We found ourselves in an incredible, almost unearthly landscape shaped by glaciers, rivers and inexorable wind – a quarter-mile-wide bench with little vegetation, piles of boulders, a high ridge some thousand feet above us to our east, and a steep thousand-foot drop to our west with the myriad peaks along a hundred miles of the divide stretched out beyond. The wind, mostly in our faces but sometimes blissfully off the starboard bow, was like a living thing, blasting, swirling, sometimes even lifting us up so that we would stagger to keep our footing.