Mountain pass

So, so I was gonna say, we, we, we did a little mountain climbing movies earlier this year.

We did, uh, a documentary anyways about the Dyatlov, uh, Pass incident, and then I ended up going down a little bit of k- a, kind of a rabbit hole of like K2 and Everest, and I ended up watching some Everest movies and ended up reading some more stuff about that.

After, lit- literally after we did that, uh, that podcast.

And so when we were just talking, uh, about, you know, a week ago, and I was like, "Oh, we should do The Eiger Sanction of all things," I, uh, not that I ever get any pushback from you, but I got...

Mm.

When the Mountain Pass is open, I'm 60.

So my constituents don't see me much in the little Snake River Valley in the winter.

Yeah.

You don't really know their history as well, except with Hawke.

So, uh, what did you choose? Did you choose going through the mountain pass or the sustained attack?

I did the mountain pass.

I also did the mountain pass.

And it begins again.

I never do sustained attack [laughs]

If that's how it was framed to me, then yes, I would've chosen to save someone.

Yes.

The servant woman carefully wrapped the great ladies up in their gaudy silk cloaks, and the man servant helped them off the raft onto the backs of the horses.

The little party rode away up a lonely-looking mountain pass, and as we fluttered on, we caught occasional glimpses of their bright colours in and out of the rocks, until they disappeared entirely over the crest of a distant hill.

That night we moored the raft at Cheveh, a village backed by high hills, the last spurs of a great range of snow mountains, at whose base we had been winding in and out.

We arrived at sunset, just as the women were trooping down with jars on their heads to fetch water from the river.

And we pulled over and sat there for about five minutes.

And, uh- Drove on up to Mountain Pass and like I said, uh-

Tell me something.

Had you said this mentally crying out or had you said it aloud?

This had been brought in case we found some cave system, with air quiet enough to allow such a rapid and easy method in place of the usual rock-chipping method of trailblazing.

walking cautiously downhill over the crusted snow toward the stupendous stone labyrinth that loomed against the opalescent west we felt almost as keen a sense of imminent marvels as we had felt on approaching the unfathomed mountain pass four hours previously True, we had become visually familiar with the incredible secret concealed by the barrier peaks, yet the prospect of actually entering primordial walls reared by conscious beings perhaps millions of years ago, before any known race of men could have existed, was nonetheless awesome and potentially terrible in its implications of cosmic abnormality.

Though the thinness of the air at this prodigious altitude made exertion somewhat more difficult than usual, both Danforth and I found ourselves bearing up very well, and felt equal to almost any task which might fall to our lot.

It took only a few steps to bring us to a shapeless ruin worn level with the snow, while ten or fifteen rods farther on there was a huge, roofless rampart, still complete in its gigantic, five-pointed outline, and rising to an irregular height of ten or eleven feet.

Now, outspread below us, it loomed like a dream fantasy against a westward mist through whose northern end the low reddish Antarctic sun of early afternoon was struggling to shine.

And when for a moment that sun encountered a denser obstruction and plunged the scene into temporary shadow, the effect was subtly menacing in a way I can never hope to depict.

Even the faint howling and piping of the unfelt wind and the great mountain passes behind us took on a... wilder note of purposeful malignity the last stage of our descent to the town was unusually steep and abrupt and a rock outcropping at the edge where the grade changed led us to think that an artificial terrace had once existed there under the glaciation we believed there must be a flight of steps or its equivalent when at last we plunged into the labyrinthine town itself clambering over fallen masonry and shrinking from the oppressive nearness and dwarfing height of omnipresent crumbling and pitted walls our sensations again became such that i marvel at the amount of self-control we retained danforth was frankly jumpy and began making some offensively irrelevant speculations about the horror at the camp which i resented all the more because i could not help sharing certain conclusions forced upon us by many features of this morbid survival from nightmare antiquity the speculations worked on his imagination too for in one place where a debris littered alley turned a sharp corner he insisted that he saw faint traces of ground markings which he did not like whilst elsewhere he stopped to listen to a subtle imaginary sound from some undefined point A muffled musical piping, he said, not unlike that of the wind in the mountain caves, yet somehow disturbingly different.

The ceaseless five-pointedness of the surrounding architecture and of the few distinguishable mural arabesques had a dimly sinister suggestiveness we could not escape, and gave us a touch of terrible subconscious certainty concerning the primal entities which had reared and dwelt in this unhallowed place.

All right.

We got the appetizers are Mountain Pass crudités straight from California, but actually processed in China.

They peeled the cucumbers in China.

For an entree, we have General Tso's chicken two ways.

We're only 10 yards away now.

For stroke three, the clue is named after a mountain pass in the Western Alps.

Ooh.

Dog associated with the Alps would be a St. Bernard, but I've got a feeling that's named for a saint for some reason, not a mountain pass.

But not knowing the geography of the Alps to name any mountain passes there, I think I'll just try it and we'll say St. Bernard.

St. Bernard from 10 yards away.

We did some lucky putting and rolled it 10 yards into the hole.

true.