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Overview
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Archaeologist Chuck Bender arrives with his family in Yosemite Valley to study the 150–year–old murders of a pair of gold prospectors in the midst of preparations for the annual Yosemite Slam rock–climbing competition and a reunion with his old climbing buddies. The trip quickly turns threatening when one climber never shows up, climbing equipment fails, and Chuck and his spouse, Janelle Ortega, are suspected in the shocking, present–day death of one of Chuck's former rock–climbing partners. Together, Chuck and Janelle race against time to solve the dual mysteries and prove their innocence—all while facing down a ruthless killer on the loose.
SCOTT GRAHAM is the author of eight books, including the National Park Mystery Series from Torrey House Press, and Extreme Kids, winner of the National Outdoor Book Award. Graham is an avid outdoorsman who enjoys mountaineering, skiing, hunting, rock climbing, and whitewater rafting with his wife, who is an emergency physician, and their two sons. He lives in Durango, Colorado.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781937226886 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Torrey House Press |
| Publication date: | 06/09/2018 |
| Series: | National Park Mystery Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 249 |
| Sales rank: | 883,831 |
| File size: | 699 KB |
About the Author
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Chapter 1
Twelve-year-old Carmelita was fifteen feet off the ground and climbing higher, her yellow T-shirt bright in the morning sun, before Chuck, caught off guard by her speedy ascent, reacted. He retrieved the growing slack in the climbing rope, sliding the line past his brake hand and through the belay device attached to his waist harness. The rope's braided sheath warmed his skin as it slipped through his cupped palm. Thin as a whiffle bat, her navy tights hanging in loose folds from her tiny thighs and calves, Carmelita balanced the rubber soles of her climbing shoes on the resin holds bolted to the climbing tower and grasped additional holds above her head with chalked fingers, hoisting herself skyward. "Take it easy," Chuck called up to her, pride edging his voice, as he took up the last of the slack in the rope. "Give me a chance to keep up, would you?" She hesitated for only a heartbeat before climbing higher, her helmeted head back, her moves smooth and fluid as she moved from hold to hold up the vertical tower. Chuck shot a grin at Janelle, who stood beside him in a form-fitting fleece top and black yoga pants. "You sure she hasn't snuck off and done this before without our knowing it?" His grin widened as he looked back up at Carmelita. A sweet spot, that's where he found himself, three years into parenthood, on a working vacation with his family in the heart of Yosemite National Park on this sunny mid-August morning, hired to explore a pair of confounding, hundred-and-fifty-year-old murders here in Yosemite Valley. Everything on this day was right in his world. Perfect. A loner turned sudden husband to Janelle and stepdad to Carmelita and Rosie three years ago, Chuck was well settled in to his new life by now, taking off for his morning runs with Janelle before the girls awoke, working in his small study in the back of the house during school hours, helping Janelle with household chores and the girls with their homework in the evenings. He bid for most of his work close to Durango these days, too, assuring he made it home on weekends when he conducted the fieldwork portion of his contracts. His morning runs kept him lean and fit at forty-five, fifteen years Janelle's senior, even as gray spread from his sideburns through the rest of his scalp and new wrinkles pleated the edges of his mouth, matching the crow's feet that for years had creased the sun-scorched corners of his eyes. Above Chuck, Carmelita continued her smooth ascent. Her bravura climb in front of the crowd of a couple dozen onlookers at the foot of the tower, so out of character for her, took him aback. Such brash public displays weren't like her. Rather, they were the province of her openly exuberant ten-year-old sister, Rosie. He took in an arm's length of rope. Another sidelong glance revealed a smile on Janelle's face that matched his own as she watched her older daughter's confident moves up the portable, forty-foot climbing tower, which was raised on hydraulic arms from the bed of a flatbed trailer attached to a parked semi-truck at the edge of the Camp 4 parking lot. Janelle's smile reinforced what she'd told Chuck in their crew-cab pickup last night, after the girls had fallen asleep in the rear seat as they'd driven deep into the night on the way here from Colorado. She'd spoken softly, so as not to awaken the girls, of her pride at having passed the last of her Emergency Medical Technician certification courses, her paramedic application now pending with Durango Fire and