Altitude

The rangers at the base station called her Queen of the Mountain. Sarah liked the title. It was her world; hers and hers alone. The research project kept her busy during the off-season, and she had all the human contact she could handle during the spring, summer and early fall months. She couldn't imagine being happier, although she missed the constant companionship and love she had once known.

He had thoroughly enjoyed his vacation in Maui. Steve wondered how he had let himself be coerced into a backpacking trip in the High Sierra. But he had, and the more he thought about it, the more he decided that it might just be the break he needed to rekindle his creative side. He knew his clients loved the ads he had crafted for them, but he was struggling to come up with just the right pitch to sell whatever was on his desk at the moment. A friend had suggested that he needed a love life, something he had immediately dismissed as far too time consuming. He was perfectly happy with his occasional one-night stands.

Neither of them ever imagined that the Sierra would trap them together, and force them to co-exist simply to survive. What they found was that co-existence meant dealing with passions that each had forgotten they had; intimacy that had ceased to exist in their perfect lives.