We walked into the mountains with our clothes on our backs in borrowed bags, our technical fabrics sleeked in icy rain. The land was grey and green in those parts; the mountains echoed a deep, cold blue back against the light and onto our skins, which made us look pale and fragile in the way we were very possibly designed to look, given our respective genetic histories. Time slowed. 

In the absence of clocks and an internet connection time took its own time, created deep ravines, glaciers, dense shrubs packed tight against the ground, defiant and small against the bluster of the wind. We walked. 

Old snow glowed against a tender sky, boulders, which had split and mossed over, marked our path. The chink, chink of our poles sang as we felt out earth, or rock, or any kind of purchase before we leaned our weight and swung into them. We stank of wet wool. We walked through a valley of giants, up out of the tree line, along a bare rock face where the winds were biting and strong. 

We walked up, as high as we could go until vertigo pulled us down on butts and hands, cold dirt stinging skin, into the saddle of a cratered lake. We followed its edges, descended further into a valley, following the lake and watched it change and shrink to a burn, to a waterfall, to a happy and bubbling stream. My hands turned blue as a I scooped sweet cold water from its curves.

We let time have its way with us.