They ascend into a small bowl where the stream becomes a little lake. Jim stands admiring it openmouthed. “It’s beautiful. Are we staying here?”

“It’s seven A.M., Jim!”

“Oh yeah.”

They hike on, up a rocky trail that rises steeply to the east. It’s hard work. Eventually they reach the rock-and-moss shore of another surrealistically perfect pond.

“Golden Trout Lake. Elevation ten thousand eight hundred feet.”

Suddenly Jim understands that they’re at the end of the trail, at the bottom of a bowl that has only one exit, which is the streambed they have just ascended. “So we’re staying here?”

“Nope.” Tash points above, to the west, where the crest of the Sierra Nevada looms over them. “Dragon Pass is up there. We go over that.”

“But where’s the trail?”

“It’s a cross-country pass.”

It all comes clear to Jim. “You mean this so-called pass of yours has no trail over it?”

“Right.”

“Whoah. Oh, man.…”

They put on their packs, begin hiking up the slope. In the morning sun it gets hot. Jim suspects the tweaks from each heel indicate blisters. The straps of his pack cut into his shoulders. He follows Tashi up a twisting trough that Tash explains was once a glacier’s bed. They are in the realm of rock now, rock shattered and shattered again, in places almost to gravel. Occasionally they stop to rest and look around. Back to the east they can see the Owens Valley, and the White Mountains beyond.

Then it’s up again. Jim steps in Tashi’s elongated footprints and avoids sliding back as far as Tash does. He concentrates on the work. How obvious that this endless upward struggle is the perfect analogy for life. Two steps up, one step back. Finding a best path, up through loose broken granite, stained in places by lichen of many colors, light green, yellow, red, black. The goal above seems close but never gets closer. Yes, it is a very pure, very stripped-down model of life—life reduced to stark, expansive significance. Higher and higher. The sky overhead is dark blue, the sun a blinding chip in it.

They keep climbing. The repetition of steps up, each with its small tweak from the heels, reduces Jim’s mind to a little point, receiving only visual input and the kinetics of feeling. His thighs feel like rubber bands. Once it occurs to him that for the last half hour he has thought of nothing at all, except the rock under him. He grins; then he has to concentrate on a slippery section. Sweat gets in his eye. There’s no wind, no sound except their shoes on the rock, their breaths in their throats.