Altitude

The rangers at the base station called her Queen of the Mountain. Sarah liked the title. 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. The more he thought about it, the more Steve decided that a back-packing trip in the High Sierra might just be the break he needed. 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 he needed a love life, an idea he immediately dismissed. 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.