Desolation Point (6 page)

*

Sarah moaned with relief as she lowered her bare feet into the cool water of the stream. With the chill rapidly numbing the pain of blisters long since burst, she leaned back on her hands, wiggling her toes in the water and laughing as tiny curious fish swam away, startled.

“Sorry, little guys.”

Her toes now motionless, the fish slowly approached her again. They nibbled gently at her feet before realizing that she wasn’t actually a food source and returning to bask in the sun-warmed pools at the edges of the current.

As soon as she had sat down, an energy-sapping weariness had settled in. The sun was already beginning to cast a pink tinge across the glacial peaks that framed Ross Lake, and the prospect of pitching her tent loomed as large as a Herculean task. It had taken her a full day to hike out to the campsite from Milepost 138 where she had left her Jeep, but she could not deny her sense of achievement at having reached even this far.

For over a week, she had followed State Route 20, driving through the heart of the North Cascades National Park. At regular intervals, she had stopped off to hike some of the countless miles of trails. She had encountered no problems, gotten accustomed to the rules and regulations governing the park, and finally felt capable of tackling one of the more challenging routes. Looking at her options on the map, she had wondered aloud at the dire names given to such magnificent surroundings. A coin toss had made the decision for her, turning her away from an exploration of the trails around Mount Fury and toward a hike up to the summit of Desolation Peak.

At the Ranger Station, Marilyn, a long-serving stalwart with a lovely smile and boundless enthusiasm, had cemented Sarah’s choice of trails, recommending the Desolation Peak hike as a relatively safe and easily navigated route. She had explained how it had become something of a pilgrimage for fans of Jack Kerouac, who, she said, had worked as a lookout on the peak back in the fifties and subsequently used the experience as inspiration for one of his novels. The good weather of the weekend had seen a steady stream of hikers making the trip, but as Marilyn issued her backcountry permit, a quick perusal of the itineraries submitted had given Sarah a little thrill of excitement: only one other person would be hiking her route, and that person would be an entire day behind her.

“Be mostly on your own up there,” Marilyn had said. She had cast an appraising eye over Sarah before nodding and handing over the permit. “You’ll be fine.”

And Sarah had been fine. Although long, her first trail—the East Bank trail—had been clearly marked and obviously well traveled, making it a pleasant hike even with the burden of her camping gear. She had made good time, stopping on occasion to rest and to exchange pleasantries with hikers heading in the opposite direction. Those who had made it up to the summit of Desolation Peak described it as one of the most spectacular viewpoints in the entire park…

It was only when Sarah’s head dropped to her chin that she realized she was on the verge of dozing off. She splashed her face with cold water and clambered reluctantly to her feet. Her tiny two-person tent took barely any time to pitch, but she couldn’t muster the strength to start a fire and settled instead for a dinner of beef jerky, granola bars, and chocolate. When she wandered down to the stream to collect water, she noticed a second small tent pitched close to the edge of the lake. A young man carrying a pan gave a cheery wave as he walked toward her.

“Hi there.”

“Oops, no you don’t. Daft little bugger…” Sarah stooped low to stop an overly adventurous fish from ending up in her water bottle, and then smiled at her companion. “Hello.”

“Johnno.” His accent was broad Australian.

“Sarah.”

They shook dirt-streaked hands and then laughed self-consciously.

“My better half spotted you. Got sharper eyes than me. Wondered if you and yours fancied a beer?”

She gazed longingly over his shoulder at the fire burning brightly by the side of their tent.

“Not sure about the beer, and there’s only me,” she said, licking her sun-chapped lips. “But I’d kill for a cuppa.”

“Zach, get the kettle on, love. We have a guest.”

She smiled as Johnno made a show of presenting her to his partner, who shook the hand she held out.

“Sit down and ignore him. He’s always been an idiot,” Zach said, in an accent nowhere near as pronounced as Johnno’s.

Johnno set the kettle on the fire and dropped a teabag into a mug he had taken pains to wipe clean. “If I’d known you were English, I’d have offered tea first. So you’re out here on your own?”

“I am.”

“Heading up or back down?”

