Whether Jed acted rude out of fear of female tears, or being made a fool once again, he guessed that he had earned the freedom to be lonely. He had tried to change. But, not long ago a particularly appealing young thing trapped him behind a hot frying pan while he was browning a fresh caught mountain trout. Somehow the usual mountain man stories about bears had lead to Jed, without thinking of the consequences, of lecturing on one of his own personal views that the only reason mankind had survived the era of pre-civilization was on account of a repugnant scent that kept carnivorous beasts of prey away. Unfortunately, this statement was made on the fifth day of an escorted trek, roughing it without daily baths, and this sweet young thing had taken the comment personally.

So, now he was alone. Just Jed and his horses. And, watching the last of the clouds collide with the mountains only to be ripped apart by pinnacles of ice; and listening to the solid crunch of hooves in old snow as the string detoured a washed out bridge crossing the creek flowing out of Avalanche Glacier, he began to come alive. He even had the feeling that this way of life was best. With that thought, he had a surge of excitement that made him shout out to a hawk soaring along a beam of breaking light, as his dad had been fond of exclaiming, "Hey, damn, it's good to be alive!"

In keeping with the ambiguity of a yellow mood, the now unfettered sun was warm, dazzling. Here and there, obsidian, or volcanic glass, sparkled as if black diamonds. Passing under an overhanging cornice, he raised himself in the stirrups to peer upwards into a massive fissure in the glacier's icefall. The interior of a glacier is another world. Chill Blue is about the only way one can describe the color. When the light reaching deep into an ice canyon is right, this blue radiates, almost as if a frozen fire. A sight well worth bending backwards to witness.

This morning, doing just that, Jed almost fell off his horse. Laughing. His eye had also caught a splash of yellow. He couldn't stop the string then and there to take another look and expect the Admiral to keep Daisy and Babs from causing a ruckus, so he debated whether his curiosity was worth the effort to find enough trees to untail and tie each of the pack horses, and to unstrap the shovel Forest Service regulations required of all pack trains as a fire tool.

"Probably was just the remains of a box of crackers carelessly discarded by a climbing party, or a bit of plastic that blew away from a backpacker's camp," Jed suggested to Admiral Beans.

"Then, how, pray tell," Jed's equine companion seemed to answer by a roll of an eyeball, "the color appears to be inside the ice? Do I have to remind you of the years it would take for that to happen? No sir, that is no recent scrap of material."