A

few years ago, my friend Jordan, a writer and park ranger in northern California, decided to take a month long trip to Grand Teton National Park to do some research for a book. He had worked for the park service twenty years earlier in the Tetons, so the trip was part research, part reverie, and part mournful return to the rougher mountains of his youth. He was one of those people who competed in and won biathlons-the Olympic winter sport where you ski, then shoot with a rifle, then ski some more. He liked to claim you could drop him into any unfamiliar terrain with a compass and a knife-maybe not even a knife-and expect that he'd survive as long as needed.