As she climbed the switchbacks, she forded those delightful currents of 
air over and over, so that as she rounded each hairpin turn in the trail, she 
had an incentive to climb toward the next one. The little shrubs that clutched 
rocks and cowered in cracks became bigger and more numerous, and flowers began 
to appear, first tiny little white ones like handfuls of salt strewn over the 
rocks, then larger blossoms, blue and magenta and brilliant orange, brimming 
with scented nectar that attracted bees all fuzzy and yellow with stolen 
pollen. Gnarled oaks and short dense evergreens cast tiny shadows across the 
path. The skyline grew closer, and the turns in the path became wider as the 
mountain became less steep. Nell rejoiced when the switchbacks ended and the 
trail took off straight across an undulating mountaintop meadow thick with 
purple-flowered heather and marked with occasional stands of tall firs. For a 
moment she was afraid that this meadow was nothing more than a ledge, and that 
she had more mountains to ascend; but
then the path turned downhill, and treading heavily as new muscles caught her 
descending weight, she half-ran across a vast boulder, pocked with tiny pools 
of clear water and occasional lozenges of wet snow, until she reached a point 
where it fell away from under her and she skidded to a precarious stop, looking 
down like a peregrine falcon over an immense country of blue lakes and green 
mountains, shrouded in a whirling storm of silver mist.