Siena
“I miss the days of yore when any idiot could throw lighter fluid on a match.” Cam tossed a stick at their lantern.
The Forest Service had banned campfires in most of the state, so the four of them sat on top of their bivy sacks around the LED. Siena scraped the gunky remains of rehydrated fettuccine Alfredo from the bottom of her bowl. “I’d prefer to live,” she said, though she couldn’t deny how much she missed having a campfire. The warm glow and heat were so inviting after a long day on the trail.
Siena slapped her neck and wiped away a dead bug. Campfire smoke also kept the mosquitos away.
Fortunately, there weren’t too many bugs at their site, a flat spot a hundred or so yards off the trail beneath a scattering of Jeffrey pines. Saddle Lake was about a quarter mile west. They could refill on water but were far enough to not be inundated by bloodsuckers.
It was beautiful, too, of course. The stars, close enough to scrape out of the sky with her fingers. The chant of the lakeside grasshoppers. The air, so cold and dry and clean that it burned her sinuses.
She’d never backpacked into Deadswitch before, saving herself for this six-week venture. Her mother had led a conservationist group into these woods when Siena was in grade school. And Dr. Feyrer... he’d never shut up about how this place would change her, using the promise of Deadswitch’s beauty to convince her to write the proposal in the first place.
But all wilderness had some everlasting impact on her, and it didn’t matter how many times she returned. The isolation of the woods haunted and astounded her as it had the first time, distantly familiar, like she’d once been rooted in a grove in another life. Dr. Feyrer knew her weak spot after all. Leading such a study in her early thirties meant she’d be more likely to spend her career in forests like this one.
She slapped her neck again.
“Sen...” Emmett narrowed his eyes at her like she was a capricious child inflicting self-harm.
Siena made a show of presenting the mosquito to him in her outstretched palm. “Am I going to need to present evidence to you every time I smack a bug off me, Emmett?”
Cam ducked her head to hide her grin. The embers behind Emmett’s eyes stirred, but before he could say anything, Isaac sliced through the tension.
“What does tomorrow look like?” The kid spun his titanium spork between his fingers, glancing at Emmett, then Cam, then Siena, who raised her eyebrows.
“I emailed you the itinerary three weeks ago,” Siena said.
Isaac winced. “I forgot to download it.”
“In all fairness, the document took up a gigabyte of space on my phone,” Cam mumbled through a mouthful of food.
Siena rolled her eyes and then nodded at Emmett. She’d let him play the Eagle Scout dad for now.
“Same as today,” said Emmett. “Another ten miles, another thousand feet of elevation gain. But it’ll suck a little more because you’ll be sore. We might catch a glimpse of Agnes, but we won’t be close enough to gather data.”
“We’ll descend into a wooded area at first, before we get above the tree line.” Cam dragged her fingers from the crown of her head all the way to the ends of her sideswept bangs as she spoke. “Those switchbacks are steep. Your toes’ll smash into your boots, and your knees will hate you, and you’ll be wishing we were going up. Then the granite starts, and we’ll climb to seven thousand feet in a matter of miles.”
“Sounds like you’ve done this before.” Isaac tore off a corner of a CLIF Bar and shoved it into his mouth.
Cam and Siena shared a glance. Emmett cleared his throat.
“A long time ago.” Cam gave her hair a last tug and dropped her hand. “I was a little older than you, getting my PhD and doing a lot of hiking and volunteering with the rangers. I was on the search and rescue team for a group of women who went missing up by Wolf Ridge. Five of them. Had to learn the area very well and quickly.”
“No kidding,” said Isaac. “Wait a sec... I think I heard of that. Wasn’t that a famous case? They were never found.”
Cam nodded. “No footprints, no tracks. No urine or buried shit. Dogs couldn’t find anything. Rangers’ logs showed folks going up the mountain all summer, but we couldn’t find any evidence of that being true.”
Siena rubbed away the goose bumps on her arms. She low-key hated when Cam told this story. Not because she feared getting lost herself, but because the story defied logic. No evidence of anyone? It wasn’t possible, even then. Except for phone tracing, methods and technology for finding people had changed little in the past fifty years, let alone seven.
Siena thought of the trail this morning—the lack of tracks in the dirt. Maybe the soil in this part of the Sierras was too powdery to hold a print. She didn’t know what kind of mineral and organic composition would cause such a thing.
As she pondered, Siena scooped up the pill waiting at the lip of her mess kit, popped it into her mouth, and swallowed some water from her Nalgene.
“So they literally found nothing?” Isaac pulled his fleece more tightly around his shoulders.
“Just a Subaru in the trailhead lot that belonged to Janet, one of the hikers.”
“And the case?”
“Cold.” Cam shrugged. “Not much you can do when the evidence runs dry. At the end of everything, the only bit left uninvestigated was that right before they left for their trip, one of the missing hikers had been playing a video game based on a pioneer cult from this area.”
“Pioneer cult?” Isaac mouthed.
