Yosemite Fall (National Park Mystery Series) Page 3

  “I was good at it,” Carmelita said. “I was really good. Wasn’t I?”

  “That’s stating the obvious,” Clarence told her. “You were estupenda up there.”

  Janelle slipped her hand out of Chuck’s grip and turned to him as they walked. “They’ll cancel the competition because of Jimmy’s accident, won’t they?”

  “I doubt it. People come from all over to compete in the Slam. It’s turned into a big money-maker for the Camp 4 Fund. Jimmy told me last year’s entry fees paid for a whole new set of gear-hauling wheelbarrows. They’re already planning to use this year’s proceeds to remodel the bathroom. They might even raise enough money to add showers, which they’ve needed forever.”

  Janelle slid her hand into the crook of Chuck’s arm. “What happened to him back there?”

  “The auto-belay device failed. They’ll fix it, of course—not that Carm would use it. If she competes, I’ll belay her again myself, just to be completely safe.”

  “Completely safe?”

  “People think everything having to do with rock climbing is dangerous. But big-wall climbing and sport climbing are entirely different animals.” He pointed up through a break in the trees to the top of El Capitan, rising half a mile above the valley floor. “Big-wall climbing comes with unavoidable risk. The potential for accidents on massive cliffs, here in Yosemite or anywhere else, is part of the game. There’s simply too much that can go wrong on multi-day, multi-pitch climbs—sudden weather changes, equipment problems, fatigue, personality issues between team members. It’s impossible to control for all of them.” He aimed a thumb behind him at the tower. “But climbing on a bolted wall is one of the safest sports there is.”

  Clarence pooched his lips. “Despite what just happened to Jimmy?”

  “Despite that,” Chuck confirmed.

  Janelle asked Carmelita, “You’re not scared?”

  Carmelita shook her head. Then she nodded. “Sorta. But that’s why I want to do it.”

  Clarence wrapped one of his beefy arms around Carmelita’s narrow shoulders, drawing her to his side. “Esa es mi sobrina valiente,” he said. “That’s my brave niece.”

  Janelle’s fingers tightened around Chuck’s arm. “Bastante bien,” she said, acceding to Carmelita with a sigh. “As long as Chuck says it’s okay.”

  Carmelita leaned around Clarence and grinned at Chuck, but Rosie said to her sister, “I’m telling you, Carm, you’re craaaaazy.” She swung her boot at another stone, sending it flying into a neighboring campsite.

  “Careful,” Chuck warned her. “It wasn’t easy for me to reserve one of the researcher sites here. We don’t want to get thrown out our very first day.”

  They continued along the path. In campsites on either side of them, campers prepared breakfast and arranged gear. Some organized overnight camping supplies. They packed duffle bags, tied guy lines to tent poles, and tossed sleeping bags over their tents to air the bags in the sun. Others, obviously climbers, sorted through their climbing kits. They counted out carabiners, coiled ropes on tarps, and arranged cams and bolts and quickdraws on picnic tables, grouping the pieces of milled-alloy climbing hardware by size and type. Still other Camp 4 campers were Latino families, middle-aged men and women with children who occupied sites ringed with inexpensive hoop tents. The adults’ worn jeans, denim shirts, long skirts, and cafeteria-worker blouses and slacks marked them not as park visitors but park concession employees.

  Block-shaped Columbia Boulder, the size of a two-story house, sat just beyond the north boundary of the campground, where it had come to rest on the valley floor after tumbling eons ago from the cliffs above. For decades, the short, demanding climbing routes up the boulder’s vertical sides had provided a rope-free proving ground for Camp 4 climbers. These days, in an attempt to improve the often frayed relations between Camp 4’s free-spirited climbing community and Yosemite’s staid ranger staff, the park service provided free coffee and donuts to all comers every Sunday morning at the base of the boulder, where the two groups mingled and hashed out any outstanding grievances.

