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Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Dare
The tamale cart closed at nine, but Imelda Viera stayed until ten, scrubbing the flattop with a pumice stone while the Tucson heat finally loosened its grip on the asphalt. She liked the quiet after close. The hiss of the stone against steel. The way the parking lot emptied until it was just her and the smell of roasted chiles and the low hum of the streetlight above the taqueria next door.
Her phone buzzed on the prep counter. She dried her hands on her apron and picked it up.
The group chat—the one she'd joined eight months ago, the one with the women who understood what it meant to carry a name that no longer had a living person behind it—had come alive again.
**JoanG_61:** Okay, I'm serious. I looked it up. Guided traverse, eleven days, Tordrillo Range, Alaska. Glaciers, mountains, sleds. Spring departure. Who's in?
**AdrienneB_MD:** You're drunk.
**JoanG_61:** I'm on my third glass of Tempranillo. That's not drunk. That's decisive.
**HaileyK_Wild:** Wait. The Tordrillos? That's legit backcountry. I've wanted to film there for two years.
**AdrienneB_MD:** Of course you have.
Imelda stared at the screen. She didn't know what the Tordrillo Range was. She didn't know what a glacier traverse involved. She had never seen snow—real snow, not the dusting that hit the Catalinas once a decade and melted before lunch.
But she knew what Rosa's bucket list said, because she'd found it folded inside a Bible on the nightstand of the hospice room, written in her sister's careful hand on the back of a church bulletin. Item number seven: *See snow. Real snow. Stand in it until your feet go numb.*
Rosa had written forty-three items. She'd completed six before the lymphoma finished what it started.
Imelda typed before she could stop herself.
**ImeldaV_Tucson:** I'm in.
Three dots appeared. Then Joan's reply:
**JoanG_61:** That's three. Adrienne?
A long pause. Imelda watched the cursor blink. She imagined the ER doctor somewhere on the East Coast, sitting in whatever sterile apartment she'd described in the forum—the one she'd moved into after the stillbirth, after her husband started sleeping in the guest room, after she stopped being able to cry and started being unable to feel anything at all.
**AdrienneB_MD:** I'll regret this.
**JoanG_61:** That's the point.
---
Three months later, Imelda stood in the Anchorage REI staring at a wall of base layers and wondering how a person who'd spent her entire life within two hundred miles of the Mexican border had ended up here.
"You want the merino," said a voice behind her. "Not the synthetic. Synthetic stinks after day two and you can't wash anything out there."
She turned. The woman was tall, broad-shouldered, with silver hair cropped close and the kind of face that looked like it had been carved by decades of sun and wind. She wore a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms that were ropy with muscle.
"Joan?" Imelda said.
"In the flesh." Joan Galanis extended a hand. Her grip was firm and dry. "You're shorter than I expected."
"Everyone's shorter than you expected. You're six feet tall."
"Five eleven and three-quarters. I stopped rounding up when I turned sixty." Joan picked up a merino base layer and held it against Imelda's shoulders, assessing. "Small. Maybe extra-small in the torso. You run hot?"
"I'm from Tucson."
"That's not an answer."
"Yes. I run hot."
"Good. You'll need that." Joan tossed the base layer into Imelda's basket and started walking toward the boot section. "Come on. We've got four hours before the others land and I need to make sure you don't die of frostbite because you bought cotton socks."
Imelda followed, clutching her basket. She had the feeling—not unpleasant, but disorienting—of being swept into someone else's current. Joan moved through the store the way she probably moved through everything: with the certainty of a woman who had spent thirty years reading land, drawing lines across wilderness, and knowing exactly where she stood.
It was only later, over coffee at the airport while they waited for Adrienne's flight from Boston and Hailey's from Seattle, that Imelda saw the crack in that certainty.
"My husband loved this state," Joan said quietly, looking out at the Chugach Mountains through the terminal windows. "We surveyed a pipeline route up here in '94. He could read a contour map the way some people read music. Just—" She made a flowing gesture with her hand. "Fluid."
