The next morning, after a hearty breakfast, we ski from the house into a small canyon that offers beautiful and challenging skiing.

As we ski down through the canyon it becomes steeper and narrower and we pass among complexes of lovely snow formations.

As the canyon becomes more challenging sometimes the only way to get across the open water creek that flows through the canyon is to ski cautiously across fallen timber logs on the snow pillows they support. A misstep and collapse of the snow pillow has consequences.

All the guests are good skiers, but this sort of “adventure ski” is something new for them and sometimes they misjudge the topography and the properties of the snow they must traverse and they suffer the consequences.

Steadily the skiing becomes more challenging. As the canyon narrows the route options become fewer and the pitches become tougher.

Even the strongest skier of the group found this pitch tough. But, throughout the entire trip their good humor remained. Never was there a complaint let alone a whine. They enjoyed every challenge, even when the challenge whipped them.

After we reached the bottom far end of the canyon and headed back home via the trail we had pioneered in. Going out on our trail helped, except it was up hill.

Despite or perhaps because the adventure was a challenge everyone enjoyed themselves immensely. Two of the girls were down hill skiers and both said this was a lot more fun than simply going up on a lift and skiing down. I agreed. The delights of navigating through a complex landscape have pleasured human beings for tens of thousands of years.

The time for my friends to return to the world comes too soon. The girls entertained fantasies of dropping out of school and staying here forever. A group of five buffalo hanging out just outside the back door delayed us for only a little while.

Going north, as the sun headed toward setting, we passed through large areas burned during the great fires of the summer of 1988. I have come to appreciate and even to enjoy these stark graphic burned landscapes that are now so much a part of the Yellowstone lodgepole pine forest.