It was in many ways a spur of the moment decision to leave the trail behind and clime this high and trackless ridge. It was so high that the trees that had died there ages past would not decay in the dry air and their corpses lay about littering the ground. It would not be long until I climbed so high that no trees or even bushes could grow, where only grass and rocks and marmots shrieking their high call can somehow find an existence. Here, though, here I was still in that transition zone between the forest and the alpine desert, that place where worlds collide and life takes on a strange and mystical tone as is only appropriate at the joint of universes. Here the forest is left behind and the peaks lay ahead and the first glimpse of a distant world laying all about in every direction is reviled, the mountains standing in all their magnificence and eloquence, unnoticing and uncaring of such lesser creatures as ourselves.