"When did he pass?"
"Fourteen months ago. But he left about three years before that. The dementia." Joan's jaw tightened. "Early-onset. He was fifty-seven when they diagnosed him. By sixty he didn't know my name. By sixty-two he didn't know his own."
Imelda reached across the table and put her hand over Joan's. She didn't say anything. She'd learned in the grief forum that the right thing to say was usually nothing.
"I need to know my body still works," Joan said. "That's why I'm here. Not the grief. Not the healing. I need to haul a sled across a glacier and know that I'm still—" She stopped. "Present. In my own skin."
"I understand."
"Do you?"
Imelda thought about Rosa's list. About the way grief could feel like wearing someone else's clothes—everything slightly wrong, slightly too tight, the seams in the wrong places.
"More than you think," she said.
---
Adrienne Bracken arrived looking exactly like her forum photo: sharp-featured, dark-haired, with the controlled posture of someone who spent twelve-hour shifts on her feet and the flat affect of someone who had trained herself not to feel things in public. She shook hands efficiently, assessed the gear pile Joan had assembled, and immediately began reorganizing it by weight.
"The medical kit is inadequate," she said, pulling items from a stuff sack. "I brought my own. Suture kit, broad-spectrum antibiotics, ketamine for field anesthesia, splinting materials, and enough morphine to sedate a moose."
"Is that legal?" Imelda asked.
"I'm a physician."
"That's not an answer."
Adrienne looked at her. For a moment something flickered behind those controlled eyes—amusement, maybe, or surprise at being challenged. "It's the answer I'm giving."
Hailey Kimura was last, bounding off the jetway with a duffel bag covered in sponsor patches and a GoPro already mounted to her chest harness. She was twenty-six but looked younger—lean, bright-eyed, with her mother's Japanese features and her father's rangy American build. She hugged each of them like they were old friends, which in a way they were, even though they'd never shared the same air.
"This is going to be incredible," she said, pulling out her phone to take a group selfie. "My followers are going to lose their minds."
"Your followers aren't hauling a sled," Joan said.
"No, but they're going to feel like they are. That's the whole point of what I do—vicarious experience. I bring people into the—"
"We've seen your channel," Adrienne said. "You jumped off a waterfall in Costa Rica and cried about your brother while the drone circled overhead. It had four million views."
The brightness in Hailey's face dimmed. Just for a second. Then the performer's mask slid back into place. "Six million, actually. And Kenji would have thought it was hilarious."
Kenji. Hailey's twin. Dead eighteen months, by his own hand, in the bathroom of their shared apartment in Seattle while Hailey was filming a sponsored kayaking trip in Baja. She'd found out from a text. Not even a call. A text from their mother that said *Come home now* and nothing else.
Imelda watched Hailey's smile and recognized it. The performance of okayness. The exhausting, daily theater of pretending the wound had closed when it was still bleeding under the bandage.
*We're all pretending*, Imelda thought. *Every one of us.*
She wondered if the mountains would let them keep pretending.
---
They met their guide the next morning at a hangar on the outskirts of Talkeetna, a small town that served as the staging ground for most backcountry expeditions in the Alaska Range. The hangar belonged to Ostlund Air, a bush-plane operation that had been running since the 1970s.
Gus Ostlund was not what Imelda had expected. The website photos showed a younger man—broad-chested, bearded, standing on a summit with an ice axe and a grin. The man who met them was still broad-chested, still bearded, but the grin was gone, replaced by the watchful reserve of someone who had seen too much of the backcountry's capacity for violence.
He was fifty-eight, with hands like shovels and a voice that sounded like gravel being poured into a tin bucket. He shook each of their hands without smiling and led them into the hangar, where four pulk sleds were laid out on the concrete floor beside piles of gear.
"Eleven days," he said, pointing to a large topographic map pinned to the wall. "We start here, at the Triumvirate Glacier airstrip. Fly in, ski out. The route goes southwest through the Tordrillo Range, crossing three major glaciers, two mountain passes, and roughly a hundred and forty miles of terrain that will try to kill you in at least six different ways."
