Click here for a gallery of photographer Dusan Smetana's outtakes from this trip

When you've been glassing mountainsides for elk and there are none to be seen, your concentration falters and your mind wanders to places it shouldn't go, like, say, the suite you would like to share with a showgirl to find out if what happens in Vegas really does stay in Vegas. On this particular morning, however, my thoughts are as pure as the Rocky Mountain air as they follow a high literary trail to Joseph Conrad's "Youth," the tale of an old seaman, Marlow, reminiscing about his first voyage. I am musing on a passage in the story that goes like this: "And I remember my youth and the feeling that will never come back any more-the feeling that I could last for ever, outlast the sea, the earth, and all men¿¿¿the heat of life in the handful of dust, the glow in the heart that with every year grows dim, grows cold, grows small, and expires-and expires, too soon-before life itself."

This is appropriate because my chances of spending a nanosecond in Las Vegas with a showgirl are less than my chances of becoming an Olympic pole vaulter; and after less than two days on foot and horseback, I fully empathize with that old sailor, yearning for "the feeling that will never come back any more."

Actually, what I yearn for is the absence of feeling, especially in my knees. Also, the arthritis in my left shoulder has flared, a saddle sore burns my rear end, and my feet throb. All this despite the fact that at my annual physical my doctor pronounced me quite fit for someone my age. That last phrase is key.

In my wallet is a kind of birthday card presented by the Social Security Administration three months ago when I reached a chronological milestone. The card has red, white, and blue stripes across the top, and in the white one are the words medicare-health insurance. I may need it when I get out of here, here being Montana's Absaroka wilderness.