"Stop the car, I mean, slow down, please. Do you think there might be any work around here, Mister?" Steve Jonas is 19 years old in the summer of 1957, riding his thumb north and west. He hitches into the two-horse town of Jackson, Wyoming in a June snowstorm, and comes face to face with the Grand Teton Range, the "peaks that shine by night as by day." Jonas finds work in the National Park, building the mountain trail that is to shape the course of his coming-of-age. It is the late 1950s, a more innocent and sweeter time than the turbulent decades to come, but the realities and aspirations of...

In 1964, newly-minted physician Joseph, just out of his internship, undertakes a two-year assignment as the Peace Corps Physician in Nepal. Many lessons not learned in medical school challenge his ingenuity and inexperience.