It’s dumb things like this:

Jason and I followed the West Foss River trail to Copper Lake, then beyond to Big Heart and Angeline. After crossing the logjam at the outlet from Big Heart, we poked around for the trail. A camper at the shoreline pointed us toward a narrow path beyond her tent. “It goes,” were the words. We tried it, though it clearly wasn’t a trail; it was a two-foot-wide path that turned into a gravelly ledge climbing 50 above the lake. I paused with my back to the rock wall, and the tension between the soles of my shoes and the pebbles beneath broke, sending me sliding—standing straight up—toward the cliff, as if on a bed of crude ball bearings. I had stopped just to the left a single small pine growing out of a crevice in the rock, four inches in diameter. I grabbed the tree with both hands while body swiveled clockwise to a stopping point perpendicular to my original position, my left foot parallel to the very lip of the ledge. Jay thought he had found a way through further along the ramp, but I wasn’t “going.” We backtracked and found the real trail a few minutes later.

Left to right, top to bottom, generally: Copper Lake (occasionally with Malachite Peak), Big Heart Lake, wildfire smoke