Once in college, I found myself as part of a group that was blazing a trail through the hills of eastern Kentucky. To call our hike “treacherous” is an insult to the Appalachian Mountains. “Difficult,” “brutal,” “perilous” … the thesaurus lacks a good synonym to convey just how hard it was. We were navigating a narrow cliff; a wall of rock to our right and a steep descent into certain death on our left. When we weren’t pushing aside thick forest branches and thorny weeds, we were trusting the tread on our boots wouldn’t betray us by giving way to the mud under our feet, sending us to a slippery demise with our bodies forever unrecovered in the crevasse of a deep ravine. Our guide led us to where we were going, incident-free (save for a few scratches on our face) and the view from our destination was one of those majestic scenes that take your breath away. The beauty and awe made us forget all about the precarious journey. It didn’t make the journey less hard, but certainly m...