Rescue. "She must have gotten this from you," Janelle said at Chuck's side, her olive face turned skyward. Her dark hair, long and silky, hung free down her back, and a tiny gemstone glittered in the side of her small, pointed nose. "Not me." Chuck took up more slack, maintaining slight tension on the line to assure it would catch Carmelita the instant she fell—if she fell. "I was always a grunter. I climbed by force of will. But look at her. She's defying gravity, and she's doing it with pure grace." Carmelita passed the tower's halfway point, moving higher despite the decreasing size and number of holds on the top half of the structure. She grasped the undersized resin grips with the tips of her fingers, her weight on her toes. The climbing rope extended from her harness to a pulley at the top of the wall and back down to Chuck in the parking lot below. Her chestnut hair, gathered in a pony tail, gleamed in the sunlight beneath the back of her helmet. She showed no hint of fear as she passed thirty feet off the ground, nearing the top of the tower. "You go, girl!" Janelle's brother and Chuck's assistant, Clarence, called to Carmelita from where he stood thirty feet back from the base of the tower with the other onlookers, several of whom waited their turn to climb when Carmelita finished. Clarence tucked his shoulder-length black hair behind his silver-earring-studded ears and raised his hands in a two-fisted salute, the sleeves of his black T-shirt climbing his pudgy upper arms toward his shoulders, his jeans riding low on his hips beneath his sizable gut. "Yeah! You go, girl!" ten-year-old Rosie echoed from where she watched at her uncle's side. Rosie's stocky frame contrasted sharply with that of her slight sister. She could have been her uncle's twin, however, he with his squat physique and pot belly, if not for the difference in their ages. "No way am I going up that thing," Rosie declared. She hooked her thumbs through the belt loops of her shorts. "No frickin' way." "Rosie!" Janelle admonished. Her reprimand was halfhearted, however, focused as she was on Carmelita three stories overhead. Janelle put her hand to her brow, shielding the sun. "Isn't that high enough?" she asked Chuck. "She might send it," Chuck replied, agog. "She might actually top out." Carmelita continued to clamber upward, the widely spaced holds at the top of the tower presenting her no discernible difficulty until, as if by levitation alone, she was forty feet off the ground and there was no more climbing to be done. After giving the top of the fiberglass tower a tap, she leaned back in her harness as Chuck had instructed, her feet flat on the wall. She shook out her hands at her sides while he held her in place, his brake hand gripping the rope. "How's the view from up there, sweetness?" he called up to her. She looked at the granite cliffs lining the valley thousands of feet above the top of the tower. "I've got a ways to go." At Chuck's side, Janelle shivered. "Don't get any big ideas, nina." Chuck relaxed his grip and lowered Carmelita, the rope running through his palm. "I'm glad I belayed her," he said to Janelle as Carmelita walked backward down the wall while he played the rope through his hand. "As light as she is, I wouldn't have wanted to trust the auto-belay to kick in and catch her." When Carmelita reached the ground, the tower attendant, blond haired, thickly bearded, and in his mid-twenties, approached from where he'd been talking with a female climber his age. The attendant's broad shoulders extended from his tank top straight as a crossbeam. His powerful quads filled the legs of his shorts. The woman climber, waiting her turn on the tower beyond the line of large boulders between the parking lot and campground, wore a magenta bikini top and shiny black climbing tights cut low across her hips. Her bare stomach was tanned and flat. A gold ring sparkled where it pierced the skin above her navel. At the foot of the tower, the heavily muscled attendant untied the rope from Carmelita's waist. "Good going," he praised her, offering his meaty palm for a high-five. Carmelita slapped his hand and pranced over to Janelle and Chuck, a grin plastered on her face. "That was a blast." "You made it look easy," Janelle said. "It was easy." Chuck lifted an eyebrow at the bright-eyed youngster before him. "Not for mere mortals." He freed the climbing rope from his harness, allowing the attendant to set about reattaching the rope to the cylindrical auto-belay mechanism at the tower's base. Carmelita's white teeth flashed. "When can I do it again?" Chuck cocked his head at the climbers grouped and waiting behind the line of boulders separating the parking area from Camp 4. Jimmy O'Reilly stood at the front of the group, deep in conversation with Bernard Montilio, the two men clearly enjoying the opportunity to catch up with each other after all these years. "The line got pretty long behind Jimmy while you were up there," Chuck said. "I'm glad we came over first thing this morning." He