The therapist’s advice was practical and, in retrospect, slightly unorthodox: “You need to be somewhere your phone doesn’t work.” She wasn’t wrong. After eighteen months of pandemic-era anxiety that had calcified into a permanent state of low-grade dread, I needed distance — not from people, but from the constant noise of digital existence. She suggested nature. I chose mountains. Specifically, the Dolomites, that jagged crown of limestone peaks in northern Italy where the earth seems to have been pushed upward by a force that couldn’t be contained.

I brought my camera because I always bring my camera. What I didn’t expect was that the act of photographing mountains would become more therapeutic than any exercise my therapist had prescribed. Not as a replacement for professional help — I want to be clear about that — but as a complement, a physical practice that engaged my mind in ways that meditation alone hadn’t managed.

The Approach

The Dolomites demand effort. Unlike alpine regions with cable cars and easy access roads, many of the best viewpoints require hours of hiking — steep, sustained climbs on rocky trails that leave your legs burning and your lungs working hard. This is part of their therapeutic value. When your body is working at its limit, your mind has limited bandwidth for anxiety. You can’t ruminate about next quarter’s deadlines when you’re navigating a rocky switchback at 2,800 meters with a 12-kilogram pack on your back.

My base was Cortina d’Ampezzo, a small town cradled by peaks so dramatic they look artificial — as if a set designer had arranged them for maximum impact. From Cortina, I could access a dozen trailheads within a thirty-minute drive, each leading to a different combination of peaks, valleys, meadows, and the rifugi (mountain huts) that make multi-day trekking in the Dolomites uniquely civilized.

The daily routine was simple: wake at 4 AM, drive to the trailhead, hike to a predetermined viewpoint, arrive before sunrise, photograph, and hike back down. Simple in description. In practice, every day was a small adventure — route-finding in pre-dawn darkness, weather windows that opened and closed unpredictably, and the constant recalibration of plans that mountain environments demand.

Tre Cime di Lavaredo: Cathedral of Stone

The Tre Cime — three massive vertical towers of dolomite rising over 500 meters from their base — are the most iconic formation in the range. I visited them four times during my two weeks, never getting the same photograph twice. That’s the thing about mountains: they’re technically permanent but visually in constant flux. Light, cloud, snow, mist, and season transform them from hour to hour, minute to minute.

My best session was on a morning when low cloud had settled in the valley overnight. I hiked to Rifugio Locatelli in darkness and arrived to find the Tre Cime completely invisible — lost in a wall of grey that extended in every direction. I set up my tripod anyway, aimed at where I knew the towers should be, and waited.

At 6:47 AM, the cloud thinned. Not everywhere — just a narrow horizontal band at the base of the towers, creating an effect I’d never seen before. The summit of each tower was hidden in cloud. The base was hidden in cloud. But the middle sections — those massive, vertical walls of pale grey rock — emerged from the mist like fragments of a dream. Stone floating in air, disconnected from earth and sky. I shot for eleven minutes before the cloud closed again. The images from those eleven minutes became the centerpiece of my mountain portfolio.

Mountains don’t care about your problems. That’s not callousness — it’s perspective. Standing at the base of something that’s been here for 200 million years has a way of recalibrating what you consider important. -Sofia Martins

The Flow State

Photographers talk about “flow state” — that condition of total absorption where self-consciousness disappears and you become entirely focused on the task at hand. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified it as one of the key components of human happiness: a state of challenge-matched-to-skill where time distorts, anxiety dissolves, and the internal critic finally shuts up.

Mountain photography produces flow state reliably because it demands total engagement. You’re simultaneously monitoring light conditions, cloud movement, composition, camera settings, your own physical position, the terrain, the weather forecast, and a dozen micro-decisions about focal length, aperture, and timing. There’s no bandwidth left for the background hum of worry that normally occupies my consciousness.

I started noticing a pattern: on days when I photographed mountains, my anxiety was significantly lower — not just during the shoot, but for hours afterward. The flow state seemed to reset something in my nervous system, like rebooting a computer that had too many tabs open. I’d come down from the mountains feeling clear, calm, and present in a way that my regular meditation practice had only occasionally achieved.

Lago di Braies and the Art of Patience

Lago di Braies, a turquoise lake ringed by dolomite walls, is one of the most photographed locations in Italy. The iconic shot — a wooden rowboat on glass-calm water with the Croda del Becco mountain reflected perfectly — has been captured millions of times. Getting an original composition here requires either extraordinary creativity or extraordinary patience. I opted for patience.

For three mornings, I arrived before dawn and waited for conditions that would differentiate my photograph from the millions that already existed. The first morning, the lake was choppy and the light was flat. The second morning, mist covered the water but the mountains were clear — beautiful, but not what I envisioned. The third morning, at 5:52 AM, the mist began to rise off the lake surface in columns, catching the first horizontal sunlight and turning the entire scene into a cathedral of gold and white.

• Arrive earlier than you think necessary — the best light often occurs thirty minutes before official sunrise, when the sky brightens but the sun hasn’t crested the peaks. This pre-dawn period produces colors and atmospheres that disappear the moment direct sunlight hits.
• Stay longer than you think necessary — after the golden hour passes and other photographers leave, the light often does something unexpected. Some of my best mountain photographs were taken in the “boring” period twenty minutes after sunrise, when the sky develops subtle textures that golden hour’s drama obscures.
• Revisit locations — a mountain lake in morning mist is a completely different subject than the same lake in afternoon light or evening calm. Visiting once gives you a photograph. Visiting repeatedly gives you understanding.
• Use a polarizer carefully — circular polarizing filters deepen skies and reduce reflections on water, but they also eliminate reflections you might want to keep. I learned to check with and without the polarizer, because sometimes the reflection is the photograph.
• Shoot the details, not just the vistas — a single flower against a mountain backdrop, frost crystals on a wooden railing, the texture of rope on a via ferrata cable. These intimate details often communicate the experience of being in the mountains more effectively than sweeping panoramas.

The Descent

Every mountain day ends with a descent, and the descent is where the therapeutic work happens — not the dramatic, exhilarating work of the climb and the shoot, but the quiet, reflective integration of the experience. Walking downhill with a camera full of images and a body full of pleasant fatigue, my mind entered a state that I can only describe as organized stillness. Thoughts arose, were considered calmly, and either kept or released.

The problems waiting for me in the valley — emails, deadlines, the ambient anxiety of existing in the modern world — hadn’t disappeared. But they’d been placed in perspective by spending the morning in the company of things that are older, larger, and more permanent than any human concern.

My therapist was right. I needed to be somewhere my phone didn’t work. But what I found in the Dolomites was more than just disconnection from technology. I found a practice — a repeatable, physical, creative practice that engages my body, focuses my mind, and produces something tangible and beautiful as a side effect of the process. Mountain photography didn’t cure my anxiety. But it gave me a tool for managing it that feels less like medicine and more like a conversation with the landscape. And unlike my phone, the mountains always have something worth saying.