They reached the fork below the cracked glacier shelf an hour before noon, where a black basalt buttress split the wind and offered twenty yards of dark shade free from the prism glare.
While Ashaun and Osha shared out cold boiled mutton and hard biscuit, Chaska took Lilt up onto the basalt nose for a ten-minute short-tether glide across the mouth of the pass—not carrying cargo, just riding the thermal draft high enough to see past the quartz fins before dropping back down to the snow shelf.
“The summer mule trail ahead is a death trap,” Chaska reported as she unclipped her safety line from Lilt’s harness and stamped snow off her boots. “Two of the quarried overhangs have six-foot wind-slabs hanging over the cut, and the sun is hitting them straight through the glass ridges. A loud sneeze would bring the whole shelf down on our heads.”
She knelt in the packed snow and drew two lines with a twig. “We’ve got two ways around the slide chutes. Half a mile to our left, there’s a deep, narrow ravine cut into the dark basalt below the glacier. The walls are sheer enough to block the wind-slabs from above, and it drops straight toward the western valley.”
