The Ullr Mountains are a remote wilderness on Midgard, remembered by Mickey Barnes as one of the emptiest places on an already sparsely populated planet. In his recurring vision, the mountains’ solitude becomes the setting for an uncanny encounter with a giant caterpillar, making this familiar landscape a point of contrast between remembered home and the unfamiliar life of Niflheim.

Landscape and Remoteness

The mountains’ trail runs for eight hundred kilometers through untouched wilderness along the crest. Its landmarks include waterfalls, vistas stretching a hundred kilometers, and trees that had been growing for three centuries since the original terraformers seeded the region. Midgard contains much empty space, but Mickey Barnes regards the Ullr Mountains as the emptiest place on an otherwise mostly empty planet; over four end-to-end walks, he recalls seeing no more than two or three other people.

That scale of solitude gives the setting its defining quality. The trail is not merely scenic but exceptionally removed from human company: the long distances, old-growth landscape, and rarity of other travelers make isolation an ordinary condition of being there.

The Recurring Vision

For several weeks, Mickey Barnes experiences the same vision as he drifts to sleep or wakes. It returns him to a campsite in the mountains, where he sits on a log before a small fire. The setting begins as an ordinary memory of wilderness, and Mickey considers homesickness as a possible explanation for the experience.

The vision turns uncanny when a giant caterpillar appears across the fire. Mickey is not frightened, though he recognizes that this calmness feels dreamlike. He tries to understand the creature’s speech, but its sounds remain unintelligible; as he listens, his head begins to ache. The fire then runs backward, unburning the sticks and drawing smoke back into itself. When Mickey looks up again, the caterpillar fades until only its smile remains.

Place in the Wider Story

The vision’s mountain setting is distinct from the underground environment where Mickey encounters a giant creeper on Niflheim. In that episode, the animal carries him through tunnels and leaves him in a chamber; the difference in setting matters, and the mountain vision does not establish that the creature is literally present in the Ullr Mountains. Instead, the recurring scene brings the remembered wilderness of Midgard into a story increasingly shaped by contact with Niflheim’s native life.

That contrast widens beyond the underground. After Niflheim’s snow has been gone for a few months, lichen gives way to grasslike growth and woody shrubs, while small creeper-like animals and a sunning, eight-legged reptile appear outside the dome. Against this emerging alien ecology, the Ullr Mountains remain a remembered landscape of long-established forests and near-total human absence. Their return in the vision joins the comfort of familiar solitude to an encounter that Mickey cannot understand.