Winter Park is a ski town the travelers find largely intact amid a landscape marked by fire and abandonment. Its chairlifts, buildings, and roadside businesses offer a startling image of ordinary life preserved, but that appearance does not make the town a refuge: the travelers pause only long enough to add fuel, and its familiar public spaces become a setting for Cima’s encounter with the world beyond her canyon.

Approach and Setting

As Hig, Cima, and Pops travel toward Erie, they have only enough fuel to reach their destination. Hig nevertheless wants to land and add a reserve. They circle back to a clear stretch of highway on the west side of Winter Park, land near the town limit, and pour fuel from cans into the aircraft. Pops passes the cans up from the plane’s strut. The stop is practical, governed by the uncertainty of the journey, rather than an excursion planned around the town.

The first view establishes Winter Park’s unusual condition. The chairlifts still hang over the slopes, while new trees have grown nearly to the seats. At the edge of town, a recreation center, a Sinclair station, and Helga’s German Food and Spirits remain standing. Hig notes that the town has miraculously escaped burning. Its survival is not evidence that the surrounding world has recovered: from Winter Park, Pops watches the Gore Range and the burning Never Summers. The town’s preserved structures sit within, rather than apart from, the larger devastation.

The contrast unsettles Hig in a particular way. The intact buildings are frightening because they look almost normal and recall a life whose ordinary signals persist after the life itself has disappeared. Winter Park’s buildings therefore register as more than useful landmarks. They make the lost past visible without restoring it, and their condition sharpens the difference between an inhabited community and a town whose structures remain after its social world has gone.

A Stop at Helga’s German Food and Spirits

Cima points out the German restaurant and wants to go inside. Hig warns that leaving the aircraft and delaying departure could be less safe than continuing, since the town may be empty but cannot be assumed safe. Cima holds to her wish. Hig accepts the brief detour, signals to Pops that they will return in a few minutes, takes an AR-15, and walks with her toward the restaurant. Pops remains by the aircraft, watching the mountains.

The restaurant bears the marks of preparation for a temporary emergency. Its door is absent, its windows are boarded, and the travelers can infer that someone had tried to protect a business and its savings against a bad period. Inside, tables and heavy wooden chairs remain, along with a central fireplace, a bar, and an unbroken mirror. The front area has suffered exposure to weather; farther inside, the furnishings are still in place. These details preserve the restaurant as a recognizable public interior while also showing how little its former purpose can now be taken for granted.

Cima advances to the bar and looks into the mirror. She then begins to cry. The moment follows her insistence on entering a familiar kind of place, but the restaurant cannot offer the ordinary encounter she sought: there is no functioning social life around the bar, only its surviving fixtures and her reflection. Hig holds her. His own reflection also makes the distance from former normality legible to him; he sees his worn, bearded appearance and missing tooth. The scene links Cima’s emotional response to the setting without explaining it away: the preserved room gives her a place to confront what has changed, not a way to undo it.

Beyond the Canyon

Winter Park is also a threshold between the relative enclosure of the canyon and the exposed world beyond it. Cima appears to remain in shock at that wider world, which she understands as empty and burning. The contrast matters because her previous surroundings had insulated her from much of what Hig and Pops have seen. At Winter Park, the surviving buildings initially resemble a route back to the old world; inside the restaurant, their silence and Cima’s tears make clear that resemblance is not restoration.

The stop also belongs to a broader pattern in Hig’s experience of ecological loss. He remembers the disappearance of trout and other species, grieves the warming streams, and continues to seek out mountain places where water and trees persist. In one remembered fishing place, he distinguishes dead forest from green forest that remains or is beginning to return. Those accounts do not establish that the same losses occur at Winter Park itself. They do, however, give the town’s new trees and remaining snow a context: signs of growth and continuity appear amid a regional landscape whose seasonal patterns and living populations have changed profoundly.

The Crossing

After the stop, the route requires Hig to fly over the Continental Divide. He approaches the pass with more concern than he once felt, despite his usual practice of keeping two thousand feet of clearance. Snow remains in the high country, and he considers the possibility of losing an engine above the mountains. He aims for the low point where an old Jeep road crosses the pass, and the low country rises into view as the aircraft makes its way over.

That departure gives Winter Park a precise place in the journey’s geography and structure. The town is a brief pause between the canyon and a difficult mountain crossing: fuel is added, Cima enters a remnant of ordinary public life, and the group returns to the larger risks of travel. Its intact restaurant and roadside buildings cannot cancel the evidence of the burning ranges or make the flight safe. Instead, Winter Park gathers the journey’s central contrast into one stop: preserved forms of the old world endure, but the people passing through them must keep moving.