By Peter Anderson
I must have missed one of the rock cairns that marked the trail and walked off the map, but I did find a fine camp in an alpine meadow, with an island of spruce shielding me from elk grazing the waning tundra sun in a snow-rimmed cirque a mile or so off toward the Continental Divide. If my inner compass was a little off, so what? This was a fine place to be lost. As the elk herd approached, a slight breeze came with them, floating my scent off toward the sun which had gone down behind a distant ridge. As far as they were concerned I wasn’t there. Even when the walls of my tent billowed out in an occasional puff of wind, I didn’t exist. So they came closer and closer and soon I could hear the cows and calves mewing and bleating to one another on the far side of the spruce.