I just finished reading The Last Season by Eric Blehm, about a backcountry ranger in King's Canyon National Park who disappeared mysteriously in 1996 while in the wilderness there. Delivering a gripping read, the author not only decribes the search for the ranger, but the ranger's life and situation leading up to his disappearance. But what struck me most about the book was the resounding feeling of longing for the mountains on behalf of the ranger, something I strongly relate to. I've spent much time in the mountains, and I, too, feel their call, feel them pulling at me when I am away. I long to wander in rugged, alpine terrain, to gaze at meadows strewn with vivid purple and red wildflowers, to see the tumbled forms of rockslides and talus slopes, and the deep blue of mountain lakes nestled in bowls and cirques.

My parents took me to the Canadian Rockies when I was four, and I was immediately hooked. Those mountains answered some call inside me, some longing. Hiking into the high country, with steep granite falling away beside me, the sweep of emerald moss beneath tumbling waterfalls roaring away from snowmelt, crossing snowfields and listening for pika in talus slopes, is something incomparable to everything else I've experienced. I've felt kinship with other writers captivated by wilderness -- John Muir, Henry Thoreau, and now the vanished backcountry ranger.

I can vividly imagine what it was like for him, twenty eight seasons in the backcountry of the Sierra Nevadas, an enchanted place Muir described as the Range of Light.