For three thousand years, China’s five sacred mountains have been the focus of contested views about their purposes, their histories, and even their locations. Today, a complex tourism industry brings thousands of travelers to each peak every day throughout the year in a confusion of familial urgency and personal quest for some, and simply “bucket list” travel for others. Having spent 1,200 days doing fieldwork on and around the mountains—and many times that studying their stone inscriptions, literary and historical texts about them, philosophical and religious treatises articulating their significance, and the artwork surrounding them—I will be honing my approach to sacred mountain research at CAS-E.