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Marco Medrano is a Bay Area native with a long tenure as a celebrity hairstylist and colorist in Beverly Hills and New York City, a licensed cosmetologist in multiple states and a longtime beauty, grooming and spa editor for numerous magazines and websites including ELLIMAN, Elevate, NowItCounts.com, Saratoga Living, VEGAS INC, Brash.com and more. He’s currently the Beauty & Grooming Editor at Out “The lm The Road To Wellville, with its Gilded Age-meetsboot camp vibe, has inspired my dream spa vacations for years. When I was given the assignment to rediscover Mohonk Mountain House, where the movie was lmed, I was elated and couldn’t believe my good fortune—what a full circle moment. As I learned rst-hand, Mohonk Mountain House and I both love treating revival wellness from the inside out, with personal exertion, e ort and relaxation.”

Kate Doyle Hooper is a proli c New York City-based travel writer, event producer, proud American Airlines Million Miler, lover of Britpop and hotel obsessive. Kate’s work has been published in ELLE, Condé Nast Traveler, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie Claire, Men’s Health and ELLIMAN Her travel philosophy: “If there’s an executive lounge, I want to be in it.”

“My Chickasaw greatgrandmother, Big Soph, started training my ‘eye’ when I was about six. Her training consisted of turning me loose at Wall’s Bargain Center in Ada, OK with a silver dollar in my pocket. The mission was a thrill we both shared: examine everything carefully and nd the treasure. She never dictated what the treasure might be; I was free to choose, and I always found it. Such wise training for a writer, editor and shopper. I’ve enjoyed the hunt ever since.” photography: Natalie Chitwood @natchitwood; hair: Marco Medrano @mrmarcomedrano; makeup: Alexandria Gilleo @alexandriagilleomakeup; set coordinator: Tracy Lane wardrobe: Alaia (orange); Sachin & Babi ( oral); Jane Motorcycles (jumpsuit) hair products: Balmain Cordless Straightener; Balmain Thermal Protection Spray; FEKKAI Glass Hair Gloss; CHI Infra Texture Spray; L’Oréal Magic Root Cover Up when i was kid, my parents promised us a puppy and a puppy we got. Hippie was a beautiful Collie, son to a former national champion and a true doppelgänger for Lassie, the most famous canine in the country. As a baby, Hippie was all legs and long nose, with a super skinny frame: think Olive Oyl (Popeye’s girlfriend) with gorgeous blond fur all over. I’d cradle him for hours and endlessly brush his majestic coat. Man, I loved that dog.

Robyn Perry Coe grew up in Oklahoma, was a Master’s fellow at New York University and has written from San Francisco, Los Angeles, Atlanta and New York. An interviewer of contemporary artists and collectors and a founding columnist for Artillery magazine, she’s currently completing her second novel.

Mitch Rustad has written for The New York Times, Men’s Fitness, Los Angeles, HudsonMOD, TennisMatch and many other media outlets with a primary focus on wellness, self-improvement and living one’s best life. He’s also a certi ed life coach, a former nationally ranked professional tennis player and says he resonates with the advice he recently got while researching the “Love Coach” story for this issue: “I’m big on the idea of choosing happiness, because it’s a choice every day.” Rustad divides his time between New York City and Scottsdale, AZ.

A couple of years later, Hippie developed a heart condition and one day he simply didn’t return from the vet. Just like that, he was gone. I remember walking across the street of our Miami home to the park and crying alone as I sat on the swings while the sun disappeared behind the trees. I was gutted. That was my rst experience with the nearly intolerable pain love can cause. And I knew then that I’d never feel that again.

Love, with all its myriad iterations, has been analyzed, dissected, broken down, studied ad nauseum. But…why do we—all of us—love love so much even when it comes with (almost) certain pain? And if love is passion, does love fade when the passion invariably quiets? These are some of life’s biggest questions for a reason.

During my fascinating conversation with journalist, author and television personality Carole Radziwill—a formidable woman who’s endured more su ering on the back side of love than imaginable—it transported me back to a place in my own life where I, again, felt the sting of loss due to love. But this time I embraced it, for those are but hazy memories from halcyon days of yore.

Radziwill, a Catskills native, hit the bullseye with her decidedly adult take on romantic love: “I’m old enough to understand that life is long,” she told me. “We all go through phases and meet people who give us something we need in our lives at that precise moment. It might not last—sometimes it lasts twenty years; sometimes ve; sometimes it lasts a weekend. And all of it is OK. It just is.”

As I get older, my own Venn diagram of love and pain is expanding. To live a happy, long life is to experience so much love and so much pain when that love goes away. I’ve loved deeply many times in my life: parents (of course), siblings, romantic partners, friends, pets and, yet, as I write this today, my desire to love and be loved is stronger than ever, never waning, never fading and that need perpetually demands to be fed. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

When you read this gorgeous edition of The Mountains, “The Love Issue,” I hope you’ll take a moment and re ect on your experiences with humankind’s most powerful and intoxicating emotion. A condition beautifully explored in these pages by our second-to-none writers Kevin Sessums, Martha Frankel, Anthony Giglio and more. In my own story on Radziwill, you’ll feel the specter of love looming over everything we discuss while inadvertently answering that most relevant of queries: What’s love got to do with it? Everything; love has everything to do with it. As it should.

—Richard Pérez-Feria EDITOR IN CHIEF