But the view. Oh, the view from atop Avalanche Spire, just south of Denali National Park, could just about stop his heart anyway.

Colt scanned the area with his binoculars.

From the north, the massive Denali range rose, rugged and magnificent, its hulking mass thundering across the horizon. A blue-gray shadow fell upon the mountains below, sweeping down to the rich greens of a pine and fir forest, the deep blues of valley lakes set in pockets inside the rising peaks of the foothills.

Snow and ice still capped a number of low-lying peaks, glaciers running off the edge like frosting. The air smelled of the summer wildflowers, and the sunlight hung long upon the day.

“I see the plane,” he said, his gaze dropping to a small white-and-red-striped crumple of metal caught in one of those glaciers, about a half mile down from the cliff where they stood. “Right where you left it, Tae.”

He lowered his binoculars and shot a glance at Taylor—Tae—Price. She wore her blond hair in a singular braid, had on a pair of Gore-Tex hiking pants, a warm jacket, and a wool hat against the still-crisp Denali wind.

Her mouth tightened at the edges. “It wasn’t there when I left it.”

Colt’s brother Dodge had walked over and now gestured for the binoculars. Colt handed them over.

“Looks like the plane slid,” he said. “I can see the trail where the melt carried it.”

“They must have landed in the valley above it, and the glacier carried it down the slope,” Echo, Dodge’s fiancée, said. She had put down her backpack and was taking a drink of water. Two golden-brown braids stuck out of her knit hat. She glanced at Tae. “I still can’t believe you survived.”

They stood on a ridge just above where they’d landed the Piper Super Cub that Dodge had flown, searching for the downed plane. Even the chopper wouldn’t have been able to put down closer to the wreck, so taking the plane gave them more reach to confirm, well, that Tae hadn’t been lying.

Not that Colt thought she was outright lying, per se, but with the position of the plane, it seemed a little far-fetched that the story went down the way she’d told it. The one that included a kidnapping, her attempts to crash the plane, surviving not only the crash that killed the pilot and her kidnapper but also a late-season blizzard.

“I can’t believe I survived either,” Tae said, maybe realizing that no, none of it really added up. Still, here she stood, daring him not to believe her words even as he stared at the crumpled evidence. Dodge and Echo had found her in a gully nearly ten miles away, so maybe . . .