The beauty of snow-capped mountains compensates for the cold in all but the grumpiest ones among us with the biggest ache in the bones. The melt will feed rivulets and rivers, dams and expectations for the coming summer.

The earth is truly a beautiful place wherever nature isn’t given too much competition from human progress. Appreciating this beauty is ingrained in the human psyche, almost as deeply as the drive to survive, but not quite!

So, there have to be farms and roads, contrails in the sky from jet planes and noisy engines on the ground transporting people and their goods everywhere. For we go everywhere, want to see everything and touch everything; and there are so many of us.

That is why strange trees are filling up our valleys and mountain slopes, denying rare indigenous plants living space, while making our ordinary plants rare. Look closely, there are also suspiciously bare slopes where fires have burnt too often, laying the land bare year upon year. This keeps happening until the topsoil is lost, the vegetation doesn’t recover and the wrong plants take over.

Mountains aren’t guaranteed to stay pretty forever no matter what. Since there are so many of us, we might capitalise on the chance of clubbing together, protecting all this nature around us that we still have, by all contributing our bit in whatever form we are capable of, to have beautiful mountains in the future.