So I went back, on a warm, safe day, on a wide and gentle overlook trail far from any cliff, with my son.

I had needed to do it, I realized, standing there — needed to change what the mountain meant, before it hardened permanently into the single worst place in the world.

Trauma does a strange thing to geography: it can take an entire landscape, thousands of square miles of ancient stone and forest and sky, and reduce it, in your mind, to the six terrible feet of a single ledge.

For six months, Glacier National Park had not been a park to me.

It had been a grave that had missed.

And I did not want to leave it that way, because leaving it that way would have meant that Brandon still owned a piece of the world, still got to keep one beautiful place locked in fear, long after I had taken everything else back from him.