"Only six?" Joan said.
"Those are the ones I can predict." Gus tapped the map. "Crevasses. Avalanche. Whiteout. Hypothermia. River crossings. And the one that gets most people—their own heads." He looked at each of them in turn. "This isn't a ski resort. There's no lodge at the end of the day. There's no cell service. Once we're in, we're in. The only way out is forward, to here." He tapped a point on the coast. "Stormwatch Cabin. There's a marine radio there. We call for pickup, a boat comes from Eilun Bay, twelve miles south. That's the plan."
"What if the plan goes wrong?" Adrienne asked.
"Plans always go wrong. That's why we have contingencies." He gestured to a young man who was loading fuel cans into the back of a de Havilland Beaver parked outside the hangar. "My nephew Cody handles our midpoint resupply. He'll fly a cache drop to the halfway point—food, fuel, and a backup sat phone—on day two, after we're established on the route. That way we're never more than five days from supplies."
Cody Ostlund was twenty-nine, with his uncle's build but none of his gravity. He waved from the plane with a wrench in one hand and a sandwich in the other. "Don't let him scare you," he called. "He's been doing this since before I was born. He's just forgotten how to be friendly."
"I haven't forgotten," Gus said. "I've chosen not to be."
"See? Charming." Cody grinned and went back to his loading.
Imelda studied Gus. There was something behind his watchfulness—not hostility, but something heavier. She'd seen it in the grief forum, in the messages people posted at three in the morning when the masks came off. The weight of a thing carried too long.
Later, while they practiced harness systems and sled-hauling techniques on a frozen lake outside town, she asked Joan about it.
"He lost two clients," Joan said quietly, adjusting Imelda's hip belt. "Ten years ago. Avalanche on Denali's West Buttress. He was guiding a team of six and he took them across a slope that released. Two buried. One they dug out alive. One they didn't find until spring."
"And he stopped guiding?"
"Stopped everything. Flew supplies for his brother's air service, did some solo trips, but no clients. This is his first multi-day guided trip since."
"Why now?"
"Cody set it up. Apparently the nephew's been trying to get him back in the mountains for years." Joan shrugged. "Maybe he's ready. Maybe he's not. Either way, he knows this terrain better than anyone alive."
Imelda looked across the frozen lake at Gus, who was showing Hailey how to self-arrest with an ice axe, his movements precise and patient despite his gruff exterior. She thought about Rosa's list again. Item number seven.
*See snow. Real snow. Stand in it until your feet go numb.*
She was standing in it now. Her feet were, in fact, going numb.
"Joan," she said.
"Yeah?"
"I don't know how to ski."
Joan looked at her. Then she laughed—a real laugh, deep and startled, the first one Imelda had heard from her.
"Well," Joan said. "We've got two days to fix that."
---
The bush plane lifted off from the frozen lake at dawn on a Tuesday, the de Havilland Beaver climbing into a sky so blue it looked painted. Below them, the Alaska Range unfolded like a crumpled white sheet—peaks and ridges and vast glacial valleys stretching to every horizon.
Imelda pressed her face to the window. She had never seen anything like this. The scale was incomprehensible. In Tucson, the landscape was defined by absence—the desert's vast emptiness, the sky's merciless clarity. Here, everything was presence. Mountains shouldering against each other, glaciers grinding between them, snow covering everything in a silence so complete it felt like the world had been muted.
"You okay?" Adrienne asked from the seat beside her.
"I don't know," Imelda said honestly. "It's so much."
"It is."
They landed on the Triumvirate Glacier at eight in the morning, the Beaver's skis hissing on the packed snow. Gus had them unloaded and organized within thirty minutes, the sleds packed, the harnesses fitted, the route ahead marked by nothing but his memory and a laminated map.