hesitated, avoiding Janelle's gaze, the idea coming to him even as the words formed in his mouth. "The only way you're going to get to climb any more this weekend is if you enter the Slam." "The what?" Carmelita asked. Janelle stiffened beside him as he continued. "The Yosemite Slam, Camp 4's big climbing competition. It starts tomorrow and runs for two days, through Sunday. That's why the tower's here. Jimmy timed it for this weekend to coincide with the reunion. He started it a few years ago to raise money for his nonprofit organization, the Camp 4 Fund, which supports the campground. The Slam has gotten bigger every year. Once it begins, entrants will be the only ones allowed on the tower." Carmelita begged Janelle, "Can I, Mama?" Janelle turned to Chuck, her smile gone. "A climbing competition? Aren't those for adults?" "The best sport climbers in the world these days are teenagers. Their strength-to-weight ratios are off the charts thanks to the fact that—" he encircled Carmelita's upper arm with a finger and thumb "—they're so skinny." "But that's teenagers you're talking about." "I'll be thirteen in December," Carmelita reminded her mother. "I don't want to think about that." "Uncle Clarence said I'll be driving in two years, with my learner's permit." Janelle glared at her brother, who ducked his head, hiding a grin. She turned back to Carmelita. "Remember what we always say, m'hija. Cars are weapons. You have to be very careful with them. And two years is a very long time." She shot another look at Clarence, her brows furrowed. He raised his hands to his older sister in defense. "I was just chatting her up. She's getting to be a big girl." He assumed a pronounced Latino accent. "Like it or not, hermana, two years from now your daughter's gonna have a steering wheel in her hands. She's gonna be one weaponized young lady." When the furrow between Janelle's brows deepened, Clarence lifted his hands further, his palms out. "Just talking the truth to you." He hoisted his shoulders close to his ears in an exaggerated shrug, his lips pooched out. "What can I say?" Janelle turned her back on her brother, crossing her arms in front of her. "Carm was a natural up there just now," Chuck told her. She shifted her elbows, loosening her folded arms. "Do they actually have a kids' section?" "Maybe. Either way, though, I'd say she should enter the open division. The way she climbed that tower just now, you never know." Carmelita's face glowed pink beneath her cafe au lait complexion, but Janelle pursed her lips. "You mean, where she'd be going up against anybody and everybody?" "All the other female climbers, anyway." "But that was the first time she's ever climbed anything in her whole life. You just got her the helmet and climbing shoes last week." Chuck glanced at the tower. "This is why we got them for her. Besides, I don't think she'd have any chance of winning. Although I will say, climbing isn't as much about experience and repetitive practice as other sports. It's a matter of natural body control and sense of balance—which, clearly, Carm's got by the bucketful. From what I just saw, I don't think she'd have anything to be ashamed of." Carmelita beamed up at him. "Really?" Chuck cupped the back of her head in his hand and looked into her luminous, almond eyes. "Really." "Cool," Rosie declared. She jigged at her sister's side, her arms swinging. "You should do it for sure, Carm." Janelle rested her hand over Chuck's at the back of Carmelita's head. "You really think you want to try it?" Carmelita nodded, bouncing up and down on her toes. "You won't be sad when you lose?" "If she loses," Chuck said. "No," Carmelita told her mother. "I won't. I promise." Rosie chimed in, "But I'll be sad for her. Would that be okay, Mama?" The corners of Janelle's mouth ticked upward and her face softened. "Okay," she said. "You guys win." At the base of the tower, Jimmy tied a re-woven figure eight into the end of the climbing rope with a well practiced flip of his fingers. He clipped the loop into his harness. Still exchanging small talk with Bernard, he gave the rope a tug, assuring it ran from his waist, up through the pulley at the top of the tower, and back down to the auto-belay mechanism. Faded tattoos purpled Jimmy's sinewy forearms below the short sleeves of his plaid, cotton shirt. A long, braided beard, cinnamon going silver, curved outward from his jaw like a scorpion's tail. Stringy, gray-streaked red hair fell to his shoulders from the back of the battered straw cowboy hat he wore low over his brow like a country singer. His loose, faded blue jeans clung to his narrow waist, and the top buttons of his shirt were undone, revealing a red bandanna—his signature style statement for as long as Chuck had known him—knotted around his neck. "Show us what you can do, Jimmy," Chuck called to him. "You're the man," Bernard cheered from behind the line of boulders. He tapped the sides of his legs with his hands, a quick rat-a-tat beat. "Let's see how much gas you've got left in