dum spiro, spero
– Part of the official state motto of South Carolina. Literally, “While I breathe, I hope.” Or more loosely, “Where there is life, there is hope.”
SATURDAY AFTERNOON, Kristi and Megan left the confluence where they last saw me, hiked up the West Fork of Blue John Canyon, and sat down to have lunch. The two young women relaxed and chatted for about a half hour then packed up their trash and started on their journey up the wash. Sometime during the next hour, they became disoriented and weren’t able to interpret their map to navigate around the dead end below a fifteen-foot cliff rising up from the canyon floor. Backtracking, then returning upcanyon, pacing around below the cliff, they spent an hour trying to figure out the instructions that called for them to bypass the cliff on the right side of the canyon.
“If we go up the right side, it looks like we’ll have to go out the right-hand canyon. I don’t think that’s the way to go.” Kristi pointed at the two conjoined branches of the canyon upstream from their vantage. “And it’s sketchy-looking, trying to cross that ledge over to the left canyon.”
“Yeah. I’m not climbing up this overhang, either. But how else do we get up there?” The sandstone slab in front of Megan was discouragingly steep, even curling back over itself in a lip at the top. Flipping open the guidebook, Megan found the page marker for Blue John Canyon. “OK, here. The book says, ‘Walk along the right (east) side on a little trail, then route-find down two steep sections.’ Are we sure that side is east?”
“I don’t think either side is east. East is down the canyon, where we came from. We’re hiking up the West Fork, so we’re going west. I don’t get it; there is no east side. Can I see the map again?”
“Yeah, sure-here.” Megan handed the map over to Kristi, running her finger over the guidebook page again and again.
“Man, I wish Aron were here-he’d have this figured out in no time.” She sighed and started the route-finding process over again. “OK, so we put my bike up here, at the head of the West Fork. And we’re here…or somewhere around here. We haven’t left the main drainage. Yeah, we have to go left. Why does it say right?”
“Oh…my…God,” Megan blurted out. “Kristi, we are total idiots. It’s on the right on the way down the canyon. But we’re going up. The ‘little trail’ is on our left. It’s gotta be up there somewhere.” She pointed up to the left.
“Oh, man-you’ve got to be kidding me. That’s ridiculous. How did we miss that?” Kristi felt crushed that they had duped themselves with such a rookie mistake (akin to holding the map upside down).
Megan quickly found a sandy ledge on their left that cut back and forth up the canyon wall like a wheelchair ramp. They followed it up and over the cliff, where they continued up the wash until the footprints petered out into sandy hillsides textured by miniature ravines and water drainages. Two hours later, well after five P.M., they arrived at the main dirt road where Kristi’s bike was locked to a pine tree. Kristi lost the rock-paper-scissors toss to see who would ride the bike back to get her truck at the Granary Spring Trailhead. On the ride, Kristi searched the plateau for my red mountain bike. Had she known where to look, she would have seen it still leaning against a juniper tree a hundred yards off the left side of the road when she was about halfway back to the trailhead. By the time she mounted her bike on the roof rack of her 4Runner at the Granary Spring Trailhead and drove back to pick Megan up, Kristi had decided that they’d taken so long in the canyon that I must have come around to meet them already, and they’d missed the rendezvous.
Pulling over to the side of the dirt access road in front of her friend, Kristi rolled down her window and joked, “Hey there, you need a lift?”
Resting in the seats, the women filled their water bottles and drank up, rehydrating after the tiring hike up the West Fork. Megan asked Kristi, “Should we go back to the Granary Spring Trailhead and wait for Aron?”
“I think he made it out before us, actually.”
Megan didn’t believe it. “No way, he had like ten miles left to hike. There’s no way he already got out and came to look for us.”
“But I looked for his bike, and I didn’t see it. There aren’t that many places to hide a bike out there. I think he’s gone. He probably went to Goblin Valley to get to the party.”
Megan figured Kristi had missed seeing my bike and that I would be around in another hour or two. “Should we go back just to see if he shows up?”
Kristi was concerned about her fuel situation, knowing it would be twenty-five miles to the nearest gas station. She hesitated. “If we drive around much more, we won’t make it to Hanksville. We’ve got maybe thirty miles left-we should really go and get gas and just meet him at Goblin Valley before it gets dark.”
Not feeling strongly about it one way or the other, Megan acquiesced, and the friends drove to Hanksville for gas and a hamburger and milk shake at a greasy spoon called Stan’s.
