Too large to comprehend.
People go out in planes, boats, on foot, and are never heard from again.
It is May, almost spring but still a time of potentially cruel weather, especially in the tumultuous arc of the Gulf of Alaska, the place where the North American and Pacific plates meet and violence is upheaved in tectonic battle. It is a place of earthquake, young mountains, and volatile glaciers, a place where the pressure of frozen millennia breaks in blue ice against a stormy sea, a place where exquisitely sharp peaks throw back the weather that tries to move inland from that sea. Somewhere in this unvisited place a colleague has disappeared. Kent Roth, a fishery biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, has gone down with two brothers and two friends on a flight from Yakutat to Anchorage. It is an immense area, one that has swallowed people from the earliest times of its recorded history.