I love living here, and I love to look at the mountain everyday. I will just be driving along and see a picture perfect view that I want to capture. It is always slightly different and always beautiful (someone even wrote a song about this after climbing to the top).

I had just come out of a building, looked up, and there was this valley visible because of the misty rainy weather. The mountain usually appears as a solid mass, it’s no wonder that the first European explorer couldn’t figure out how to climb to the top. (Also he was arrested for trespassing by the government of Spain and carted away).

This day was a patriotic holiday, and I had noticed the flag waving about in the breezy weather. So I drove up to get a closer look and the wind promptly stopped. But as there has been this rainy weather pattern, the wind did eventually pick up after a bit.

Here’s a different view of a lovely rainy day. The mountain is an obstacle to the clouds, and funnels precipitation so that there is often a very localized effect of rain or snow. On this day it was raining up the pass, and dry where I stood.

I had gone to the northern suburb to visit a friend, and this is the view from her house, the mountain just peeks over the top of the foothills, and doesn’t look very majestic. The white things in the middle are pillars of rock, just sitting there for no apparent reason. I think it is part of the military academy, that’s why it’s not surrounded by housing.

But, from whichever angle one approaches the mountain, it always makes me happy just to see it, towering over the town.