It had come out of nowhere, this avalanche, the one that deterred Mike and her from reaching the summit of Mt. Rainier, the one that now rendered her incapacitated, frozen. Strange to be lying so still, when she is supposed to be climbing, moving forward. She is tempted to try and get up anyway, but the pain in her leg hurts too much for even her to move. She hates to admit defeat, that the elements have gotten an edge on her. Her whole adult life she has spent in defiance of them. Now she is at Nature’s mercy, must work with Her if she is to survive. She has to keep focused. Mike will soon be back with help, camp is only several hundred feet from here. It is starting to snow. But she must not panic, must keep her mind clear. She must fight her mind even as it wants to sleep, take her away. She must think of overcoming it like the mountains she has always conquered. She will strive for victory; life is victory now.

Mt. Rainier. This is where the fall happened, this mountain that over the years she and Mike had called friend. They had met each other here, fifteen years ago; she a junior on spring break at the University of Washington, bored with the dryness of her philosophy major, he a climbing guide who supported his death-defying habit with an engineering career which he skipped out on as often as possible. She was twenty, he thirty-eight, but their age difference melted like snow in July in the face of their common goal, getting to the summit. All the members of that first trip worked well, which Mike informed her was not always the case, but from that point on, she and Mike always were a team.

The fear of death never deterred her from climbing. It was what she wanted to do from the time she was a little girl, before she even knew it was possible that anyone could climb a mountain. When her family went hiking or skiing together, she would look at the landscape, and wonder what it would be like to stand at the top, to feel the victory of climbing to the top. The mountains seemed so majestic, so formidable, so untouchable, like no one could ever conquer them. It was when she was eleven that she discovered that they had been climbed, been conquered. And from then on, she vowed that one day, she would climb the mountain. By the time she did, nine years later, the dream burned alive within her, and there seemed to be nothing that would quench it.

She was never discouraged from her dream, not even by her parents. They never were the kind of people who thought girls should spend their lives in the servitude of others’ needs, baking cookies all day in the kitchen. If anything, her climbing mountains would just follow in their footsteps. Her sister was a star soccer player in college and her mom was a downhill skier as a young girl, even going so far as to try out for the Olympics but breaking her ankle before she qualified. All the family vacations were outdoor events, skiing in Aspen, hiking in the Appalachians. She told her family her dream on one of these vacations, when they were snowboarding in the White Mountains the winter before she started college. They had always known; they had watched her go off on her own, always heading for the biggest hill she could find, trudging her way determinedly until she reached the top. And somehow, she had known they were always there, too, watching her test her heart. Vocalizing her dream to them made it more a reality, for she was a person who always did what she said she would, did whatever she set out to do. She never forgot the look of pride on her parents’ face as they wished her well in her strivings, but she saw the fear too, the fear that one day she would never come back if she went.