On Being on the Top of the World

We three are on the spine of an unnamed nunatak rising out of an unnamed glacier, and we are having a conversation about the age of rocks. Here, June 28 in the last year of the millenium is a blazing blue twenty-four hour day, the temperature varies from a constant two to four degrees, and we sit on our backpacks in a virtual ocean of black mountain peaks and snow eight hundred kilometers from the North Pole. Much closer to the North Pole than to my home in Edmonton, Alberta. I have questions.