  After so many years away, Chuck gazed around him with a sense of nostalgia. No campground in the national park system was more famous than Camp 4. From its position on the north side of Yosemite Valley, the campground had served since the 1960s as the base of climbing operations for hypercompetitive climbers bent on putting up ever more difficult routes on the valley’s surrounding faces. In those early years, the original occupants of the campground included pioneering rock climbers like Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Royal Robbins, Ron Kauk, and—among only a handful of accomplished female climbers at the time—Lynn Hill. The early Camp 4 denizens assumed mythic status as climbing grew to become a global sport. During Chuck’s summers at Camp 4 decades later, the campground had remained home to an ever-changing cast of big-wall climbers, still predominantly male, all competing for the unofficial title of Best Rock Climber on Earth.

  Chuck looked from side to side as he walked along the central corridor through the campground with his family. Camp 4 was a different place now than when he’d spent so much time here twenty years ago. The campground’s sites were occupied by a roughly equal number of males and females, and by a far more diverse crowd as well. Rather than almost exclusively white, Camp 4’s current climber occupants embodied a healthy mix of the multiethnic stewpot representative of modern-day America and the world, with Anglo as well as Asian, African American, and Latino climbers sorting piles of gear. Signaling the biggest change of all, in addition to the walk-in campsites occupied by climbers preparing for ascents and the numerous sites taken by tourists organizing camping supplies, a third of the campground’s sites were occupied by park workers and their families.

  As Chuck, Janelle, Clarence, and the girls passed one of the worker-occupied sites, a middle-aged Latina woman looked up from a camp stove positioned at the end of a picnic table in front of her. The smell of frying bacon wafted from a skillet on the stove. The woman looked through the steam rising from the pan, taking in Janelle, Clarence, and the girls.

  “Hola, amigos,” she greeted them. Her deep, gravelly voice reminded Chuck of the rough, sandpapery tone shared by Rosie and Rosie’s grandfather, Janelle’s Mexican-immigrant father.

  “Hola,” Janelle responded.

  The Latina woman went back to flipping strips of bacon in the pan with her spatula.

  Janelle winked at Chuck. “You said you were bringing us to Yosemite Valley, not the South Valley. It’s nice to see the diversity in the park.”

  In the years after their arrival in New Mexico from Juarez as newlyweds, Janelle’s parents raised her and Clarence in Albuquerque’s South Valley, the only neighborhood they could afford with their meager, blue-collar incomes. In her teen years, Janelle fell in with a rough set of friends, dropped out of high school, and bore Carmelita and Rosie with a local drug dealer, now deceased.

  Clarence sidestepped the violent culture of the South Valley, completing high school and attending the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology. He joined Chuck’s firm, Bender Archaeological, as a temporary employee after graduation. Chuck appreciated Clarence’s boisterous ways, which contrasted with his own taciturn manner, and named Clarence his right-hand man on contract after contract.

  When Chuck met Janelle through Clarence, their courtship led to a quick marriage and Janelle’s move with the girls to Chuck’s hometown, just north of the New Mexico border in Colorado’s rugged San Juan Mountains.

  “Looks like they’re here to work instead of play, doesn’t it?” Chuck said of the Latino campers. “Then again, so are we.”

  The site he’d reserved, one of a handful of Camp 4 sites set aside for teams conducting research in the valley, abutted the far west end of the campground. Next to the site was the campsite reserved by Jimmy, using his many personal connections in the park, for himself and the other men attending the reunion. Besides the two solo pup tents already erected by Jimmy and Bernard, the reunion site wa
s empty.

  The YOSAR team’s steepled white tents ringed a small meadow outside the campground to the west, beyond the Bender Archaeological and reunion campsites. Cruiser bikes rested against wooden platforms on which the search-and-rescue team’s wall tents stood, and an array of lawn chairs faced each other in a circle in the center of the meadow.

  Of the former Yosemite Valley climbers who had accepted Jimmy’s emailed invitation to attend the reunion, Chuck considered himself the furthest outlier. In the years after his graduation from the Fort Lewis College School of Archaeology in Durango, he’d focused on building Bender Archaeological into a viable archaeological services contractor. Only during breaks between projects had he driven to the valley to climb with the others, freeing himself for a week or two from the ongoing stress of winning and working his contracts.

