Iron Mountain, Oregon. The road to the top felt like a back-alley deal between man and geology. Cracked asphalt bleeding into dirt, dust clouds rising like the ghost of every logger who ever cursed that mountain. By the time we got to the trail, my nerves were already jangling like a neon sign on its last leg.

The climb was less hiking and more some mad ritual. Switchbacks cutting into the slope like scars, lungs straining in the thin air while the sun hammered down with the kind of merciless clarity that makes you question your life choices. Every step closer to the summit felt like a dare, just one more bend, one more gasp, one more hallucination of water that isn’t there.

And then the top. God help me, the top. The Three Sisters brooding in the distance, jagged silhouettes like old gods waiting to be appeased. The world stretched out in every direction, green ridges folding into volcanic scars, clouds drifting like lazy conspirators. And that’s when it hit, the rush, the high-voltage madness of knowing we’d dragged ourselves out of the human circus and landed smack in the heart of something primal and unflinching.

Camera shutters firing like machine guns, chasing meteors and lightning bolts between the Sisters. We weren’t tourists anymore, we were lunatics on assignment from some cosmic editor, tasked with capturing the whole absurd, magnificent scene before the sun burned it away.

Iron Mountain didn’t just give us a view. It carved into us, left us buzzing and sleepless, wired on starlight and the raw electricity of being alive in a world that still has teeth.