Cam shifted uncomfortably. She got weird every time she told this story, so for the entirety of their friendship, Siena never pressed her on the details of her time searching for the famous Deadswitch Five. But she knew when to cut in and save Cam from the obligation of divulging too much.
“There are rumors floating around of some freaky cultists who’ve lived in Deadswitch for decades,” Siena said. “Probably offspring of those original pioneers. My mom used to tell me about them when I was a kid. Claim the land is divine or whatnot... Don’t really know the details. Clearly they aren’t allowed to live back here without all kinds of permits, but the rangers haven’t been able to catch anyone.”
“The rangers sound like boneheads.” Isaac raised a hand toward Cam. “No offense.”
Cam threw another stick at the lantern. “Bonehead is a term of endearment compared to what I’ve called some of them.”
Siena could see the gears turning in Isaac’s head, and Cam started tugging at her hair again.
Siena shared a glance with Cam. “We don’t have to keep talking about it.”
Cam quickly masked her discomfort with a wry smile. “I was just getting to the good part.”
Siena nodded. “Sure you were.”
“We should get to bed.” Emmett grabbed the lantern, groaning as he stood. “Tomorrow’s gonna hurt.”
Siena tried to detach herself from the pain as her hips begged for mercy and her butt cheeks burned. The second day was always the worst. Even a liberal amount of ibuprofen and a hit off Cam’s joint couldn’t save her.
She led the way as they trekked up the granite, setting her eyes on a cairn and focusing all her energy on reaching it. Rounding the bend, she found the next pile of rocks as the sun beat down on the back of her neck. She could tell the others were suffering because no one spoke—not even Cam—though their labored breathing was quite the symphony.
When Siena was in her early twenties, she could have skipped up a mountainside like this and would have been at the top twenty minutes ago, double-fisting peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for an early lunch.
Damn, she was hungry.
“Did anybody bring any peanut butter?” she gasped.
“In exchange for carrying the theodolite the rest of the way, you can have my whole jar of peanut butter,” Emmett yelled back.
She wasn’t that hungry.
The ground turned to dirt and leveled out. Siena almost fell over in relief, instead peering down at the others, who were still a couple of switchbacks below her. She smiled and waved, and Cam threw her the finger.
Siena dipped into the shade of forest growth, her eyes adjusting to the change of light. She drank deeply from her CamelBak and edged forward, searching near the trail for a tall place to sit so she didn’t have to take off her pack. In front of her, the trail forked, one path leading northwest up another granite face, the other northeast, dipping into a glade.
This wasn’t right. There was only one trail until Wolf Ridge broke off from the main Deadswitch Trail, which wasn’t until tomorrow.
Siena ungracefully floundered with her bag, tugging her map from the side pocket. She opened it, located the Glass Lake Trailhead, and followed the line with her finger. Sure enough, there was no fork, and the trail neither ascended nor descended. It was supposed to continue dead north through the forest.
She approached the fork with caution, as though it hid something insidious. Olive paint flecked an old sign in front of a fir, but as much as Siena scrutinized, she couldn’t decipher what it had once read.
Siena spun toward the granite when the rest of her team reached her. Cam leaned against a tree, Emmett sat on a rock, and Isaac had freed himself from his pack, which lay sideways on the ground, abandoned.
“Something’s wrong,” said Siena, hating how nervous she sounded. It wasn’t like anything terrible had happened. “There isn’t a fork on the map.”
Cam unclipped and crawled out of her pack, joining Siena by the blank trail sign. “That’s not right.”
“I’m sure you just missed it on the map.” Emmett held his hand out toward Siena.
“Cam just said... You know what, forget it.” She shoved the map into his hands. “I have a fucking doctorate in geomorphology, Emmett.”
“I’m aware.”
“Then don’t patronize me.”
He said nothing as he studied the map. Typical. She waited for him to magically uncover something she had missed. Instead, she was met with a frown.
“Well.” He accordioned the map and gave it back to her. “The map says north, so we should go north.”
“Helpful.” Siena yanked open the map again, almost tearing it.
“We can get there with our eyes closed, trail or no trail. You basically said so yourself.”
“Hey, it’s alright.” Cam joined them. “Look.” She pointed to a winding blue line on the map. “We’ll take the right trail, and if we don’t cross the creek in two miles, then we’ll turn around. Easy as that.”
“We’ll lose time,” Siena countered.
“We’re up here for six weeks. We have plenty of time.”
Cam was right. And panicking or being frustrated this early in the game was silly. An incorrect map didn’t negate her years of wilderness training.
“The GPS is deep in the bottom of my bag somewhere.” Isaac picked up his seventy-liter from the ground and smacked it a few times to dust it off. “You want me to dig for it?”
“It won’t show us anything we don’t already know.” Siena slapped away an antlion crawling across her shoulder, checking to see where it fell and finding only the dusty trail.
It flew away. Chill out.She took a few deep breaths. “It’s fine. Let’s go.”