"Day one," he said. "Twelve miles to our first camp. We climb eight hundred feet to the saddle, then drop into the next valley. Stay in my tracks. Don't step off the packed snow. Don't take off your harness. If I stop, you stop. Questions?"
"What if I have to pee?" Hailey asked.
"You hold it or you go fast. The glacier doesn't care about your bladder."
Hailey saluted. Gus did not smile.
They set off into the white, five figures and four sleds strung along a rope like beads on a string, moving across the glacier's face with the slow deliberation of ants crossing a tablecloth. The mountains rose on either side, immense and indifferent, their peaks hidden in wisps of cloud.
Imelda's world narrowed to the simplest things: the hiss of her skis, the pull of the sled, the burn in her thighs, the rhythm of her breathing. She was terrible at skiing—her legs wobbled, her poles stabbed at the snow at wrong angles, and twice in the first hour she fell, tangling in her harness while the sled tried to run her over. But each time she got up, brushed off, and kept moving, because the alternative was to stop, and stopping meant thinking, and thinking meant Rosa.
By noon they'd covered six miles and climbed four hundred feet. Gus called a halt in the lee of a rock outcrop and they ate lunch standing up—cheese, salami, crackers, chocolate—while the wind picked at their jackets and the sun turned the snow into a field of diamonds.
"How are your feet?" Joan asked Imelda.
"Numb."
"Good numb or bad numb?"
"Is there a difference?"
"Good numb means cold. Bad numb means you can't feel them at all."
Imelda wiggled her toes inside her boots. They protested, but they moved. "Good numb, I think."
"Then you're fine." Joan squeezed her shoulder. "You're doing great."
"I fell four times."
"I fell six times on my first glacier day. And I'd been skiing since I was eight."
Imelda doubted this, but she appreciated the lie.
The afternoon was harder. The slope steepened and the snow turned crusty, each step requiring effort. Hailey moved with the fluid grace of someone who'd spent her twenties in the mountains, gliding ahead and then circling back to film the others. Adrienne skied with mechanical precision, her movements efficient but joyless, like someone completing a task rather than experiencing a journey. Joan set a steady pace, her long legs eating distance, her surveyor's eyes constantly reading the terrain ahead.
And Gus was everywhere—ahead, behind, beside them—probing the snow with his pole, reading the surface for the subtle depressions that marked hidden crevasses, adjusting their route with small hand signals that Joan, at least, seemed to understand instinctively.
They made camp at five, on a flat bench overlooking a frozen lake. Gus showed them how to stamp out a platform, set up the tents, and build a snow wall for wind protection. They cooked dinner on a camp stove—freeze-dried stew that tasted like cardboard and salvation—and crawled into their sleeping bags as the sun dipped behind the western peaks and the temperature dropped like a stone.
Imelda lay in her bag, every muscle screaming, and stared at the tent ceiling. Beside her, Adrienne was already asleep, her breathing even and controlled, even in unconsciousness.
From the other tent, she could hear Hailey's voice, low and murmuring, recording a video diary.
"Day one," Hailey was saying. "We made it. Twelve miles. My legs are toast. The light out here is insane—I got some incredible footage of the glacier at sunset. Tomorrow Gus says we'll cross the saddle and drop into the Capps drainage. The cache drop is scheduled for midday. I keep thinking about what Kenji would say if he could see this. He'd probably say I was crazy. He'd probably be right."
A pause. Then, so quietly Imelda almost missed it: "I miss you, K. Every single day."
Imelda closed her eyes. She thought about Rosa. About item number seven.
*See snow. Real snow. Stand in it until your feet go numb.*
Check.
She slept.
---
Day two began with a sky the color of old pewter.
Gus stood outside the tents at six a.m., studying the clouds with the intensity of a man reading a diagnosis. When Joan emerged, he spoke without looking at her.
"Weather's moving faster than the forecast said. That front wasn't supposed to arrive until Thursday."
"How fast?"
"Fast enough. We need to get over the saddle before noon. And Cody needs to make that cache drop in the next three hours or the ceiling will be too low."
