Assuming, reasonably enough, that these tourists would want to see the highest mountains, the pilot carved a long sweeping turn up a valley with a white thread snaking down its bottom: a river violent with snowmelt. After a few minutes, this frayed into several tributaries draining a few miles of high Selkirk crest. All the mountains along the crest proper were above the tree line and presented a bleak prospect of barren rocky snags and crags reaching high above vast talus fields where nothing would grow except the occasional freak tree. They burned a lot of fuel in a short time gaining altitude and thudded over a low saddle between peaks, suddenly giving them a view of many more insurgent-friendly mountains beyond, stretching to the horizon, interrupted only by a long north-south lake in the middle distance. Turning north again, the pilot made for the border, following the slow curve of the ridgeline, passing some especially prominent peaks. But during the last few miles to the border, the ridgeline lost a couple of thousand feet of altitude and plunged back below the tree line again. One bald peak jutted out of it a few miles south of the border—Abandon Mountain, the pilot called it—but other than that, it was scrub trees, patchy snowfields, and talus ranging northward well into Canada. In the far distance, the Selkirks leaped upward and became a truly magnificent range, but that was in British Columbia, where, plainly enough, everything was bigger and better.