An hour later, around the same time that Brad and Leah were roving the desert back roads at Goblin Valley, Kristi and Megan turned off the highway into the state park, looking for the same party. A large sign indicated that the campground was full. Kristi stopped the vehicle to consider their next move.
“Should we go to the campground and try to find the party?” Megan asked.
“I don’t know.” Kristi laughed at herself, then explained, “It’s funny, this whole day has been so indecisive. ‘Should we wait or should we go get gas? Should we go this way or that?’ ”
“It’ll be fun, but I’m tired.”
“Me, too.” Then Kristi reconsidered. “But it’ll be fun.”
Megan said, “You know what’s going to happen? We go in there, and everybody’ll be drinking, and then we’ll drink. And then it will be dark, and the campground is full, and we’ll be drunk and have to go drive around the desert looking for a place to camp.”
Figuring they would find me over at the Little Wild Horse Canyon the next morning, Kristi and Megan turned around and drove down the highway on the way to Little Wild Horse until the pavement ended. They pulled off on a spur road, where they camped out that night. Sunday morning, they took their time getting ready and then drove the short commute, parking next to a Toyota Tacoma at the parking area for Little Wild Horse. Kristi noticed the vehicle first.
“Hey, do you remember what kind of truck Aron has?”
“Uh-uh. I don’t think he told us,” Megan said, still feeling tired from the previous day’s effort in Blue John.
Kristi said, “That Toyota looks like it could be his. It’s got skis and a bike. And it’s got Colorado license plates. I bet that’s his truck.”
“He’s probably already in the canyon,” suggested Megan.
Kristi agreed. “Yeah, it’s already eleven-thirty. He probably went in.”
“We should put a note on his windshield with our e-mails, in case we don’t see him in the slot.”
“But what if it’s not his truck?”
Megan was used to exchanging e-mail addresses with people, to arrange future trips and invite them to visit Moab. She was surprised she hadn’t done that with me the day before. “Well, if it’s his, he’ll have our e-mails, and if it’s not, they’ll just throw it away.”
“It’s an out-and-back canyon, though. If he’s in there, then we’ll see him on his way out.”
“OK, then. Should we have lunch before we go and see if Aron shows up here?”
“Hmm, I’m not really hungry yet.” Kristi was ready for some hiking and exploring.
While they were walking, Megan continued speculating about whether they would see me at Little Wild Horse. “Do you think he came and went already?”
Kristi pondered the question for a few seconds. “I guess he either got up really early and went through it already, or he’s so completely hungover that he decided not to go hiking today at all.”
“Why didn’t we get his phone number?”
“We were just going to see each other again.”
“Yeah, but that’s weird. I’d usually have exchanged numbers or e-mails or something, and we didn’t. He was really nice. That was so cool that we met him in the canyon, and he hiked with us and didn’t just blow by us.”
The pair enjoyed themselves through the morning, exploring the narrow slot of Little Wild Horse. In the end, they doubled back on their entry path, coming out the same slot to the parking area. After packing Kristi’s white 4Runner with the remnants of a weekend of off-road adventuring, they drove back through Green River to Moab on Sunday afternoon. Megan wondered what had happened to me, but neither thought about something out of the ordinary. There were too many rational explanations. They didn’t worry about whether they would see me again; they talked about how much fun they’d had over the weekend and about how refreshing it was to get away from work for a change. They agreed it was too bad that they had to go back to the Outward Bound warehouse the next day to prepare supplies for another set of upcoming trips. They were hardly ready to trade their carefree desert explorations for their indoor offices, but they decided they would go out again soon, and with that promise, the shock of returning to civilization lost some of its sting.
After helping me get my truck unstuck from the ice and mud on Thursday afternoon, my friends Brad and Leah Yule left the Mount Sopris area near Carbondale, Colorado, and drove the scenic highway over forested McClure Pass on their way to the southwest part of the state. It was well after dark when they pulled off Highway 550 into the scenic mining town of Silverton, where they slept in the back of Brad’s truck right on Main Street. Leah was already four months pregnant so the next day, she caught a ride with her mom and went shopping in Durango while Brad skied Silverton Mountain with some of his colleagues from Aspen’s Incline Ski Shop. Brad and his coworkers had saved up their tips for the entire season to pay for a trip to the recently opened experts-only ski mountain; lift tickets were over a hundred dollars each, but that included a guide and a unique in-bounds backcountry experience that powder junkies lust after. That evening, Brad and his friends stayed in a Silverton hotel room to sleep off the aftereffects of a local brewer’s festival that had included topless sledding at the base of the ski area. After a late start the next morning, Brad went down to Durango and met Leah. They drove the Devil’s Highway, Route 666, into the Utah desert. Late Saturday afternoon, Leah monitored their cell phone as they drove north on Highway 95 across the upper arm of Lake Powell, waiting for me to call and finalize our rendezvous plans for Goblin Valley that evening.
