Flying through the pass was awesome. I mean in the sense of inspiring genuine awe. You are a dot moving among white clouds. White cliffs break through the clouds and you fly beside them. You’re not high up by mountain standards, twenty-five hundred feet, maybe a little more. But it feels like you’re in the sun’s own kingdom. For much of the crossing, the snow makes it impossible to tell where the ground is, and then when you spot it, it’s crazy, striations of ice and rock like the inside of a marble. It doesn’t seem to exist in any measurable relation to where you are. (Even crazier: the
...more