the old tank." Bernard's pasty face and jowly cheeks spoke of his current life as an office-bound attorney for a downtown San Francisco law firm, as did his high fashion, turquoise-framed glasses. His ample waistline pressed at his pleated khaki shorts and short-sleeved dress shirt, while his closely cropped brown hair showed only a hint of gray. He turned to Carmelita. "And you're the climbing-est girl of them all," he congratulated her. He continued to tap his legs with his hands and counted off in time with the taps, "One…two…three, four, five. You're the girl who's got the jive." Jimmy settled his hands on two holds above his head. "You guys are next," he said over his shoulder to Chuck and Bernard. "Not me," Chuck said. "No way." "I'm ground-based these days," said Bernard. "You're scared you can't do it anymore," Jimmy said. "You got that right," the two of them said together. Jimmy tightened his grip on the holds at the base of the climbing tower and lifted himself off the ground. He ascended the large, easy-to-grasp holds on the lower portion of the tower with no apparent strain, the belay mechanism automatically taking up the slack in the rope as he climbed. Each of his moves was precise, his fingers set, his feet poised on holds beneath him. He angled left and right, scaling the wall with ease, his decades of climbing experience evident. He passed the halfway point on the tower and reached above his head for a small hold thirty feet off the ground. Only two of his fingertips fit atop the tiny protrusion, which sloped outward, providing little purchase. He grunted as he transferred his weight to the hold, revealing his first sign of strain. His knuckles turned white as he clung to the tower. Then his fingertips slipped from the hold and he fell. The ratchet in the auto-belay mechanism should have kicked in, catching him when he dropped no more than a few inches. Instead, he cartwheeled away from the wall and plummeted toward the ground unimpeded, his arms and legs flailing. He screamed as he fell, the climbing rope zipping freely through the mechanical belay device bolted to the base of the tower. Chapter 2 Jimmy's scream echoed across the parking lot as he plunged headfirst toward the ground. Chuck charged forward with Janelle at his side, but they were too far back to reach Jimmy in time to break his fall. At the last possible second, Jimmy spun himself upright and struck the gravel parking lot feet-first. The sharp crack of breaking bone echoed off the tower wall, followed by a howl of pain from Jimmy. He lay on his back in the gravel at the base of the tower, the rope still attached to his waist. He gripped his left leg with both hands, his face contorted. Chuck slid to a stop in the loose rocks and stood over Jimmy while Janelle knelt at Jimmy's side. Clarence and Bernard and the other onlookers joined Chuck, forming a circle around the fallen climber. Carmelita and Rosie peered around Chuck from where they pressed at his back. Jimmy took gasping breaths. Blood speckled his pant leg below his left knee. He moaned, the sound coming from deep in his throat. Janelle slid the leg of his jeans up from his ankle. Chuck bit his knuckles to keep from gagging at the sight of Jimmy's foot turned impossibly outward from his ankle, sideways, at a ninety-degree angle. "Ouch," Rosie said. "Rosie!" Janelle scolded without looking up. Then, to the group, "Someone call 911." Clarence plucked his phone from his pocket. "I'm on it." "Goddammit," Jimmy muttered. He grimaced, his eyes squeezed shut. "Looks like a fracture/dislocation of the ankle," Janelle said. "Impossible to try re-setting it here." She shifted to put her knees on either side of Jimmy's head, bracing his neck. "Do you hurt anywhere else?" she asked him. "I think my leg took all my weight," he said through clenched teeth. He exhaled, his breath morphing into a groan. "Good." "Good?" He squinted up at her, his pupils glinting between his slitted lids. He breathed hard and fast, chuffing like a steam engine. Clarence jabbed at the face of his phone. "I can't believe it. No service." "That's not a surprise," the climbing tower attendant said as he arrived from the tiny A-frame building set between the parking lot and campground that served as the Camp 4 office. "It's okay, though. I called in on the campground radio." The shriek of a siren sounded from up the valley in the direction of Yosemite Village. The number of gawkers around Jimmy grew as campers arrived from their sites beneath the firs and black oaks towering over the campground. Members of the Yosemite Search and Rescue team, stationed in a ring of canvas tents on the west side of Camp 4 in the heart of the valley during the park's busy summer climbing season, arrived at a jog in T-shirts, canvas shorts, flip-flops, and ball caps bearing the YOSAR logo. The rescuers were in their twenties and early thirties, tanned and buff, mostly males with a smattering of females. They elbowed their way to the front of the circle. Before they could displace