“Up, tomorrow. You?” She kept her question casual. Although it was nice to chat to someone after spending most of the day in solitude, she was hoping not to have to tag along as a third wheel.

“Down. We’re taking the lazy option and getting the boat out. Zach got the whole Kerouac thing out of his system today and is now craving a feather bed, a bath filled with bubbles, and room service.”

A bottle top hit Johnno’s head with a resounding thud, and Sarah tried hard to keep from laughing.

“Ignore him, darling.
I
try to.” Zach handed her the mug of tea, and she leaned back against an old log with a grateful sigh.

“Thank you.”

“No worries.” They drank contentedly for a while before Zach broke the silence. “Hey, you got a radio?”

Puzzled by the random nature of the question, she hesitated before answering. “No. I’ve got a mobile phone, but the service is really patchy out here.”

He stabbed three marshmallows onto sticks and distributed them. “Heard the weather forecast today, that’s all. They reckon we’ve got maybe another day like today before the rain sets in.”

She nodded. Marilyn had told her pretty much the same thing, except that Marilyn had given her a window of three days of good weather. “I’m going to set out early tomorrow, get back down before dusk. I don’t mind a bit of rain on the low trail out.”

“Torrential rain,” Johnno corrected her, “of Biblical proportions.”

With a frown, she raised her head to the cloudless sky, thousands of stars dizzying her for an instant. Night after night, the weather had been settled like this, but she supposed it had to end at some point. When she lowered her head again, her marshmallow was ablaze.

“Bollocks,” she muttered, and ate it anyway.

Johnno seemed to have caught the change in her mood and threw the packet of marshmallows toward her as a means of apology. “Oh, you ever tried a s’more?”

“A what?”

“S’more. Not as disgusting as it sounds, I promise you.”

Graham crackers and Hershey’s chocolate were quickly produced from their bear-proofed larder and Sarah watched wide-eyed as the alleged delicacy was constructed.

“Oh God, really?” Marshmallow and melted chocolate oozed from the center of the crackers and across her fingers.

“Delicious. Try it.”

She took a dubious bite and then a larger one. “Oh, yum.”

“One of this country’s finest culinary contributions,” Zach declared seriously and refilled her mug of tea. “To great adventures.”

All thoughts of bad weather banished, she happily tapped her mug against their beer bottles. “To great adventures,” she said, and stabbed another marshmallow.

*

“Oh, just one second…” Alex tightened the last rope across the flatbed of Walt’s truck and stood back to evaluate their handiwork. “Good to go, I think.”

Walt slapped the tailgate firmly into place and nodded his agreement. “Yup.”

“How many you expecting?”

“Marilyn reckoned on ten or so. Less if the weather breaks.”

“Set to, on Thursday.”

“Yup.”

Alex cast a glance over her camping gear, somehow squeezed in between several large blocks of wood and all the tools of Walt’s trade. “I should get two good nights out there at least.”

He followed her gaze, one gloved hand scratching through his unkempt beard. “You watch, mind. It’s gonna be earlier than Thursday, and it’s gonna break hard.”

Even after so little time in his company, she knew better than to argue with him. For days, the weather had been hot and humid, clouds threatening to mass in the late afternoons but then dispersing as if only a preview of a main event yet to come. Despite the twinge of unease that his warning instilled, she was loath to cancel a hiking trip that she had been looking forward to all month. From what Walt had told her about the winters up here, there would be precious few opportunities for her to access the higher trails in the coming months.

They were both heading into the North Cascades National Park, where Walt regularly gave wood carving demonstrations to tourists and where Alex had barely begun to explore the myriad tracks and trails that weaved their way through thousands of acres of protected wilderness. Walt, who knew certain areas of the park like the back of his hand, had spent hours poring over maps with her, pointing out the less well-known routes, useful water sources, and natural places to find shelter. He had never asked and she had never told him, but somehow he knew how important it was that she find the confidence to strike out on her own, and the only caution he had ever voiced was in regard to the weather conditions. It was Walt who had suggested leaving well before dawn, and she knew that was for her sake not his. The head start she would gain on the first trail would give her the option of continuing to the summit that same day, cutting her trip slightly short but ensuring that she didn’t miss out on any part of the route she had chosen.

