Finding The Walls Of A Box Canyon

How do you fly into a mountain on a perfectly clear day? You don't see it, that's how. You look everywhere but where you should be looking; you see everything but what you should be seeing; you do everything but what you should be doing.
You fail to see that fucking mountain.
You don't fly the airplane like a commercial pilot; you fly it like a student or a child or a fool. You fly it like someone who thinks he is lucky to be in Alaska, someone excited to be out there in the wilderness, like a tourist seeing wolves for the very first time.
You never think to look for it, and so you fly right into a mountain that you didn't know was there.
And within a week, your company hires someone else to take your place, and he doesn't know a damn thing about mountains either.
Welcome to the Last Frontier.

(From The Map of My Dead Pilots by Colleen Mondor)