Mount West Watch Co. is an American microbrand whose stated mission is to build timepieces influenced by nature, "with designs that excite and renew a sense of curiosity and appreciation for what can be". Its name and its first watch both come from the same place: the rugged landscape of the American Mountain West, read in the case as a dance of polished and brushed surfaces flowing into sharp end links, like traversing a desert plateau before stepping into steep mountain valleys.

The brand's debut is the Summit, a 39 mm diver built around a piece of engineering it developed itself: the Dual Uni-Directional Bezel. Two independent uni-directional bezels turn what is normally a single elapsed-time scale into a tool for running several intervals at once — quick-set timers, decompression stops, lap counting or a third time zone — and it is the reason the watch asks to be handled rather than simply read. Underneath sits a Swiss Sellita SW200 automatic in a case 11.8 mm thick and 44.3 mm lug to lug, with 200 m of water resistance, a domed sapphire crystal, a screw-down crown, a screw-down caseback engraved with a North Star chart, heavy luminous treatment and a tapering steel bracelet on screw pins with an adjustable clasp. The watches are designed, tested and serialized in the United States and carry a three-year warranty.

The Summit V1 is offered in four dials named after the terrain that inspired them — Obsidian, Snowfall, Treeline and Abyss, the last a deep blue cascading outwards into black, with bright markers charting the hours like stars above water — at $1,450. Alongside them runs the Medic, a limited edition of ten pieces per production run built on the Snowfall's fully lumed white dial with the indices rendered in red, made as a tribute to practitioners, first responders and healthcare workers; Mount West donates 10% of the proceeds from each one to a major medical organisation chosen by that community.