  Bender Archaeological started out as, and largely remained, a one-man operation. Chuck was the only full-time employee of his firm. He hired part-timers like Clarence to complete specific projects as necessary, and maintained only superficial contacts with other archaeologists, a fact that had served him well professionally. By working his contracts on his own, fame within the archaeological community for the many discoveries he’d unearthed over the years accrued directly to him. That fame led to the stream of work that had flowed his way month in and month out over the years—straight through to the intriguing contract from the Indigenous Tribespeople Foundation that brought him to the valley this week.

  Chuck knew his ability to create and run his own business derived from his isolated upbringing in Durango as the only child of an entirely absent father and mostly absent mother. It was as a direct result of that lonely upbringing, in fact, that he’d so appreciated the camaraderie of the tight circle of fellow climbers with whom he’d based out of Camp 4 and climbed the cliffs around the valley each summer as a young man.

  Chuck stopped in the path with Janelle, the girls, and Clarence when brakes squealed on Northside Drive outside Camp 4. A large truck pulling a flatbed trailer stopped on the shoulder of the road adjacent to the campground. Three dozen tourists in broad-brimmed hats and long-sleeved sunblock shirts sat in rows of bench seats bolted the length of the trailer. A tour guide in walnut slacks, beige shirt, and a billed cap faced her charges from her perch in a tall chair affixed to the trailer bed behind the truck’s cab.

  The guide addressed the tourists through a microphone hooked over her ear and running from the side of her head to her mouth. Her voice issued from speakers mounted on the cab’s roof as the tourists peered through the trees at the campsites.

  “Before you is Camp 4,” the guide announced, her amplified voice reaching her tourist charges as well as every camper in the campground. “For decades, the best rock climbers in the world have made names for themselves climbing demanding routes around Yosemite Valley while based out of this camping area. Camp 4 is considered the birthplace of big-wall rock climbing, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.”

  The tour guide adjusted the arm of her microphone at her cheek. “Today, Camp 4 is more than just a climber hangout. Climbing teams still use the campground as their temporary living quarters between ascents. But they face stiff competition for campsites from non-climbing park visitors and seasonal employees in the valley. To secure first-come, first-served sites in the campground, would-be campers begin lining up as early as three o’clock in the morning—about the time the infamous, hard-partying Camp 4 climbers of old would have been going to sleep.”

  Her spiel complete, the guide tapped the cab of the truck behind her. The tour vehicle jerked into gear and rumbled on down the road.

  “You’re famous,” Janelle told Chuck as they resumed their walk.

  “I think she said ‘infamous.’ I like that better.”

  Rosie hopped from foot to foot when they reached their campsite. “I have to go, go, go,” she said, her voice strained and her face turning purple.

  “I’ll take her,” Carmelita offered.

  “Gracias,” Janelle said.

  Rosie and Carmelita set off for the bathroom at a jog.

  Clarence sat sideways in a hammock he’d tied between the trunks of two trees next to his tent. He dug his toe into the dirt to swing himself back and forth, using the woven-mesh sling as a chair. “I’m impressed,” he said to Janelle. He rested the back of his head against the side of the hammock as he swung. “You’re letting Carm climb tomorrow.”

  “She just . . . she looked so good up there. Like she was lighter than air.”

  Clarence patted his round belly. “Lucky for her, she takes after you, not me.”

  “Ahoy,” a tall, lanky man Chuck’s age called out as he approached on the gravel path from the front of the campground. He pushed one of Camp 4’s shiny aluminum wheelbarrows loaded with duffle bags. “Where is everybody?” he asked Chuck, stopping in front of the reunion campsite next door.

  “Hello to you, too, Ponch,” Chuck said. He walked over and offered his hand. “Been a long time.”

  Ponch Stilwell settled the legs of the wheelbarrow in the dirt at the edge of the site and took Chuck’s hand. “Twenty-some years,” he agreed.

  Ponch’s high forehead gave way to thin tendrils of blond hair combed from the front of his head to the back. His black jeans, polo shirt, and loafers were far removed from the beaded leather vest, woven headband, and silk drawstring pants he’d sported in Camp 4 twenty years ago. Back then, as the group’s hippy wannabe, he’d given himself over to mystical dances, transcendent chants, and spooky fortune tellings, his Buddhist thumb cymbals, dried-gourd maracas, and deck of tarot cards always close at hand.

