “All This Was Fields”.

If you like, you can play the track A Place in the Mountains whilst looking at the images (difficult to do on a mobile!) as the melancholy nature of of the music fits perfectly with the mood I was trying to portray!

(This track has been made freely available under the Creative Commons CC-BY licence.)

At the time I took many of the photos, the cloud was clinging to the mountains. The mist swirling through the trees. Light was low. Moody to the point of being sombre. To reflect this as well as the “mood” I felt at the time, I adopted the Fujifilm Classic Chrome simulation.