Distance and Perspective

An anonymous question about visibility and distance was posed in a comment a few days back. Perspective is hard to come by out here. Mountains are just in the background. Sometimes the maps are hard to read so we don’t know which mountains we’re looking at. We can drive a long time and they don’t appear to get much closer. We got lucky, though, when we pulled into the Galena Overlook, which had both an interpretive sign pointing out the various peaks on the Sawtooth Range and a USGS map of the area. Some extremely scientific measurements (thumb and forefinger) tell us these mountains are 15 miles away.