The problem is: we don't care. The landscape isn't what makes your story. It's your characters and your plot that matter. Start out with THAT. Tell us about the character and what he/she is concerned about. Environment can (and should) be hinted at in your opener, but it isn't what matters. Your character is what will hook us in.

Choices for a character are excellent in fiction. So, good job with that, but... Immediately after we learn Alex has two choices, we are told that it isn't a hard choice. This statement/thought pretty much kills any interest in what follows. My suggestion is to save the "not a hard choice to make" bit until after the two choices are presented to the reader. Let us mull over the differences first (or at least read them first) and, perhaps, decide for ourselves which might be the best route for Alex to take. When Alex makes her decision, we'll begin to see her true nature, what makes her who she is. Does that make sense?

On Elan's point: I think that the lack of character motivation is truly what troubled Elan, and it troubles me as well, which is precisely what my first paragraph attempts to address. Without that, the setting might be overwhelming; with motivation, the setting will be fine, is my point. Give us a reason to care about Alex if possible.

"Alex sat at the edge of the stream resting as she examined the road in front of her." You've got Alex performing three verbs in this sentance with a number of complex objects, and you've missed a comma where it makes a real difference to the syntax. I can figure it out, but it takes a bit. Unfortunately, I can't know which road is being examined here no matter how hard I try. Not that it especially matters, but it does create clarity problems. I also don't know the orientation of the stream with respect to the various roads described, which also may be unimportant.

Then you go on to use phrases like "there the road" "dizzying steepness" "tense with apprehension" in apparent ignorance of the not very subtle implications of these phrases in relation to the relative subjects. Finally, after a good bit of description based on Alex's observations, you tell us that she's surrounded by fog that prevents all observation beyond a short distance from her current position. I suppose that you mean it became impenetrable only in one direction, but since you don't tell us which direction that is, we can't draw much useful information from the text itself.