Two men on snowmobiles dressed head to toe in white and grey camo gear are waiting on the other side.
Beanie hats tugged down over their foreheads. Reflective sunglasses hiding their eyes. The one on the right revs his engine. Suddenly accelerating, he makes a full doughnut turn, churning up snow and spraying it into the air. He roars to an abrupt stop by my door and grins. All suntan and white teeth. I lower the window to meet his gaze.
‘This is Wolf,’ he points behind. ‘And I’m Cooper.’
He says it so confidently in his hard Australian accent, as if it’s perfectly normal that someone’s named after an animal.
‘Ariel sent us and—’ He stops, looking our hire car up and down. ‘Sorry, mate, you can’t go any further in that.’
Rez and I get out to see what the problem is. They’re right. Our four-by-four has sunk to tyre depth in the drift. Swallowed by the snow, there’s no way we can go on.
‘What do you suggest?’ Irritation creeps into Rez’s voice.
‘We get your equipment strapped onto the trailer and head for the mountain,’ he says, barely looking in Rez’s direction.
‘Before we lose the light,’ Wolf adds.
Rez looks between them, at the narrow sledge attached to the back of Wolf’s snowmobile, and then frowns at me. He mouths dickheads.
‘We’re not normally this difficult to reach,’ says Cooper. ‘You’ve come out of season, that’s the problem. Ariel must have warned you about the weather though. She’s a temperamental one, likes to change by the hour, especially when we get higher up.’ He smiles. ‘It’s mad, we have our own weather system up there.’
I look up. The sky is dark and ominous.
‘She warned us, yeah,’ I say sharply. ‘And I’m OK with it or we wouldn’t be here.’
The two men exchange glances and grin. ‘Alrighty,’ says Cooper. ‘Let’s get you loaded up and bounce.’
‘Bounce?’ Rez quietly echoes. I can tell he hates them already. ‘Hey, hey,’ he snaps at Wolf, who’s already unpacking the camera equipment from the boot. ‘Careful with that, that’s fragile and fucking expensive.’
Cooper claps a gloved hand on Rez’s shoulder. ‘We got you, bro, don’t worry.’
My arms are wrapped tightly around Wolf’s waist as we hurtle through the valley. A blurry haze of white and green rushes past as we weave around black ice, dodge tall pines. Launching into the air, we crash into the snow with a thunk so hard the wind’s knocked out of me.
Icy air rushes at me, so cold it hits like a rocket into my chest. For fuck’s sake, slow down! is all I can think as sleet strikes my face like an icy fist.
We follow the glacial river deeper into snow drifts, the valley narrowing, the cliffs rising up sharply on either side. A 500-metre-high wall of golden limestone that not even the most skilled rock climber could master.
The valley is famous for its waterfalls. Cooper told me to keep an eye out for all seventy-two of them. They’re easy to spot – the sub-zero temperature has frozen them solid into icicles. I imagine what it must be like in the spring, the noise of 20,000 litres of water per second pouring over the cliff face into the valley. Now they mark the landscape like sheets of glass. Opaque and shimmering. Like the cliffs have been clad in silver.
Wild beauty is everywhere. Nature has reclaimed its property now the tourists have left. She’s in charge and we’re at her mercy, or at least it feels that way as the wind picks up suddenly, howling through the valley like an angry spirit. Clouds roll in from above, extinguishing the last of the sunlight and blocking any view of the mountains. It feels like we’re being squeezed from every direction.
Pressing down, pressing in.
Boxing us in.
Nature’s coffin.
I breathe a sigh of relief when the cable car station appears on the horizon. We skid to a stop by the chrome, dome-shaped building.
More high security. A fence, razor wires and cameras. Wolf leaps to the ground in a burst of energy while Cooper taps a code into the keypad on the steel-reinforced gate. We follow them inside.
First through a cage and then into the loading dock. A small semicircular platform where the cable car doors are open and waiting for us. It’s a sleek black bubble of a machine. State of the art. All glowing buttons and levers and tinted windows to shield from the glare. A spaceship about to take off.
Some serious money has gone into this and I make a mental note to grill Ariel about where the investment is coming from.
Rez is scowling. He watches the warriors closely as they unload his equipment, irritated they won’t let him help with lifting. The small space is filling up quickly with testosterone and animosity.
‘Here comes the fun bit,’ Cooper says in his Antipodean accent. A lazy drawl. Now we’re out of the storm, I notice how his earlobes are widened with discs. His nose pierced with a small silver ring. He inserts a key into the control deck and presses a sequence of buttons. ‘Hope you’re not afraid of heights.’
With the clouds hanging low, like an impenetrable ceiling, it’s difficult to imagine there’s anything above us.
The doors slide shut, the cable car rocks sideways in a sudden gust of wind that knocks me backwards into Rez and we share a laugh. Then, all of a sudden, it jerks skywards and my stomach drops.