Sometimes I just feel like a brainless hike up a hill with no route finding, treacherous terrain or precarious precipices. So as part of creating the new site, we want to take the time – and make use of the skills of the writers we work with – to go back and document the history of this project so far, so that anyone discovering Dark Mountain online can get a fuller sense of what it is and what it has done.

This felt like a glimpse of another story to the ones we’re used to hearing from either the enthusiasts or the critics of religion: a story of uneasy coexistence, the persistence of supposedly extinct beliefs and practices, and how different stories about the world and our place within it may share a sense that there are certain places where the veil between time and the timeless grows thin.

Every time I drive into the North Cascades National Park I read a park sign that says The North Cascades-The Alps of America.” This has always struck a spiteful chord in my dark side and I have dreamt of vandalizing this sign to read The Cascades of America”.

This provides access to public picnic areas, hiking/nature trails, the Walk-Up Trail (to the top of Stone Mountain), playground, the Quarry Exhibit, Confederate Hall Historical and Environmental Education Center, and the Lasershow Spectacular (it was not scheduled on the night we visited).

This myth for most of human history has held true: no less so for the first Native Americans who crossed the land bridge of the Bering Strait from Siberia into North America than for my own ancestors who more recently fled the famine in Ireland in the mid-19th century for a new life here in the US.