"I can do without it, also, but we can't go around it; that would take too long."
Boyce looked at Lloyd with a perplexed expression.
"Why did I agree on taking this route, anyway?"
Lloyd grinned and closed his pack while he spoke.
"It's shorter, for one thing." Boyce began. "I wonder, at times, if we will make it there, by taking this way?!"
He drank some water then slung the sack around his neck and shoulders, and Lloyd did the same with his pack.
They both got on their feet and looked at the escarpment then started in its direction, pacing themselves steadily and surely until they were quickly on the other side of the aspen, and were standing at the base of the escarpment's towering cliffs.
"Looks high!" Boyce's brief comment drew a look from Lloyd until he finished his thought. "But — we can't turn back now!"
He laughed for a moment then looked up.
"You know, if someone told me, back when I was a boy, that I would be climbing an impossible rock when I was twenty-one, I would have laughed in their face." Boyce continued to laugh, watching for Lloyd's reaction.