Buy the Book ANGELS OF LIGHT The rock climbers of Yosemite Valley – admired for their skill, notorious for their adventures, astonishingly innocent in their childlike devotion to climbing. The discovery of two tons of drugs and a smuggler’s corpse in a frozen High Sierra lake is the death of that innocence. The climbers’ world of carefree squalor and dedication to sport proves unable to resist the temptations of big money. John Dog Coloradas has for ten years been one of those tough, fearless children, each climb a revelation of what his body and mind can do, like a child’s amazing progression from crawling to walking to running. Now, at age twenty-eight, he quickly approaches the end of childhood, brought to a close not by an aging body and the commitments of love, but by the greed and violent ceremonies of the drug trade. The crash of a marijuana-loaded plane sounds the starting gun for a race between the authorities and seekers of easy money, and the climbing deaths that follow paralyze the climbers’ base camp with fear and paranoia. Isolated from his family of colleagues, who are broken by mistrust, John Dog acts alone, returning to the lake for a brutal reckoning with the forces that brought death to his friends and destroyed his world’s innocence. Angels of Light is a story of double jeopardy – the world’s most dangerous sport wedded to the world’s most desperate business. Angels of Light is also a penetrating tale of men and women whose lives of messy passions, casual bonds, and talents squandered in the valley, are transformed – if only for those moments spent on vertical rock – by the elemental pursuit of physical risk and the nerveless concentration of effort that are ascent.