Janelle at Jimmy's side, however, an ambulance turned from North Access Road into the Camp 4 parking lot. The vehicle braked to a stop next to the climbing tower, raising a cloud of dust. From where she knelt at Jimmy's head, Janelle reached forward to rest a hand on his tattooed forearm. "They're here." "Thank God," he said through compressed lips. Sweat beaded his brow. The onlookers fell back as a pair of EMTs approached from the ambulance. "I'll go along," Bernard told Chuck. "Where will they take him?" When Bernard shrugged three times in a row, raising and lowering his shoulders in quick succession, a YOSAR team member said, "He won't go to the valley clinic, that's for sure. I bet they'll take him straight to Merced. Believe me, they know the way." "His foot sure was twisted," Rosie said thoughtfully, a finger pressed to her chin. She walked with Chuck, Janelle, Carmelita, and Clarence on the gravel path through the center of Camp 4 as they returned to their campsite from the climbing tower. West of the campground, the wail of the ambulance siren died away, marking the vehicle's departure, bearing Jimmy and Bernard down the valley. "That is so gross," Carmelita told her sister. "But true," Janelle said. "One of the things I've learned in my classes is that the human body can get really messed up in an accident." Chuck pictured Jimmy's foot sticking out sideways from his ankle. Thank God he'd belayed Carmelita himself; the thought of her leg mangled like Jimmy's, or worse, made his stomach queasy. Their campsite came into view through the trees ahead. Camp 4 offered only walk-in tent sites, with vehicles restricted to the large parking lot at the campground's front entrance. Campsites were arranged side by side in long rows, accessed by pathways linking the sites to the central bathroom and parking lot. Beneath the tall pines and oaks looming overhead, the campground was open and dusty, the only ground cover a few hardy bunches of buffalo grass, with campsites in full view of one another among the stout tree trunks. Chuck had erected their two-room family tent at the edge of their reserved research-team site in the dark the night before, after the long drive from Colorado, while Janelle wrestled the sleeping girls into their pajamas and Clarence set up his own small, solo tent. Early this morning, Chuck had hauled the last of their supplies from their big pickup truck in the parking lot via the graveled footpath past the other campsites to their assigned site, using one of the oversized wheelbarrows provided by the campground. As Janelle and the girls and Clarence slept, Chuck had opened the cook stove on the picnic table and connected it to its propane tank, stacked firewood next to the fire grate, and assured the latch was fastened on the metal cabinet next to the picnic table that contained their food, as required to keep the park's notoriously nosy black bears at bay. Almost immediately upon stepping out of the zippered family tent in the morning, Carmelita had spied the climbing tower at the edge of the parking lot. "Can I climb it?" she begged Chuck, eyeing the tower through the trees. "Pleeeeeease." He looked at her with surprise. Carmelita rarely made such requests, particularly with such ardor. She added, "That's why you got me my new climbing shoes, isn't it?" He studied the climbing tower, rising beyond the trees at the front entrance to the campground. Only a few of campers waited their turn to climb it this early in the morning. But the line was sure to grow as the day wore on and more climbers arrived in the valley for the start of the Slam tomorrow. Janelle ducked out of the tent. "Are you okay with it?" Chuck asked her, warming to Carmelita's interest in the sport that had consumed him as a young man. Janelle stood at Carmelita's back and combed her fingers through her daughter's long, sleep-tangled hair. "You want to be like Chuck, do you?" she asked Carmelita. "Like me a long time ago," Chuck clarified. Now, as Carmelita returned to the campsite with the others in the wake of Jimmy's fall, she spoke while looking at her feet, her voice soft but firm. "I still want to do it," she said. "The Slam." Chuck gave Janelle's hand a squeeze. Carmelita's first year of middle school hadn't been all they'd hoped. Shy and reserved, Carmelita had made few friends and refused entreaties from Janelle and Chuck to try after-school clubs and sports. The good news, at least, was that she'd done well in her classes. Very well, in fact. But she'd spent a lot of her free time alone. "You're crazy, Carm," Rosie declared. She swung her hiking boot at a stone, kicking it from the path. She teetered at the end of her kick, her foot nearly as high as her head. Only Clarence's quick grab kept her from tumbling backward to the ground. "I was good at it," Carmelita said. "I was really good. Wasn't I?" "That's stating the obvious," Clarence told her. "You were estupendo up there." Janelle slipped her hand out of Chuck's grip and turned sideways to face him as they walked. "They'll cancel the competition, won't they?" she asked him. "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 money to remodel the bathroom. They might even make enough to add showers, which they've needed forever." Janelle rested her hand in 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, 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 things." He pointed up through a break in the trees at the top of El Capitan, looming 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—changes in the weather, equipment problems, personality issues, fatigue. 