On a summer family vacation to the upper peninsula of Michigan several years ago, I went trail running on a gorgeous system of cross-country ski trails, everything was going great until I turned around a corner and was overcome with the feeling, “let’s get out of here fast.”

I don’t know why that happened. There was nobody else around, and I couldn’t hear any sounds that sounded like someone hiding behind some trees or bushes, but I just knew that I wanted to hightail it out of there as quickly as possible…

It was the summer of 1998. I was an intern at Pacific Crest Outward Bound School in Bend, Oregon. I was on a 2-week course in the 3 Sisters Wilderness in Central Oregon, assisting the two instructors and teaching some naturalist classes to the students on the course. The final part of the course was to summit a mountain called Broken Top. Broken Top is a crumbling volcano that looks as if it could topple right over when you look at it.