Perhaps I had better back up a bit and explain. We were in the Wallowas. We had been in the Wallowas for three days. It was early, flawless August. There was a canteen with a missing lid....

That particular mountain hadn't been on the agenda at all, in the beginning. This was to be a rambling day, a roaming day, a let's-see-what's-over-the-next-rise- and-to-hell-with-the-trail day; nobody had put any climbing into it that I knew of. The mountains were to be our backdrop, not our stage. That was the plan. But the plan did not account for the fact that Cliff and I were barely nineteen.

The day had begun early, as most days do in the mountains. It had begun with no sun in the sky, only a patch of light and a promise beyond the eastern rim of the basin which would soon become the sun. The light was gray in camp, and the gray light was cold. We got up rapidly; we built a fire, with the urgency and clumsiness of cold hands. Below us, wrapping us on three sides, Mirror Lake lapped blackly at polished granite.

Cliff and I were half of a party of four - all in our late teens, unchaperoned, buoyed by the mountain air and boisterous with the success of our assault on Eagle Cap the previous day. We were camped at what is very nearly the westernmost lake in the Lake Basin, on the south shore, only there wasn't a south shore; only talus and great dark cliffs and, halfway along, a rocky, sheer-sided little peninsula with a spring at its base and a single gnarled tree at its tip and barely enough room for four sleeping bags on its level, matted summit. The day stretched before us; the day beckoned. What lakes would we see, what cliffs and what green meadows?

The sun crept down the mountains. The sun raced down the mountains, but we were faster. The sun found an empty camp and, a hundred yards to the east, four tiny figures leaping from boulder to giant boulder along the southern margin of the water.

- from Chapter One