I stood at the base of the Dachstein last autumn, watching clouds catch on its limestone ridges the way they've caught for 200 million years. A tour group passed by, talking about their weekend plans, their next vacation, what they'd eat for dinner. The mountain didn't care. It had watched the Romans march through these valleys, seen the Habsburgs rise and fall, witnessed two world wars reshape the world below. And it would be here long after we'd all returned to dust.
What does the future mean to something that measures time in epochs rather than hours?
We think about tomorrow as if it's something we can shape, control, predict. We make plans. We set goals. We worry about what's coming next week, next year, next decade. But the mountains of the Salzkammergut teach a different lesson about the future—one that's both humbling and strangely comforting. They've been the silent witnesses to countless human futures that came and went, and they'll witness countless more.
The Weight of What Comes Next
The future terrifies us because we can't see it. Can't touch it. Can't know it.
I've spent hours hiking these alpine trails, thinking about the people who walked them before me. The salt miners who trudged these paths for 3,000 years, their futures defined by the mountain's white gold. The soldiers who marched through during the Napoleonic Wars, wondering if they'd see another spring. The refugees who fled across these peaks in 1945, carrying nothing but hope for a future that might not kill them.
Each of them faced their own unknown tomorrow. Each of them probably felt that weight in their chest—that mix of anticipation and dread that comes with not knowing what's next.
But here's what strikes me: the Hoher Dachstein didn't change its shape for any of them. The Traunstein didn't lower itself to make their passage easier. The mountains simply were, and are, and will be. They hold our futures the way they hold snow in winter—temporarily, before it melts and flows down to become something else entirely.
Geological Time vs. Human Time
The Dachstein massif began forming during the Triassic period, roughly 230 million years ago. Think about that number. Really think about it. While we stress about five-year plans and retirement savings, this limestone giant has been standing for 230,000,000 years. The entire span of human civilization—all 12,000 years of it—represents about 0.005% of the mountain's existence.
When geologists talk about the future, they measure it differently. The Alps are still rising, pushed upward by the collision of the African and Eurasian tectonic plates. They grow about 1-2 millimeters per year. That's slower than your fingernails grow, but it's relentless. In a million years—a timespan our minds can barely grasp—these peaks will be 1,000 to 2,000 meters taller.
That's the mountain's future. What's ours?
Memory Carved in Stone
Walk through Hallstatt, that impossibly picturesque village clinging to the mountainside, and you're walking through layers of human futures that have already happened. The Bronze Age settlers who discovered salt here around 1500 BCE had no idea they were founding what would become the world's oldest salt mine. They couldn't have imagined that 3,500 years later, tourists would flood their valley, taking photos of the same mountains they looked at every day.
The future they worried about—would there be enough salt? Would rival tribes attack? Would their children survive the winter?—has been answered, archived, and mostly forgotten. But the mountains remember in their own way.
Every rockfall is a memory. Every fossil embedded in limestone is a record of a future that never came—the future where that ancient sea creature continued living, evolving, becoming something else. Instead, it became stone. Permanent. A witness frozen in time.
What the Ice Tells Us
The Dachstein glacier has been melting. Not might melt, not could melt—is melting. Right now. The ice caves that have existed for thousands of years are shrinking at a rate of about 1 meter per year. Scientists estimate that within 80 years, the glacier might be gone entirely.
This is our future writing itself in real-time.
I visited the ice caves two years ago. The guide, a man in his sixties who'd been working there for thirty years, pointed to markers on the wall showing where the ice level used to be. "When I started," he said, "the ice was here." He pointed about two meters above our heads. "Now it's there." He gestured to where we stood.
The future isn't some abstract concept when you can see it disappearing beneath your feet. When you can measure it in meters and years rather than maybes and somedays.
The Paradox of Permanent Witnesses
Here's what keeps me up at night: the mountains will outlast our concerns about the future, but they won't outlast the future itself.
Even mountains die. Eventually.
The Alps are young as mountain ranges go—only about 65 million years old, compared to the Appalachians at 480 million. But they're already eroding. Wind, water, ice, and time are slowly wearing them down. In another 100 million years, they might be gentle hills. In 500 million years, perhaps flat plains. The future extends so far beyond our comprehension that even these eternal witnesses become temporary.
But that's not the point, is it?
The point is that while they're here—while we're here—they offer us perspective. They've watched humanity's entire story unfold in what amounts to a geological eyeblink. Every crisis that felt world-ending, every triumph that seemed eternal, every future that people worried themselves sick over—the mountains saw it all come and go.
What Doesn't Change
I have a friend who moved to Bad Ischl three years ago. She was running from a future she didn't want—a career that was crushing her, a relationship that had curdled, a version of herself she didn't recognize anymore. She told me once that what helped her wasn't the change of scenery. It was looking at the Katrin mountain every morning and realizing it had been there through countless people running from their own unwanted futures.
The mountain didn't judge. Didn't offer advice. Just stood there, being itself, the way it had been itself for millions of years.
Sometimes the most profound comfort comes from permanence in a world obsessed with change.
Tomorrow's Archaeology
What will future archaeologists find in these mountains? What traces of our present will become their past?
They'll find the ski lifts we've built, slowly rusting into the rock. The hiking trails we've carved, gradually eroding back to wilderness. The tunnels we've bored for salt and tourism, eventually collapsing. They'll find our plastic waste, our concrete foundations, our metal cables—all the things we thought were permanent but which the mountain will slowly digest and transform.