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 questioned, "Despite what just happened to Jimmy?" "Despite that," Chuck said. Janelle turned to 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 sabrina valiente," he said. "That's my brave niece." Janelle's fingers tightened around Chuck's elbow. "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 craaaaa-zy." 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. On either side, campers prepared breakfast and arranged gear. Some organized overnight camping supplies. They packed duffle bags, tied guy lines to tent poles, and flopped sleeping bags over their tents to air them in the sun. Others, obviously climbers, sorted through their climbing kits. They counted out quick draws, coiled ropes on tarps, and arranged cams and bolts and carabiners on picnic tables, grouping the pieces of climbing hardware by size and type. Still other Camp 4 campers were Latino families, middle-aged men and women with children occupying sites ringed with inexpensive hoop tents. The adults' worn jeans, denim shirts, long skirts, and cafeteria-worker uniforms 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 the giant rock had come to rest after tumbling eons ago from the cliffs to the valley floor. For decades, the short, demanding 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 commingled and hashed out any outstanding grievances. After so many years away, Chuck gazed around him with a sense of melancholy. No campground in the national park system was more famous than Camp 4. From its position in the center of Yosemite Valley, the campground had served since the 1960s as the base of climbing operations for an ever-changing cast of world-renowned, 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 Yvonne Chouinard, 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. As he made his way along the central corridor through the campground with his family, Chuck noted Camp 4 was a different place now than when he'd spent so much time here twenty years ago. Taking an informal inventory, he noted that 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. In addition to the walk-in sites occupied by climbers preparing for their ascents, numerous sites were taken by young, international travelers organizing only camping supplies, with no climbing gear in evidence, and fully a third of the campground's sites were occupied by Latino workers and their families. As they passed one of the worker-occupied sites, a stout, swarthy Latina woman looked up from a camp stove. The smell of frying bacon wafted from a skillet on the stove in front of her. She squinted through the steam rising from the pan, taking in the mocha complexions of Janelle and Clarence and the girls. "Hola," she greeted them. Her deep, gravely voice reminded Chuck of the rough, sandpapery tone shared by Rosie and Rosie's grandfather, Janelle's Mexican-immigrant father. "Hola," Janelle responded. "¿Que tal?" "No mucho," the aproned woman said. She returned to flipping strips of bacon with her spatula in the pan before her. When they were out of earshot of the woman, Janelle turned to Chuck. "You said you were bringing us to Yosemite Valley, not the South Valley." Upon immigrating from Juarez as teenage newlyweds, Janelle's parents had raised Janelle and Clarence in Albuquerque's gang-ridden South Valley, the only neighborhood they could afford with their meager, blue-collar incomes. As a teenager, Janelle rebelled against what she perceived as the stifling, though loving, upbringing of her parents by bearing Carmelita and Rosie with a South Valley drug dealer, now deceased. Clarence escaped the violence of the South Valley by attending the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology. He joined Chuck's firm, Bender Archaeological, Inc., 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 small, mountain hometown of Durango, north of the New Mexico border in Colorado. "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 for Bender Archaeological, 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, calling on his many personal connections in the valley, for himself and the other reunion attendees. Other than the two solo pup tents already erected at the edge of the site by Jimmy and Bernard, the reunion site was empty. The YOSAR team's white canvas tents ringed a small meadow outside the campground to the west, beyond the Bender Archaeological and reunion campsites. Cruiser