The author, along with his wife and 18-year-old daughter, and instructors Justin Matterson and Ed Ley-Wilson, were trekking in the Andes of Peru to visit Elvin Berg, a man who had saved the author's life during an Amazon expedition 15 years earlier. However, they walked into the middle of guerrilla warfare and drugs trading and discovered that Berg had been brutally murdered. Anxiously attempting the return home they were forced by illness to stop in a remote mountain village, and there discovered Berg's 6-year-old daughter Elizabeth.
