When, a few weeks ago, I had an opportunity to spend a day hiking in the mountains of Colorado, I leaped into it.  I had not been to Colorado's mountains in some time.  I started early, leaving Denver before 8:00 A.M., headed to Rocky Mountain National Park.  Once there, I caught the trailhead to the crest of the Continental Divide.  I had not been to the top in eight years.  It was a relatively short hike, four and a half miles, with an elevation gain of nearly 3,000 feet.  It was great to be back, great to be in the heights, wonderful to breathe in the crisp alpine air, the oxygen thin wind that, on this day, powered over the divide at over sixty miles an hour.  As I ascended, I watched the boreal forest fade into the stunted spruce trees of the sub-alpine zone, then the treeless expanse of the high altitude tundra that sprawled across the lower edges of the peaks that thrust themselves into the nothing but blue sky.  Magnificence unleashed.
     Thinking about the years that had passed since I last stood on top, I marveled that the land had not really changed, that the features I had seen eight years before remained today, that the vistas I had seen in years past still lay before me, that the sun was still illuminating the same shadows on the same mountains.  On the other hand, everything had changed.  I had changed, the animals had changed, the world had changed.  Many years ago, as he lay dying on the battlefield, an Native American warrior remarked, "Nothing lives long but the sun and the mountains."  So true, so very true.  However, as any geologist or astronomer knows, one day even the mountains will no longer be, and one day even the sun will no longer shine.
     So will anything last?  Not really:  as the cosmos came out of nothing, so it will fade into nothing.  But the question remains:  where will "nothing" be?