I had just arrived from the mainland, so it felt like nine when the phone rang at 3 AM. It was the front desk, telling me that the van had arrived.

The van was in the front lot, with a trailer hitched. I boarded the back of the van and off we went.

As we drove up the winding two-lane road, the vegetation around us began to shrink, from big thick trees, to smaller pines, to shrubs and grasses, and finally to bare rock.

We arrived near the summit, and our driver began setting up our bikes while we walked to the crater’s rim. And waited. I watched my breath escape in little clouds and tried to remind myself where I was.

Soon the horizon changed from purple to red to dark orange. A bright orange line appeared above the clouds and I experienced what Mark Twain called “the sublimest sightâ€? he’d ever witnessed.

Having seen sunrise from the top of the world, there was now no place to go but down.