Collaborations with nature

LAST FEBRUARY, I huddled with 18 other artists on the narrow shoulder of the Mount Lemmon Highway, which snakes up the Santa Catalina Mountains north of Tucson, Arizona, through desert scrub and grasslands into sprucefir woodlands. We’d stopped at 3,000 feet above sea level to notice the change in altitude.

“How much can we perceive elevation?” asked Erik Schmahl, the landscape architect who led the somatic exercise. I closed my eyes and heard wind, car engines and a distant airplane. I felt cool air on my skin. My bones seemed to settle.

“Feeling altitude isn’t solely a human experience, though we have more faculty to move up and down the mountain easily,” Schmahl said. “For plants and animals, slight shifts in elevation can