I held Mama’s hand and looked up. The mountain was so big and so white and so perfectly pointy at the top, it looked exactly like an ice cream cone somebody had built for a giant — vanilla, dipped in clouds.
“Are we really going up there?” I asked.
“Just a little bit of the way,” Papa said. But I secretly decided we were going all the way to the very top scoop, because that’s where the good stuff always is.
The sun was still waking up when we started, and so were the trees — everything gray-blue and quiet, like the whole mountain was whispering. That’s when I saw them: three baby deer, wobbly on their skinny legs, watching us from the edge of the trail. I froze. They froze. Then, without saying anything to each other, we all agreed it was fine, and they went back to their breakfast and we went back to ours — which was walking, mostly uphill, mostly straight up, like the trail had decided to skip the easy part entirely.
My legs burned. My cheeks got hot even though the air was cold. “This is the hardest part,” Papa kept saying, and every time, he was wrong, because there was always a harder part after that.
And then — I stepped out of the trees and stopped so fast that Papa almost bumped into me.
It was a meadow. But not a regular meadow. It was a meadow made entirely of flowers — purple ones, white ones, tiny yellow ones that looked like they were smiling — and the mountain stood right behind it, so close and so bright I had to squint. I turned in a slow circle with my arms out.
“This is it,” I whispered. “This is the fairyland.”
I looked everywhere for the fairies. And instead I found something round and fat and fuzzy, sitting on a rock, watching us like it owned the whole mountain.
“A beaver!” I gasped. “A wild mountain beaver!”
“I think that’s a marmot, sweetheart,” Mama laughed. I did not believe her. There was another one. And another. By the time we’d walked all the way around, I had counted so many beavers that I stopped counting and just started waving at each one like an old friend.
We climbed higher, around the whole shoulder of the mountain, the world opening up on every side like someone slowly pulling back a curtain. Behind us: the valley, tiny trees, tiny lakes. Above us: the glacier, a river of blue-white ice that Papa said was older than Grandma. In front of us, always, the mountain — closer now, close enough to touch, or so it seemed.
Coming back down was a different kind of hike. The path had crumbled in places, loose and narrow, the mountain letting go of little pieces of itself with every step. Papa held my hand tighter here than anywhere else. “Both feet, every time,” he told me, and I said it back to him like a spell — both feet, every time — all the way down, watching my shoes instead of the view, because for a little while the view wasn’t the important part. My parents didn’t let me look down the mountainside. They looked down for me.
And then, right when my legs had almost nothing left, I heard water — real water, rushing and laughing — and there, finally, in the stream by the trail, were actual beavers. Real ones. Not marmots pretending.
“See?” I told Mama. “I told you there were beavers.”
She didn’t argue that time.
The trail brought us down through the mist to a waterfall — Myrtle Falls, tumbling white over black rock, with the whole ice cream mountain framed perfectly behind it, like it had been waiting all day to show off. We stood at Paradise with our tired legs and our pink cheeks and looked back up at everything we’d just walked around.
I didn’t find any fairies that day. But I found their whole kingdom — the flower meadow, the fuzzy round guards standing watch, the water that finally led us home. And I decided that was even better, because now I know exactly where it is, in case I ever need to visit again.