It is about a hundred and fifty pages and I have now read it three times, roughly five years apart. It gets shorter each time and better each time, which is not a thing I can say about many books.
The first reading
I read it as nature writing, which it is, and mostly noticed the descriptions — the water, the light, the granite. I remember thinking it was beautiful and slightly static. Nothing happens in it. There is no summit narrative, no ordeal, no arrival.
The second
I noticed that the absence of a summit is the argument. Shepherd walks into the mountain rather than up it, repeatedly, over decades, and the book is a sustained case that the climbing frame — conquest, peak, achievement — is a poor way to know a place. That reframing arrived about eight years after I first read the words that contained it.
The third
This time it read as a book about attention. Specifically about the difference between looking at something and looking with it — the sections on lying flat and watching, on cold water on skin, on sleeping outdoors, are all about dismantling the position of the observer standing outside the thing observed.
I do not think this reading is more correct than the other two. I think it is what I brought. Which is roughly the argument I made in the rereading post, and Shepherd is the cleanest evidence I have for it.
A caution
It has become a slightly fashionable book, and there is a mode of recommending it that turns it into a lifestyle object — the small beautiful edition on the shelf, the quotation about the mountain that does not need you. That mode is precisely what the book argues against. Read it, do not decorate with it.