By seven P.M., they were heading into the San Rafael Swell, traveling west off of Highway 24. Leah watched the signal indicator bars on the cell phone’s screen disappear as they drove along the flat stretches of pavement. They got a usable signal only when the vehicle crested small bumps in the terrain.
“Why don’t we call him?” Leah inquired.
“He doesn’t have a cell phone. He said he would call to get directions.”
“You know what? Before we get so far out here that we lose the reception entirely, we should check the messages. Go back to that bump where it was higher. I got four bars there.” Brad made a U-turn to swing back into range. The homemade wood camper shell rocked the vehicle slightly to the passenger side as Brad pulled the turn tight on the two-lane highway.
“OK, stop right here, on this little hill.” Leah checked the three messages on the phone, but none of them was from me. “That’s weird that he didn’t call. Did he say for sure he was going to come?”
Brad answered, “Well, he never really said so. I told him about the party, and that we would be there, and that there were going to be people from Aspen there that he knew. He sounded interested, and he said he was going to call and get directions.”
“Maybe he decided not to. Should we wait here to see if he calls?”
“He didn’t have much of a clear plan before he left-he just wanted to go climbing and hiking and get the heck out of Dodge. You know, off-season stuff. I didn’t ask him to sign in blood that he was going to come. I think we should get going so we can find that billboard.” One of Brad’s friends had promised to leave more specific directions stuck to a billboard at the entrance to the state park, to cover for any last-minute changes.
Within five minutes of departing the hump in the road, the truck’s left rear tire went flat. Brad discovered that the spare was dangerously low as well. Moving at a sluggish 5 mph, the couple continued on toward Goblin Valley State Park. Brad retrieved the directions, the main navigation being to turn left at the Scooby-Doo stuffed animal stuck in a juniper tree. The evening sun hammered straight into Brad’s eyes, turning the dust-frosted windshield into a glass curtain. They missed the turnoff for the party and drove around for an hour as the sun went down and the desert sank into darkness.
Exhausted from a full day in the truck, they quickly lost interest in cruising the back roads of the state park at 5 mph, so Brad pulled over in a finger canyon off a spur road, found a flat parking spot, and they retired into the camper for the night. It was not a big loss to them to have missed the party-they were an easygoing couple out on a road trip for whatever fun they found, and there’d be plenty more parties through the off-season. With daylight aiding them on Sunday morning, Brad and Leah puttered around until they found the aftermath of the party-friends lying about the desert as if a plane had crashed into a nearby ravine. One friend revived enough to take them on the hour-long drive into Green River to repair the tires. They returned in the early afternoon.
Assuming that I had either found the party or come up with something more interesting to do, Brad and Leah were unalarmed that they didn’t see me in Utah. With only two days back in Aspen before their honeymoon trip to the Bahamas, they had pressing preparations on their minds, though they figured they would see me at the Spruce Street party on Monday night.
Monday was hectic at my house. My roommates were getting ready for our first party of the off-season, a big blowout to rejoice in the transition of seasons and of roommates. With the four Aspen ski areas closed, the season was officially over. After working with me at the Ute all winter, Leona Sondie was leaving for Boulder, where she planned to work as a landscape gardener for the summer. Elliott Larson was moving in to join his mountain-bike-racing teammate Joe Wheadon, rounding out the foursome with Brian Payne and me. Brian was back in town after a two-month absence-his January ski accident had forced him to move in with his parents in Ohio for recovery and rehab-and I would be back from my vacation. It would be a rare occasion that we’d all be together. That it was a workday night was inconsequential to the scale of the party; few of the attendees would have serious responsibilities the next day, off-season bringing with it a respite from significant duties on the job. Party planning included getting a keg, stocking up on grilling supplies, stringing decorative lights around the house, inviting fifty people to come over, and rolling up the living-room-wall garage door to add some extra party space to our thousand-square-foot home.
