The White Desert
A young man named Barry Houston drives into the small Colorado town of Dominion, where the spring warmth fights a desperate rear-guard action against winter's lingering grip on the mountains beyond. Warned against crossing Hazard Pass, where snow still clings to the pines and the columbine blooms beside ten-foot drifts, Barry fills his car with gas and heads into the treacherous high country toward a place called Tabernacle. The Rocky Mountains surge around him in savage beauty, their streams running brown with the melt of the continental divide, and with each mile the landscape grows more hostile, more indifferent to human ambition. But the true journey lies deeper than the terrain. As Barry battles the mountain's vicious temperament, he carries with him the weight of unanswered questions about his own identity, secrets that have shaped his path and might yet unravel everything he believes about himself. This is an adventure story where the wilderness functions as both obstacle and mirror, reflecting back what the traveler refuses to see in himself. Cooper writes with a poet's eye for the high country, rendering its harsh grandeur in prose that feels both intimate and vast. A romance woven through with mystery and the elemental struggle between human will and mountain indifference.