He pulled out the satellite phone—their only link to the outside world—and called his nephew. The conversation was brief, clipped, the shorthand of two people who'd been talking about weather and terrain their whole lives.
"He's wheels up in twenty," Gus said, putting the phone away. "He'll hit the midpoint cache site by ten. We push for the saddle now."
They broke camp in record time, the urgency in Gus's voice translating into faster hands, tighter knots, quicker movements. Even Imelda, who was still learning the choreography of camp breakdown, moved with purpose.
The saddle was a notch between two peaks, a wind-scoured col at sixty-two hundred feet where the snow had been polished to ice by months of storms. They reached it at eleven, sweating despite the cold, and paused to look back at the glacier they'd crossed—a river of white stretching north toward the Alaska Range, impossibly vast.
"There," Hailey said, pointing east. "Is that Cody?"
A small shape was moving against the gray sky, the distant buzz of a prop engine reaching them a moment later. The de Havilland Beaver, painted red and white, was threading between the peaks at low altitude, heading for the cache drop site in the valley below.
"He's low," Gus said. His voice was flat, but Imelda heard something beneath it. Tension. The kind that lived in the body, not the words.
"The ceiling's dropping," Joan said, shielding her eyes.
They watched the plane descend into the valley, disappearing behind a ridge. The engine noise faded, then rose again as Cody came around for his approach to the cache site—a flat section of glacier they'd marked on the map, where he'd land, unload the supplies, and fly out.
Except he didn't land.
The sound changed. The engine note climbed, then stuttered, then climbed again—the sound of a pilot fighting for altitude in deteriorating conditions. They couldn't see the plane. The ridge blocked their view. But they could hear it, and what they heard made Gus's face go the color of the clouds.
A sharp crack. Not thunder. Metal.
Then nothing.
"No," Gus said. It was the quietest word Imelda had ever heard, and the loudest.
He was moving before anyone else could react, unclipping from the rope, pulling off his sled harness, grabbing his pack. "Stay here," he said. "Joan, keep them on the saddle. Do not move."
"Gus—"
"Do not move."
He went over the saddle and down the far side at a speed that seemed impossible for a man his age, his skis carving fast turns through the crusty snow, disappearing into the gray.
They stood on the saddle in the wind and waited.
Twenty minutes. Thirty. Forty-five.
Hailey had her camera out, filming the empty valley, her hands shaking. Adrienne stood motionless, her face unreadable. Joan paced, three steps left, three steps right, her eyes locked on the point where Gus had vanished.
Imelda prayed. Not to God, exactly—she and God had been on complicated terms since Rosa's diagnosis—but to whatever was out there, whatever force governed mountains and weather and the fragile machines that humans flew through them.
*Let the boy be alive. Let the boy be alive.*
At the one-hour mark, Gus's voice crackled on the handheld radio he'd left with Joan.
"Found him. He's alive. Plane's destroyed. He's got a shattered right femur, possible internal injuries. I need Adrienne down here. Now."
Adrienne was moving before he finished the sentence, pulling on her pack, clipping into the rope. Joan grabbed her arm.
"I'll lead. You treat. Hailey, Imelda, stay roped to us. We go together."
"Gus said—"
"Gus said to stay on the saddle. The saddle is not a hospital. Let's go."
They descended into the valley together, four women on a rope, moving toward the column of dark smoke that was rising from behind the ridge like a signal fire.
---
The Beaver had clipped a rocky spine at the top of the ridge—a granite fin that jutted from the snow like a shark's tooth, invisible in the flat light of the whiteout that had closed in during Cody's approach. The right wing had sheared off on impact, sending the plane cartwheeling down the slope in a spray of metal and fuel. It had come to rest upside down in a snowfield, crumpled like a beer can.
Cody was lying in the snow thirty feet from the wreck, where Gus had dragged him. He was conscious, which was a miracle, and screaming, which was not.