Typical of older buildings in the Smuggler Mine area of Aspen, 560 Spruce had gone through several renovations throughout its 115-year life. Consequently, the house had a funky character, including a roll-up garage door installed in the west wall of the living room. The Smuggler Mine Company had built the house as an assay office where assessors weighed silver ores and measured their purity. In 1894, when the largest silver nugget in the world was extracted from the mine, it most likely passed through 560 Spruce, though no one at the time was much excited by the find, since the silver crash of 1893 had dropped the bottom out of the silver market. As it sat on the assessor’s scales, the largest nugget in the world held little more value than a decorative rock.
In the postwar era of Aspen’s history, 560 Spruce was reincarnated as a fly-tying shop that added the roll-up garage door to the west wall of the first floor and remodeled the assay office into a one-bedroom apartment. Later renovations and additions divided the two-story barn-style building into two apartments, one studio unit upstairs and a four-bedroom place downstairs. In the lower unit, the kitchen surrounded an afterthought of a bathroom, with two entrances into the shower, one from directly behind the kitchen sink. The garage/shop space became the living room, with the remnant roll-up door still in place. With a deck installed outside the garage door where the driveway had been, the warm weather of spring and summer brought the opportunity to roll up the wall of the living room and enjoy the sun and breeze in the house, or push one of the house’s beat-up couches onto the deck for an outdoor nap.
Friends started showing up on Monday evening, including Brad and Leah and Rachel Polver, and before the sun had set in a dazzling light show over Mount Sopris, the food from the grill-your-own potluck was gone. Rachel thought it was odd that I hadn’t shown up for a grubfest, given my seldom satisfied appetite, but Leona reassured her that I’d be back from Utah in time for the main party. As more friends and acquaintances gathered and the party rocked on into the night, music blared out the open wall, and my roommates shouted over the stereo regarding my nonappearance.
A cupful of beer in his hand, Elliott raised the question: “Hey Briguy, have you seen Aron yet? I thought he had to work tomorrow.”
“He’s probably still out on his trip. I haven’t seen him since Wednesday. Does he know about the party?” Brian asked Leona.
Leona repeated what she’d told Rachel earlier. “Yeah, when he left, he said he’d be back here for it. I told him I was leaving on Tuesday, and it’d probably be our last chance to hang out, and he said he’d be here. It’s my going-away party. He better not miss it. I’ll be pissed.”
“What time is it? If he’s real late coming back, he’s probably gonna be ready to walk in and crash.” Elliott was concerned that they’d have to tone down the party if I came home wanting to go to bed. “He’s gonna have a hard time getting to sleep with the party raging. Maybe he figured that and stopped to sleep someplace.”
“That’d be better than having to kick everybody out. It looks like this could go on a while.”
Brian was right-it did go on a while. Though he went to bed shortly before midnight, by the time Joe and Leona ushered the last partiers out to catch buses and walk home, it was well after two A.M.
However, come eight-fifteen Tuesday morning, I hadn’t shown up at the Ute Mountaineer for work. My manager, Brion After, called the house at Spruce. Leona had just woken up and was stumbling around in her room, groggy-eyed and hungover.
“Hey, Leona, it’s Brion. Is Aron there?” Brion sounded more hopeful than curious, and slightly anxious.
“What? No. Isn’t he there?” Leona was instantly awake with worry.
“No, he hasn’t come in or called. I was thinking he might be sleeping off his vacation. Is his truck there?” Leona roamed around the house with the cordless phone in her hand, peeking out through the kitchen window to see if my truck was in one of the parking spaces in front of the wood-slat fence. Knowing my habit of stuffing a vacation to the chockablocks, she thought I might have driven through the night and rolled straight to work that morning. She checked my room for any indication that I’d been there and left, but there was nothing. Something wasn’t right.
“Did he pull a Leona? Maybe he forgot his shift changed.”
Brion and Leona chuckled at her self-effacing joke. She had gained a reputation after she’d missed a shift she was supposed to cover, and then compounded the goof-up a week later when she came in to work and wasn’t even on the schedule.
“It’s possible, but he said ‘See you Tuesday’ on his way out the door. He knew today was his project day.”
“He must still be on his way home from Utah, then,” Leona said. “Maybe he’ll be there in an hour or so.”
“Maybe. I’m gonna go, but I’ll check back. When do you leave?”
“In an hour, once I get the car packed.”
“OK, call me if you see him.”
