My own humble opinion was that such an elaborate statement was hardly necessary. After an afternoon spent scrambling about the Pueblo Indian cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde National Park, the notion was already at the forefront of my mind. Standing atop a stone outcropping I reckoned to be someone's 1,000-year-old living room, the whistling wind occasionally tugged me toward the vast canyon below as if to show in no uncertain terms who was in charge. The wind, I learned, was but a whisper of the maelstrom that was to come.

The shout arrived somewhere around Pagosa Springs, Colo., near the base of Wolf Creek Pass, when a lightning bolt struck the power line next to my SUV as I pushed down on the accelerator. Lightning chased me through rain and sleet over the steep pass, water gushing beneath my wheels, winds howling as the elements conspired against me.

I downshifted and reflected back a year or so, recalling a similarly intimate experience with the earth almighty.

It was the wheels of this SUV that took me there, there being the Canadian Rockies near Fernie, B.C. I was a day behind on our Canadian kayaking excursion, having to wait out the Sabbath in Whitefish, Mont., for a tire store to open. I had managed to run over two nails getting to and from the burly whitewater stretch of the Kootenai River Gorge a day prior and wasn't heading into Canada without the benefit of a spare. Eager for more paddling, Kevin and Dave drove ahead without me.

We were to meet at the Elk River, a Canadian classic broken down in three sections of class V-VI, III-IV and II-III whitewater. I had run the class IV stretch to the bottom a week earlier and, after discussion with local boaters, recommended the upper run as a worthwhile adventure for my visiting friends from California. When I arrived at the lower put-in only an hour and a half after I last spoke with Kevin, I thought I might hang around long enough to meet them for a play run to the designated takeout. As I waited, I decided to hike upstream to scout their progress.

It wasn't long before a large cliff cut me off at the water's edge. I spotted a marginally technical boulder route I thought might go around the impasse, but as I climbed I soon realized that the route only went up. Higher up, in the sun, the rock began to rot and flake and I soon found myself straddling a steep, sharp spine that crumbled under hand and foot.

I should have turned back, but something pushed me further into ever more precarious and dangerous heights. Many times I felt the fragile rocks I clung to might give way entirely, that I had been drawn to this place only to see the earth shift and send me plummeting some 500 feet into the abyss.

When I reached the crux move, I froze. Thoughts and ideas scrolled through my head like graffiti murals painted on the sides of box cars, passing through my brain like billboards on the side of a high-speed train.

Scratching the decayed stone for stable hand and footholds, I considered quite thoroughly how my life might come to an end. Alone, in a relatively remote canyon in Canada, no one knowing my whereabouts. It was a scenario I had never envisioned. I'm smarter than this, I thought. How did I get here?

"I should have turned back, but something pushed me further into ever more precarious and dangerous heights..."

Forget it, I told myself. You ARE here, and that's all that matters. You are climbing, and climbing is about trust. Right now you need faith in yourself.

I weighed the options and opted to reach my leg around the spine of rock to what I considered the shady side, where the rock might be more stable. There, a small piece of stone jutted out about a quarter inch from the face of a seemingly bottomless cliff wall. I jammed all my weight on my right big toe and reached desperately for the next move.