The Absarokas form the mountain setting for the final phase of the BCSC wilderness trip, where the group’s preparations give way to independent survival tests. The landscape is not only a backdrop: its camps, routes, weather, and hazards shape the hikers’ choices, while its quiet beauty offers Helen a rare chance to pause and take pleasure in where she is.

Setting and Camp

At one camp in the Absarokas, Beckett points out a stream along the eastern edge and directs the group to pitch there. He also passes along a local warning that the place is haunted, telling the hikers to behave themselves. The combination of practical instruction and ghost story makes the camp feel like a place with its own character, while Beckett’s announcement that it is his favorite place in the range marks a change in Helen’s regard for him: for the first time, she finds herself genuinely liking him.

Helen’s first act on arrival is to trade her boots for flip-flops and take off her pack. Her blisters have healed, leaving tender pink skin, and the relief of removing her gear makes her feel markedly lighter. With camp to set up and dinner to make, there is still work to do, but the prospect of a full day with no further demands makes it seem easy. She closes her eyes in the breeze and notices the field’s magenta, baby-blue, and butter-yellow flowers. In this moment, the Absarokas are not only difficult terrain: they are a place where recovery and attention to small pleasures become possible.

The Course and the Solos

The group enters its third and final week in the Absarokas with the Solos ahead: a twenty-four-hour exercise in which Beckett will send participants out in three separate groups to navigate, find water, make and break camp, and repeatedly choose how to proceed. Before forming the groups, he asks each hiker to name four people they would most like to travel with. Helen would like to hike with Windy, but expects Windy and Jake to choose each other. Hoping to avoid spending her remaining days preoccupied with their uncertain relationship, Helen writes that she wants anyone but Jake and circles the request twice.

While Beckett considers the requests, the hikers continue toward a part of the range where the trail divides into three roughly equivalent routes, one for each group. He warns them that the impending test is the purpose of their training, but the day’s immediate undertaking is a brutally difficult pass called Devil’s Crotch. The contrast between the announced ordeal and the punishing hike that precedes it makes the course’s progression tangible: even before the hikers are sent out alone, the terrain demands stamina.

Three days later, Beckett announces the groups. Helen is assigned Jake, despite her emphatic request. On the morning of the exercise, he reviews each group’s route on a map; the hikers wave goodbye and set off in three directions. Their hoped-for reunion the following afternoon depends on avoiding a catalogue of wilderness dangers: falling widow-makers, bears, avalanches, scarce water, icy rivers, cooking accidents, getting lost, or giving up. The Absarokas turn the exercise’s abstract requirement to survive into concrete exposure to risk.

Landscape, Risk, and Narrative Role

The wilderness course makes navigation and self-sufficiency inseparable from the Absarokas’ physical demands. Beckett identifies Helen as the group’s best map reader, a distinction that matters as the participants separate onto unfamiliar routes. The Solos require each group to find its way and water as well as establish and dismantle camp, so the range functions as an active constraint on what the hikers can accomplish, rather than scenery they simply pass through.

The Absarokas also frame a contrast between what Helen initially wants to avoid and what the course requires her to face. She tries to arrange distance from Jake, but Beckett’s grouping places them together for the independent test. Meanwhile, the same landscape that threatens injury and disorientation gives her an unhurried day at camp, a stream at the edge of the site, and a field of flowers to notice. Its significance rests in that doubleness: the range offers relief without becoming safe, and beauty without removing the need to make consequential decisions.