The second three ascended twenty-five hundred feet in steep switchbacks. Rory's pack was somewhat heavier as befitted the younger, stronger, taller and, more to the point, junior member of the team. Twenty-five hundred feet was the ascent Anna'd used to climb twice a week from the ranger station in Guadalupe Mountains National Park to the high country. She'd been younger, stronger and taller herself in those days and still it was a bitch of a climb.

A member of the bear team assigned to handle bears that clashed with visitors gave them a lift partway up the famous Going to the Sun Road that cut through some of the most scenic country in the park, a road made in the 1920s and '30s, when labor was cheap and so was wilderness. He dropped them off at Packers Roost, a horse and hiker staging area at the bottom of Flattop Mountain.

Unlike some of the parks Anna'd worked, Glacier was a pristine rather than a rehabilitated wilderness. Most of the land had never been logged, mined or grazed. The trees were old growth, the land scarred only by the natural phenomena of fire, flood and avalanche. An unusual departure from this purity was the old fire road they followed to the beginning of the ascent.

Because it had once been cut clear of trees then left to heal, it had a fairy-tale quality. A wide swath of delicate green moss grew in from the road's edges to a narrow trail kept barren by foot traffic. This living carpet was starred with tiny white star-shaped flowers. Overhead, feathery branches of fir and cedar closed out the sun. A tenuous heady perfume, found only in the mountains of the west, scented the air. With each breath, Anna was transported. As she walked she enjoyed flashbacks to the southern Cascades at Lassen Volcanic and to the tip of the Rocky Mountains in Durango before they let go their alpine greenery and flowed into the red mesas of New Mexico.