At two hours past noon on Day 74, the expedition left the high station, with a retired slate-quarryman named Orren. An elderly highland guide with a face as weathered and pitted as subalpine dark grey rock, whose wool coat was patched with cured deerskin at the elbows. Yseld had paid him four silver coins from their communal pouch to guide them up the old paved approach toward the Needlehouse.
As they climbed out of the Hawk’s Notch, the last stunted mountain pines fell away behind them. The world opened into the stark, breathtaking austerity of Ecology #5: Subalpine Rock and Sparse Mountain Vegetation.
There were no trees here. The landscape was a vast, wind-swept wilderness of bare grey limestone talus, dark fiery dark rock stone props, and shattered scree slopes that plunged into bottomless ice-slow gorges. In the sheltered rock crevices, growing in gritty pockets of frost-shattered shale, clung tough, low cushions of silver-leaf mountain saxifrage, pale alpine cushion-moss, and tiny mountain willows whose woody stems crept flat against the rock like veins across a miner’s hand. The air was thin, icy, and odorless. He carried none of the organic warmth of the lowlands—only the dry, metal scent of cold stone and permanent snow.