bikes rested against the wooden platforms on which the search-and-rescue team's wall tents stood, and an array of lawn chairs faced each other in the center of the meadow. The idea for the reunion was Jimmy's, timed to coincide with Chuck's working visit to the valley. Jimmy had scheduled the Slam for the same weekend as well, though none of the reunion attendees took him up on his suggestion that they sign up for the competition. In declining Jimmy's offer, the former climbing buddies cited age and creaking joints. Chuck also cited the tight timeframe he faced with Clarence to complete Bender Archaeological's contracted work in the valley. Of the former Yosemite Valley climbers who 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 contracts in his mid-twenties did he drive 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. To this day, Chuck was the only full-time employee of his firm. He hired part-timers like Clarence to complete specific contracts 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 small archaeological world for the many discoveries he'd unearthed over the years accrued directly to him. That fame led to the stream of enviable contracts that had flowed his way month in and month out—straight through to the intriguing contract from the Native Peoples Foundation that brought him to the valley this week with Janelle, the girls, and Clarence. Chuck knew his comfort in working on his own or with only one or two temporary hired hands like Clarence 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 appreciated the camaraderie of the tight circle of fellow climbers with whom, for the few weeks he could spare each summer during his twenties, he'd based out of Camp 4 and climbed the cliffs around the valley. With Jimmy and Jimmy's longtime climbing partner Chet Alstad as their unofficial leaders, the other climbers attending the reunion this weekend had spent entire summers and significant portions of falls, winters, and springs at Camp 4, teaming with each other in twos, threes, and fours to put up ever-more-challenging routes on the valley's towering walls, all the while bickering like family over who among them was the most talented climber and whose completed routes were the most difficult. Chuck stopped in the path with Janelle, the girls, and Clarence when brakes squealed on the passing road at the edge of the campground. They watched as a truck and flatbed trailer pulled to a stop on the shoulder of the road adjacent to the campground. Three dozen tourists in broad-brimmed hats and high-collared, sunblock shirts sat in rows of bench seats bolted the length of the trailer. A tour guide in khaki slacks, long-sleeved shirt, and a ball 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 amplified 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 renowned as the birthplace of big-wall climbing, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003." The tour guide adjusted the arm of her microphone. "Today, Camp 4 is more than just a climber hangout," she continued. "Climbing teams still use the campground as their temporary living quarters between their 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, prompting the tour vehicle to jerk into gear and rumble 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 bounced from foot to foot when they reached their campsite. "I have to go, go, go," she said, her voice strained and her face turning red. "I'll take her," Carmelita offered. "Gracias," Janelle said. Rosie and Carmelita set off for the bathroom at a jog. Clarence sat sideways in the hammock he'd tied between the trunks of two pines next to his tent. He dug his toe into the dirt and swung 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. "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 the campground'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-odd years," he agreed. His receding hairline 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 amateur philosopher and teller of fortunes, he'd been given to mystical dances, transcendent chants, and spooky readings of the future, his Buddhist thumb cymbals, dried-gourd maracas, and deck of tarot cards always close at hand. Chuck briefed Ponch on Jimmy's accident. "He's on the way by ambulance to the hospital in Merced," he concluded. "What a way to start the reunion," Ponch said, his eyes clouded. He rested his palm on the handle of his gear-filled wheelbarrow. "Did Chet go with him?" "Bernard went. I've got his cell number to check in when they get there." Ponch turned to the reunion campsite. Other than the two small tents erected by Jimmy and Bernard the night before, the site was empty. "Where is he, then?" "Chet? 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 said with emphasis. "You don't get it. Chet was supposed to fly in at dawn. Right here, to Camp 4." His eyes roamed the deserted campsite. "Jesus," he moaned, growing pale. "What have I done?" Chuck stiffened. "Say what?" "Chet's dead." Ponch's voice shook. "And it's all my fault."
