SEWARD -- These days it's just another mountain to most in Alaska and beyond -- but not to us in Seward. It's our mountain. It hovers behind us. It watches our back.
Nowadays, the 2015 Fourth of July Mount Marathon race is long over and forgotten. Into September, I spy climbers trudging up and cautiously inching down. Before the race, I watched racers practicing on its trails. During the week before the big race it wasn't uncommon to see more than a dozen struggling up the incline at any given time and several others descending. Years ago, I wondered why so many people took their dogs with them. Eventually I realized most of those weren't dogs but climbers on all fours.
On the Fourth of July and the days leading up to the big race, the mountain gets all the attention it could ever want. Alaskan eyes are on it, and so are hundreds of feet.
But the next day, it's just another mountain rising above town. The snow patches are almost gone, and so are all the news reporters and cameras.
Turning yellow, brown, plum
By now, its varied shades of green have turned red, orange, plum, brown and yellow. That's when some of us look for the clearly visible "Heart of the Mountain."
It stood its ground thousands of years ago when the Sugpiaq, Kenaitze and Dena'ina visited the shores beside it. Did they have a name for it? We don't know.
It stood by patiently as Baranov and the Russians built their fort and shipyard beneath it along the shores of the bay they named Resurrection, from which they launched Phoenix, the first ship they built in Alaska, in 1794. We have no record of them giving the mountain a name.
From its peak, the mountain provides a magnificent view of Resurrection Bay and the alluvial fan upon which the town of Seward sits. In one writer's words, the town is like a handful of pebbles, symbolic of humanity's pathetic attempt to scratch at the land's vast surface. It's a tenuous afterthought clinging precariously to the head of its impressive fjord.
Many have glimpsed this mountain from far out in the bay. Others have climbed its steep sides. But to experience this mountain's more varied moods, one must see it evolve from one season to the next, closely watch it rust beneath August rains and sense the threat of termination dust creeping down its slopes to finally blanket the town.
Scurry's Mountain? Lowell Mountain?
When you see Mount Marathon at sunset and sunrise, during rain and sleet and snow, at noon and at midnight — you're getting close to understanding it. It becomes a part of you when your eyes can't see it beneath a fog-clouded shroud, but your mind sees it anyway because you know it's there.
The mountain watched Frank and Mary Lowell's arrival in the 1880s, as the first settlers after Alaska Natives, and observed their children and grandchildren mature under its guidance. It stood by as surveyors mapped the town in 1902. They named it Scurry's Mountain after a man who had a camp near the Lowell homestead — even though it was already known as Lowell Mountain. Early photographs show no visible trails on its slopes.
If you scale a mountain enough over the years, Henry David Thoreau says, a piece of you "escapes through the loose grating of your ribs" each time you ascend. The mountain's dust and grime work their way through your skin and into your soul, just as your sweat and blood gradually percolate into the mountain's essence.
Your heart and the heart of the mountain become one.
100th anniversary
After the first official race a hundred years ago, people started calling it "the marathon mountain." Pretty soon that morphed into Mount Marathon. Nowadays, months after the famous race's 100th anniversary, the mountain rests mostly forgotten by the world. But it's used to that.
For now, to those of us in Seward, it's our mountain. But throughout human history some people have always claimed it. That's been their illusion and ours, too. In reality, it's always belonged to itself. In 10,000 years it will still be there, with stories to tell that we'll never know.
"Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf," wrote Aldo Leopold, considered the father of wildlife management in the United States.
And even the wolf will be long gone before the mountain fades away into an ever-changing landscape.
Doug Capra is a Seward freelance writer and the author of "The Spaces Between: Stories from the Kenai Mountains to the Kenai Fjords."