He opened the driver’s door and gave a thin whistle between his teeth, prompting Kip to scramble into the cab. “East Bank Trail, then?” he said as Alex pulled her door shut.

She smiled, relieved that he wasn’t going to try to talk her out of her plans. “Just kick me out somewhere near One Thirty-eight.”

“Got your radio?”

She patted the conspicuous bulge at her hip. The two-way had been a gift from Walt, and it was open to one of the public channels used by the park rangers. “Present and correct.”

“Not been up Desolation for a while. Let me know if you carry on up there today and I’ll square it with Marilyn.” He shifted the truck into gear. “Wish I was coming with ya.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She waggled her eyebrows at him. “And let that poor woman down? You know she’ll have been up all night baking brownies.” The crush that Marilyn Eagle had on Walt was the stuff of legend.

The truck bounced through a pothole that Walt made no attempt to avoid or slow down for, and the impact jarred Alex’s teeth.

“Sorry ’bout that,” he said amiably.

“No, you’re not.”

He grinned. “I was apologizing to Kip.”

*

“About here okay?”

“Wh―?” Startled, Alex turned toward Walt when she realized he was slowing the truck. She had been staring out the window at the scenery as it passed by. Silver light flooded down from a full moon, giving a ghostly hue to the blackness of lakes that she could just about detect through the rolling forest. Waterfalls tumbled from unseen sources, and unidentifiable nocturnal creatures dashed away from the truck’s approach to take shelter among the trees. Although she had driven this route on numerous occasions, it had always been in the daylight, and now she felt like a privileged guest in some strange, secret version of what should have been familiar surroundings.

It seemed as if they had only been traveling for a few minutes, and yet Walt was already unfastening the ropes from around her kit.

“Sorry.” She jumped out to help him. “Not been much company, have I?”

“When I first came here,” he said, his voice his usual leisurely drawl, “all’s I did was stare. Felt like there was just too much to take in, like I didn’t deserve to be here. Been here fifty-seven years now. Still feel like that some days.”

She nodded, her throat tight. “Thanks, Walt.”

He made a gesture as if to dismiss himself as nothing but a sentimental old man shooting the breeze. “Trailhead’s that way. Let me know where you’re at.”

“I will. Say hi to Marilyn.”

This time his gesture was far less polite, and Alex laughed, waving through the cloud of dust as he accelerated away. She adjusted her pack, altering the strap lengths to find a comfortable balance, and then checked her watch. The official distance to her first campsite by Ross Lake was sixteen miles, and she wondered whether it really was an option for her to continue to the Desolation summit that same day. With a shrug, she decided that over thinking the matter would only result in her rushing or getting stressed. She would hike at a decent pace, try to judge the weather, and see how she felt.

Standing alone by the side of the road, she took a deep, slow breath. The sharpness of pine resin intermingled with the earthier scents of vegetation decaying underfoot. Water trickled over rocks somewhere off to her right, a constant melody that sounded at once amused and ethereal. She set off walking past a beat-up old Jeep, feeling light-headed with a mixture of nervous anticipation and simple happiness.

A skittering through the fallen leaves made her pause just as she reached the trailhead. She tiptoed in the direction of the sound and then crouched low to pan her small flashlight across the ground, but it picked out little from the shadows. She shook her head at herself.

“Not gonna get past halfway if I go chasing after every little critter,” she muttered, feeling faintly ridiculous. She was turning back toward the trailhead when the glint of metal caught in the beam of her light.

“What the…?”

No one would have seen the truck from the road, and it was unlikely that she would have noticed it either, had she not wandered slightly out of her way. Midnight black and obviously a victim of some rough handling, the SUV had been concealed in a large patch of undergrowth. She cast her flashlight over it, picking out the numerous dents in the bodywork, tires that were only borderline legal, and a side window that was splintered like a spider’s web. It certainly wasn’t the vehicle’s value that had motivated such an effort to hide it away. She knelt by the rear bumper, flicked a finger beneath a loose corner of the truck’s license plate, and pried the plate upward. The original plate beneath the false one had been hacked at with something sharp before the owner had given up and tied the upper one into place.