“I will. Bye.” Leona hung up and paced around with a heavy heart. She started packing her aunt Leslie’s Subaru with her belongings, readying for the drive down to Boulder, but the more full the car got, the more worried she became.
Aware that I had never been over fifteen minutes late in the past, Brion was also starting to get concerned. He went down to the sales floor around eight-thirty A.M. to talk the matter over with another employee and climber, Sam Upton. “Have you seen Aron come in yet?”
Sam looked up from organizing the trail-running shoes in the display room. “Uh, no-he’s supposed to be redoing the camping wall this morning, right?”
Ignoring Sam’s question, Brion pressed. “He hasn’t called or anything?”
Sam sensed the tension in his voice. “No. Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just talked with Leona, and he wasn’t home. She said it didn’t look like he’d been there at all. It’s eight-thirty now. The only time Aron’s ever been more than a few minutes late was when he had that epic up on Pearl Pass.” Remembering the time a month earlier when I had spent the night bivouacking in a hand-dug snow pit at 12,000 feet, Brion had confidence that I would show up unless I was in serious trouble.
Understanding the implications, Sam asked, “Do you think he’s had an accident?”
“Aw, I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is he’s not ditching work. It’s possible something bad might have happened.”
“He could be lost or hurt. But I doubt he’s lost-he’s always wearing his compass and altimeter watch, and he’s good with it,” Sam said.
“No, I know. Even if he were fifty miles out in the middle of nowhere, he could cover that in a day. It’s not a panic situation. I mean, he’s strong enough that if something happened, he’d get himself out. Anything short of a broken leg wouldn’t even slow him down. And if he broke his leg, he’d crawl back. It’d take him awhile, but he’d get out. We have to give him twenty-four hours,” Brian concluded, and Sam agreed.
Leona called in to the Ute once an hour, speaking with Brion and Paul Perley, the general manager. She recounted the last time she’d seen me, on Wednesday night almost a week before. “He had his boxes of climbing equipment out and his biking stuff. He said he was going to do some climbing, some canyoneering, and maybe some mountain biking. He was packing like ‘Oh, I should take this just in case I go biking,’ and ‘Oh, I should take this in case I want to do some climbing.’ He usually would have it all figured out ahead of time, but this time I don’t think he knew where he was going. He said he was going to Utah, to the Canyonlands area. The question is, did he make it to the desert?”
As the afternoon slipped away, Brion reiterated his decision with Paul. “We have to give him until nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Any mountaineer would want the chance to get himself out of trouble before the helicopters start flying. If he isn’t here at the start of his shift tomorrow, I’ll call his parents and get the ball rolling.”
Tuesday evening around six-thirty P.M., right after their shifts, my roommates Brian and Joe were sitting in the living room at Spruce Street, relaxing with the garage door rolled up, testing the quality of the beer left in the keg.
“Hey, what’s the story with Aron?” Joe inquired.
“He’s still gone,” Brian replied. “I think Leona called the Ute this morning. He didn’t go in to work.”
“What do you think we should do, call the cops or something?” Joe wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, but it struck a chord with Brian.
“You know, we probably should,” he said after thinking about it for a long moment. He pulled the phone book out from under the coffee table at his feet and leafed through the pages for the number of the Aspen police department. He dialed the nonemergency number and spoke with the dispatcher after the first ring. “A friend of ours was due back from a trip last night, and he hasn’t come home, and it’s been a day. I just wanted to let you know we think he’s missing. It’s pretty low-key-we’re worried about him, but we’re not freaking out. What can we do about it?”
“We can file a missing person’s report. You said it’s been twenty-four hours?”
“Yeah, he was supposed to come back from Utah yesterday, and he missed work today.”
“What’s his name?”
Brian provided my name, age, approximate height, weight, and description to the dispatcher, who typed the data into the police computer system.
“Do you have his license-plate information?”
“Uh, yeah, hold on, I think I can get it for you.” Brian went in my room and found an old climbing itinerary from when I had soloed the Bells two months earlier. It listed my license number-NM 846-MMY-and the year and model of my truck.
“Where do you think he went? You said Utah?”
“I know he was heading out to ski Mount Sopris on Thursday, but he was all packed up for a trip. I think he said he was going to the Moab area in Utah.”
“Anything more specific than that, or just the Moab area?”
“That’s it. He usually leaves itineraries, but he didn’t leave one this time.”
“All right. That’s a start.” They hung up.
What the dispatcher didn’t tell Brian was that I hadn’t been missing long enough for the police to do anything yet.