Adrienne dropped to her knees beside him and became someone else. The flat affect vanished. The controlled distance evaporated. In its place was a precision that Imelda found almost beautiful—hands moving with absolute certainty, voice calm and commanding, every question pointed and necessary.
"Cody, I'm Adrienne. I'm a doctor. Can you tell me where it hurts?"
"My leg—oh God, my leg—"
"I can see it. I'm going to stabilize it. What about your chest? Can you breathe okay?"
"Yeah—I think—it's just my leg—"
"Good. That's good. Gus, I need the splinting materials from my kit. Joan, I need you to hold his shoulders. Hailey, go to the plane and bring me anything—blankets, sleeping bags, anything insulating. Imelda, hold his hand."
Imelda knelt in the snow and took Cody's hand. It was hot—feverishly hot—and gripped hers with the desperate strength of a man in agony. She looked into his eyes, which were wide and terrified and very young, and she said the thing she'd said to Rosa in the hospice, the only thing that had ever seemed to matter:
"I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Adrienne worked for forty minutes. She set the femur—a process that made Cody scream and then go mercifully unconscious—splinted it with foam pads and aluminum stays from her medical kit, administered morphine, checked for internal bleeding, and wrapped him in every insulating layer they could find.
When she was done, she stood up, peeled off her bloody gloves, and looked at Gus.
"He'll live if we get him to a hospital within a week. The femur's a clean break, but if it goes septic, he'll lose the leg. Maybe more."
Gus nodded. His face was a mask, but his hands were shaking.
"The sat phone was in the plane," he said. "It's destroyed. Along with half our fuel, all the resupply food, and the backup stove. What we have is what's on our sleds right now."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing Imelda had ever heard.
"How far to Stormwatch Cabin?" Joan asked.
"About ninety miles. Over the Capps Glacier, through the Neacola corridor, and down to the coast."
"And the radio there works?"
"It worked last fall when the fishing crews used it. No guarantee."
"What's the alternative?"
"There is no alternative. The nearest road is a hundred and fifty miles east. The nearest inhabited place other than Stormwatch is Eilun Bay, twelve miles past the cabin. We go forward or we sit here and wait for someone to notice we're missing, which won't happen for eleven days—that's when the boat is scheduled to pick us up at the cabin."
"Eleven days," Adrienne said.
"Eleven days. And that's the optimistic number. After that, the spring thaw opens the crevasses and floods the lower valleys. The route becomes impassable."
Joan looked at the four women, then at Cody's unconscious form, then at the smoking wreck of the plane. Imelda watched her face and saw the surveyor's mind working—calculating distances, gradients, loads, the brutal arithmetic of calories and miles.
"Then we move," Joan said.
"We move," Gus agreed.
He pulled out his map and spread it on the snow. They gathered around it, five people staring at the thin red line that marked their route—a line that had been a recreational challenge that morning and was now the only thing between them and dying in the Alaskan wilderness.
"We'll need to build a rescue sled for Cody," Gus said. "I can rig one from the pulk frames. Redistribute the loads. We dump everything nonessential. Every ounce matters now."
"I'm keeping the medical kit," Adrienne said.
"Obviously. But the extra camera gear goes. The books go. Anything that isn't food, fuel, shelter, or medical stays here."
Hailey looked at her camera bag. Then she looked at Cody. She unzipped the bag, pulled out her primary camera and one battery, and left the rest in the snow beside the wreck.
"One camera," she said. "If we survive this, someone should be able to prove it happened."
Gus looked at her for a long moment. Then he nodded.
They spent the rest of the day building the rescue sled, redistributing gear, and rigging a hauling system that would let them drag Cody across the glacier. By nightfall they had a plan, a route, and a timeline that left no room for error.
Eleven days. Ninety miles. One injured pilot. No communication with the outside world.
Imelda lay in her sleeping bag that night, listening to the wind pick up outside the tent, and thought about Rosa's bucket list. Item number seven had been the easy one.
She wondered what the mountains had in store for the rest of it.
