4
Sam pushed himself up the trail. He’d left the bakery at noon, after a typical nine-hour day, baker’s hours. And he enjoyed unwinding on the hiking routes that abounded so close to Leavenworth that he could walk to the trailheads. In Rhode Island, the biggest hill had been eight hundred feet and been a half-hour drive away. Now he lived at twelve hundred feet and couldn’t turn around without seeing a half dozen eight thousand footers.
During his one month here, he’d learned that hiking the Cascades was a different challenge than back East, and not just the elevation. A wrong turn there could lead you back to the highway miles away from your car; do the same thing here and you could walk a hundred miles without ever seeing another human, or a road. Wilderness that even jets took a while