  Chuck briefed Ponch on Jimmy’s accident, concluding, “He’s on the way by ambulance to the hospital in Merced.”

  “Geez. What a way to start the reunion.” Ponch rested his palm on the handle of his gear-filled wheelbarrow. “Did Thorpe go with him?”

  “Bernard went. I’ve got his cell number to check in with him when they get there.”

  Ponch turned to the reunion campsite and surveyed the two tents. “Where is he, then?”

  “Thorpe? I haven’t seen him yet. Jimmy and Bernard were the only ones here when I showed up with my family last night. You’re the first to get here this morning.”

  “He should be here by now.”

  “The way I understand it, everybody’s trickling in throughout the day today.”

  “No,” Ponch insisted. “You don’t get it. Thorpe was supposed to come in at dawn. Right here, to Camp 4.” His eyes roamed the deserted campsite. “Jesus,” he moaned. “What have I done?”

  “Say what?” Chuck asked, bewildered.

  “Thorpe’s dead,” Ponch said, his eyes clouded and voice shaking. “And it’s all my fault.”

  3

  Chuck took a backward step, the muscles on either side of his spine drawing up tight. “What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “The cards.” Blood drained from Ponch’s face. He pounded his cupped palm with his fist. “I should have told him.”

  “Your tarot cards?”

  Ponch nodded. “I should’ve spoken up.”

  “They told you something might happen to Thorpe?”

  “Not might. Would. Something awful would happen to him, at the hands of someone else.”

  Chuck’s back muscles loosened. “I can’t believe you’re still into those things.” He shook his head. “You’re saying your cards are telling you Thorpe is in some sort of trouble, is that right?”

  “I laid them out a few days ago, alone at my place. I figured I’d get a sense of what was up with him since he’d asked me to be with him this morning when he flew.”

  Chuck raised his arms, imitating a soaring bird. “You mean . . . ?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. In his wingsuit.”

  Chuck’s back again grew tense. Tarot cards or not, he knew the risks of Thorpe’s chosen sport.

  “The cards told me he was in danger,”
Ponch said. “I did a Two Paths spread. The major Arcana cards were fine, but the Death card was upright instead of reversed. The danger was clear as could be, but I convinced myself not to say anything to him. I mean, come on—he’s a wingsuit flier.”

  “Danger is what he does,” Chuck concurred.

  “I figured I hadn’t heard anything yet because of the bad reception in the valley.” Ponch dug his phone from his pocket, punched its face, and turned it to Chuck. “See? Nothing.” Again, he scanned the empty campsite. “But he’s not here.” He pointed skyward, toward the head of the valley. “I was with him at sunrise on Glacier Point.”

  “He jumped?”

  “He flew.” Ponch’s jaw muscles twitched, his face still white. “He dropped off the point into the shadows and then out across the valley. I lost sight of him pretty quick.” He stared up through the trees, where the valley’s south wall showed between outstretched branches. “He planned to shoot Sentinel Gap.”

  Chuck sucked a breath. “The notch in the ridge?”

  Ponch lifted and dropped his chin, a grim up-and-down movement. “If conditions were right, he was going to fly through it, then swing around and pop his chute to land here, in the parking lot. It was supposed to be a big surprise. He figured the helmet-cam footage of his fly-in to the reunion would make for a great online post. But it all depended on the wind—shooting the gap, landing here, the whole thing. If the winds were too strong after he jumped, he could have landed anywhere, even outside the valley altogether.” Ponch looked around him. “But if he’s not here by this—”

  A male voice broke in from behind Ponch. “Chuck Bender?”

  A park ranger approached on the path through the campground. The ranger carried a metal clipboard thick with papers. He looked eerily familiar to Chuck. The uniformed man was in his early thirties, his regulation gray shirt and evergreen slacks crisply pressed. A flashlight, walkie-talkie, and holstered pistol hung from his black leather belt. Buzz-cut hair showed beneath the circular brim of his straw, Smokey Bear ranger hat. He was clean shaven, his piercing gray eyes set close on either side of a long, hooked nose.