Mark was waiting in the hallway, standing in the exact spot I’d left him as though he hadn’t shifted his weight once in the intervening fourteen minutes. He led the way down the stairs without a word. His truck was already running in the lot, exhaust curling white in the early morning cold.
We drove west, then cut through La Bajada and picked up Highway 4 toward the Jemez. Mark, who normally drove with one knee with music blaring while gesticulating about whatever climber drama was consuming the local gym that week, kept both hands on the wheel at ten and two and the radio off.
Then it hit me.
That same acrid, charred-sage scent I’d caught in the hallway the night before.
My nose had always been sharp. Sharper than anyone else’s I’d ever met, actually, to the point where I’d learned not to mention it because people looked at me funny when I told them I could smell rain coming from forty miles out or identify which of my friends had been in a room based on the scent they’d left behind. But the odor clinging to the inside of Mark’s truck wasn’t anything I’d smelled before. It was organic and mineral at the same time, like something earthy mixed with rotten eggs…
Or sulfur.
“So which trail are we doing?” I asked, more to break the silence than anything.
“There’s a spur off the East Fork. Not on the trail maps.”
“How do you know about it then? A hiking forum or something?”
“I found it last week.”
I hadn’t known Mark to hike alone. He was a social creature, the friend who organized group trips and complained about how boring solo outings were. The idea of him out here alone, finding unmapped trails in the Jemez backcountry, sat wrong.
Everything about this morning sat wrong.
We left the highway and bounced along a forest road for twenty minutes before Mark pulled over at a wide spot where the shoulder met a wall of mixed conifer. There was no trailhead marker. No sign, no other cars, just a gap in the trees that might have been a game trail or might have been nothing at all.
I climbed out of the truck and stretched, the cold mountain air filling my lungs. We were high here, eight, maybe eight and a half thousand feet. Ponderosa and Douglas fir gave way to spruce further up the slope, and beyond the spruce the mountains climbed toward rocky ridges still holding patches of early snow. I could hear a creek running somewhere nearby.
“Mark, where exactly are we going?”
He was already walking toward the gap in the trees. “It’s about four miles in. Maybe five. There’s a canyon.”
“You didn’t mention a five-mile approach.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No.”
He stopped and turned, looking at me with those unblinking eyes. “You’ll like it. Trust me.”
Trust me.Two words Mark had never once said to me, because he’d never needed to. Trust between us had always been ambient, built over four years of belaying each other on sketchy trad routes and sharing hangovers and borrowing each other’s laundry detergent. The fact that he had to ask for it now was maybe the most unsettling thing that had happened all morning.
But I followed him. Because he was Mark, and something was clearly wrong with Mark, and I was constitutionally incapable of abandoning someone who needed help even when the help in question was dragging me into a trailless section of the Jemez Mountains on a cold Saturday morning for reasons that made no sense.
The terrain rose steadily through the conifers, the ground soft with decades of accumulated needles. We walked in single file, me three paces behind, Mark apparently navigating by some internal compass that he checked by tilting his head at regular intervals, as though listening for a signal I couldn’t hear.
He didn’t talk. Not about climbing or beer or the weather or any of the hundred things that normally poured out of him in an unbroken stream of cheerful chatter. He walked like a marionette whose operator had studied human locomotion but couldn’t quite replicate it.
Forty minutes in, my skin was crawling. The forest had gone quiet, the same suffocating silence I’d felt in the Sandias. Even the creek sound seemed to have gone away. I could only hear the crunch of our boots and the rasp of my own breathing.
Turn back.
The thought was so clear it might as well have been spoken, issued by some part of myself I couldn’t identify.
“Mark.” I stopped walking. He didn’t turn around immediately, just stood there facing uphill with his hands at his sides. “Mark, I want to go back.”
He turned slowly. His face was blank. Not angry, not confused, justvacant, like a screen that had been switched off. “We’re almost there.”
“I don’t care. Something doesn’t feel right and I want to?—”
