Snow clouds were breaking over the rugged Colorado Mountains in early October. Dude Thomas worried beyond belief that he was going to get trapped in an unforgiving blizzard. He could neither see any fires or city lamps at night nor could he find any smoke from campfires during the day. He did the only thing that he could think of at the moment and just kept trying to walk.

His impatient Father had denied logic the entire trip. He seemly was determined to get to the other side of the Rockies before the onslaught of winter set in. This one-mindedness had cost his Father his life on a narrow pass.

Instead of getting out of the covered wagon and leading the scared horses as he should have, he instead used the whip. The horses losing footing slipped and stumbled and the weight of the wagon became an unstoppable force pulling everything with its momentum down the treacherous mountainside his father had been trying to navigate. The wagon tumbled down the steep cliff taking everything they owned except a young Dude Thomas.

Dude savior had been nature. He had left the wagon to take a whiz and a few moments later his father screamed as the wagon left the tapered path and crashed down the mountain side crumbling into many pieces.

Dude was dumfounded more so because he didn’t even have rope to repel down the mountain to bury his father and scavenge any useable items. With tears in his eyes and the clothes on his back he started walking. Not having a clue to where he would go nor where he would end up.

He knew it would take several days to walk back to the last town they had left but with the snow coming that task would become difficult to a matter of luck. Without food and a grumbling stomach the fourteen year old Jamie “Dude” Thomas was in dire straights.

Dude had lived in a small town in Illinois and knew how to hunt and fish. But he had neither the inclination nor equipment to hunt or fish. The mountains and odd trail his Father had picked was without doubt the absolute worse for the both of them.

Dude was not a mountain man, he was lost, he was hungry, and it was going to snow. He knew crying would not help but he sometimes felt like it. Not a soul in sight to even ask directions in a vast landscape of seemly endless peaks and ridges.