In the Hallstatt cemetery, they bury people for ten years, then dig them up to make room for new graves. The bones are cleaned, painted with flowers and names, and stored in the charnel house. Space is limited when you live on a mountainside. Death becomes practical rather than permanent.
But the mountain keeps everyone. Every molecule of every person who's ever lived here eventually becomes part of the soil, the rock, the water flowing down to the Hallstätter See. The future isn't somewhere else—it's right here, being built from the materials of the past.
The Stories Stone Tells
Limestone is fossilized sea creatures. The mountains I look at every day are made from the bodies of ancient life forms that lived when this was all underwater. Their future was to become the foundation of something massive, something that would last far longer than they ever could as individual organisms.
What's our equivalent? What are we building that will outlast us?
Not our buildings—those will crumble. Not our technology—that will rust and decay. Not even our ideas, really, since those evolve and transform beyond recognition. But maybe our stories. The ones we carve into the collective memory the way water carves valleys into stone. Slowly. Persistently. Creating shapes that guide the flow of what comes next.
Living With Long Sight
The Salzkammergut teaches you to think in longer timescales. When you're surrounded by things that have existed for millions of years, your personal timeline starts to feel different. Not smaller, exactly. Just proportional.
I used to panic about the future constantly. Where would I be in five years? Ten years? What if I made the wrong choice? What if everything fell apart?
Then I spent a winter here, watching snow accumulate on peaks that have seen thousands of winters. I watched spring come—not because anyone willed it or planned it or worried it into existence, but because that's what spring does. The mountain didn't change its schedule for my anxiety.
The future will come whether we're ready or not. Whether we've planned for it or not. Whether we understand it or not.
The mountains don't teach you to stop caring about tomorrow. They teach you that tomorrow is just another layer of stone being laid down, another season in an endless cycle, another moment in a story so long that our entire lives are just a sentence in an infinite book.
The Practice of Presence
When I hike now, I try to notice what's here. The way lichen grows on north-facing rocks, patient and slow. The way water finds the path of least resistance, not through planning but through simple persistence. The way trees grow toward light, not worrying about whether they'll make it, just growing.
The future is being built right now, in this moment, by what we choose to do and not do. But it's also being built by forces so much larger than us that our choices are like adding a grain of sand to a mountain. Both things are true simultaneously.
Does that make our choices meaningless? I don't think so. Every grain of sand matters when you're building a mountain. It just takes a different kind of time than we're used to thinking about.
What Mountains Know About Tomorrow
If mountains could speak, I don't think they'd tell us not to worry about the future. Worry is human. It's how we've survived this long. But maybe they'd remind us that the future is just another name for time moving forward, and time has been moving forward for 13.8 billion years without asking our permission.
The future of the Salzkammergut is already being written. The glaciers will continue melting. The valleys will keep deepening. The rock will slowly transform. Tourism will rise and fall. Towns will grow and shrink. People will be born, live, die, and become part of the mountain's story.
And through it all, the peaks will stand. Not unchanged—nothing is unchanged—but standing. Bearing witness. Holding space for all our human futures to unfold against their ancient slopes.
I think about the salt miners again. The ones who worked these mountains for 3,000 years. Each generation worried about their children's future. Each generation faced uncertainty and change. Each generation thought their problems were unprecedented. And they were right—each generation's problems were unique to them. But the pattern of worrying, planning, hoping, and fearing? That's been the same for as long as humans have looked at tomorrow.
The mountains watched all of it. They'll watch whatever comes next too.
Carved Into Tomorrow
So what do we do with this knowledge? How do we live knowing that our futures are both immensely important and cosmically insignificant?
We live anyway. We plan anyway. We hope and fear and dream anyway.
But maybe we hold it all a little lighter. Maybe we remember that the future isn't something we build from scratch—it's something we participate in, like adding our voice to a song that's been playing for eons. We don't control the melody, but we can choose how we harmonize with it.
The limestone cliffs of the Dachstein will be here long after I'm gone. They'll witness futures I can't imagine, changes I'll never see, stories I'll never know. And somehow, that's okay. Better than okay. It's comforting to know that something will remain, will remember, will bear witness.
Our futures are carved in limestone and memory—not because we're permanent, but because we're part of something that is. The mountain doesn't need us to last forever. It just needs us to show up, live our moment, and trust that the next moment will come whether we're ready or not.
Tomorrow is already being carved. It's in the slow erosion of peaks, the patient growth of forests, the gradual shift of seasons. It's in the choices we make today and the choices we don't make. It's in the stories we tell and the ones we forget to tell.
The future is both lighter and heavier than we imagine. Lighter because we can't control it. Heavier because we're part of creating it.
And the mountains? They'll keep standing. Keep watching. Keep holding space for all the tomorrows yet to come, carved into their ancient stone, written in water and ice and time itself. That's their gift to us—not answers about the future, but perspective about our place in it. We're temporary. Our worries are temporary. But the act of worrying, of hoping, of looking toward tomorrow? That's as old as these mountains, and just as much a part of the eternal story being written here.
Stand at the base of any peak in the Salzkammergut and you're standing in the future's memory. Everything that will happen has already been witnessed by stone that was here before and will be here after. Your tomorrow is just another layer being laid down, another season in an endless cycle, another breath in a story that has no ending—only continuations, transformations, and the patient persistence of mountains watching it all unfold.