My family brought us to an a.ban.don.ed mining town, and without warning, my father and brother sent me and my 8-year-old daughter tumbling down a mine shaft. When we landed, she whispered, “Mom... don’t move.” We stayed still until they left. Then she revealed what my brother said before we fell.

The speck of blue grew larger and sharper with every agonizing step.

The tunnel didn't empty out at a tourist center or a graded road. It ended at the high, rugged lip of the Uncompahgre Gorge, fifty feet above the rushing waters of the Uncompahgre River, where the original Silver Creek drainage culvert emptied waste rock onto the canyon wall.

Melissa and Sophie emerged through a broken iron grate into the biting mountain air.

Above them, the sky was a velvet expanse of ink, dusted with a billion brilliant, indifferent stars. The fresh pine scent hit Melissa’s lungs like medicine, clean and sharp, washing away the stench of sulfur and damp tomb.

She fell to her knees on the narrow ledge outside the tunnel mouth, gripping the rusted iron frame to keep from tumbling down the scree slope into the river below.

"We’re outside," Sophie cried quietly, touching the cold granite of the cliffside. "Mom, we’re outside!"

"We are," Melissa managed a ragged smile, brushing damp hair from her daughter’s forehead.

Down along the valley floor, winding through the canyon roughly half a mile away, was the faint, asphalt ribbon of Highway 550—the Million Dollar Highway. Occasionally, the headlights of a solitary semi-truck swept across the canyon walls, miles out of reach.

Between their ledge and the highway lay a steep, treacherous descent through loose shale, dense aspen groves, and freezing wilderness.

"Can you walk a little more, baby?" Melissa asked.

"I can walk," Sophie said, standing tall despite her shivering frame. "Where are we going?"

"There's an old maintenance shed near the Silver Creek bridge," Melissa recalled from the drive up that morning. "The Colorado Department of Transportation keeps emergency sand and gear there. And usually... an emergency call box."

They began the descent.

Every step was a battle against gravity and exhaustion. Melissa leaned heavily on a fresh aspen branch she had scavenged, her ribs screaming in protest, her left leg dragging. Sophie walked beside her, acting as her mother's eyes in the dark, spotting loose stones and tree roots.

It took two agonizing hours to descend the four hundred feet of elevation to the canyon floor.

By the time they reached the treeline near the base of the highway bridge, the sky in the east was beginning to pale into a faint, frosty gray. Dawn was coming.