I strolled leisurely down the path, pausing every so often to ooh and ahh to myself, to snap more pictures, to stand and listen to the quiet. After rounding a blind curve, I was surprised to find a storage area cut into the rock with the doors thrown wide open. It was a huge cave of a room that tunneled through to the other side. Inside were coils of rope dangling from pegs in the wall, shovels, picks, snowblowing equipment, fencing made of orange mesh, wooden barriers painted red and white. A sign on the door read AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. I wasn't "authorized," but if I wanted to catch the sights from the other side without hiking all the way around the mountain, this would be the perfect shortcut.

I looked left and right. The coast was clear. Everyone was still back at the hotel drinking coffee and eating pastry on the terrace. I entered the cave and scurried through to the other side, shivering when the temperature seemed to drop twenty degrees. And it wasn't any warmer when I walked out into the daylight. Unfortunately, I'd left the sun and all its warmth on the other side of the mountain. But this wasn't so bad. At least I didn't have to worry about my makeup melting.

Ahead of me was a wooden guardrail. I inched toward it, peering down into a crevasse that bored its way downward into total blackness. I felt the bottoms of my feet tingle and inched slowly backward.

"Hi, Emily."

I wheeled to my left and looked up. The trail ended at this point and gave way to a set of wooden stairs that laddered up the rock face to the summit. Shirley Angowski was standing halfway up the staircase, her right leg hooked over the railing in what looked like an impossible contortion.

"Oh my God," I shouted. "Don't jump!"

"Smile." She aimed her big honking zoom lens at me and clicked her camera. "I'll mail that to you when I get it developed."

I breathed a sigh of relief. I'd misread her acrobatics completely. No one about to commit suicide would promise to send me photos. I mean, film processing could take as long as two weeks with some discount companies. "Thanks," I called up to her. "Just what I need. Another picture of myself with my mouth hanging open. You don't look too safe up there. Aren't you afraid you'll fall?"

"I used to teach gymnastics. You want to see me walk to the summit on the railing? It's just like the balance beam."

I was delighted by the number of job opportunities open to people who were geographically challenged, but no way was I going to encourage this kind of suicidal behavior. "I hope you're not serious!"

Shirley laughed. "Just kidding. Balance beam wasn't my specialty anyway. I was better at floor exercise."

"Well, be careful."

"You too."

I'd seen enough for now. Anxious to check in on Nana and to monitor the whereabouts of Helen and Lucille and Dick, I headed down the trail that flanked the shaded side of the mountain and eventually found myself walking through another tunnel. Along the thick outer wall, huge windows had been cut into the sandstone like embrasures in a castle wall to allow hikers unimpeded views of the mountainscape beyond. I stood at one lookout point, amazed to find a church perched at the very edge of a precipice on a flat of land below me. On a scraggly peak behind the church stood a solitary cross, dark against the endless bank of clouds. I found the sight of a church seven thousand feet up pretty inspiring, but I did wonder if they had an occasional problem with attendance.