The Yellowstone Conundrum

by John Randall

  The foursome had taken off at 1:00 am, which was the normal starting time for summiting Mt. Hood. Two hours into the climb, their headlamps on, with only a handful of other people on the trail, the weather turned ugly, wind howling in circles.

  “It’ll be all right by morning!” Dad had shouted, which made the scary feeling in her stomach a bit less worrisome. After all, he was Dad.

  It was a bugger of a climb. At 4:00 am, at the top of the Hogsback, the Pacific NW was struck with a late winter storm; a storm that dropped seven inches of rain in Seattle, six-plus in Portland and feet-upon-feet of wet snow on Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams and Mt. Hood.

  The Perly Gates were huge rock outcroppings, like incisor teeth covered with glacial ice that protected the summit of Mt. Hood. The “trail” led to the center of the outcroppings, through an ice canyon, and continued upward

  to the summit.

  Penny started to get really scared when Dad turned and looked at her, face covered with ice and snow, and his eyes wide with fear. “We gotta get down!” he shouted, his words instantly blown to some other part of the universe.

  It was dark and she was cold. While they had “standard” winter equipment, they had nothing with them to protect themselves against hurricane winds, negative temperatures and blowing wet snow.

  Dr. Death was on the horizon. Dad could see him; red eyes, sharp teeth and a tongue that would wrap around his neck. Penny screamed. “Dad! Dad!” Meanwhile Frankie Carlson had lain down and was fetal; his dad stood over him, his mind frozen with indecision.

  “Pitch a tent!” Dad had shouted, then shook Mr. Carlson and pointed to his son.”

  Penny screamed again. “Dad, we’ve got to go down!”

  “Too late for that! Make camp! We’ll ride it out!” His head shook back and forth.

  no no no no no we’ve got to get out of here

  Penny grabbed her Dad’s arm. “We’re going to die if we stay here!” she shrieked. Her Dad shook his head as he put his pack down and began to scramble to find the four-person three-season tent that would be impossible to set up in a gale at 10,400 feet in the middle of a freak three-day storm. Dad fought with his pack, then with fingers numbing found the tent. With a determined yank he pulled the fabric out of his pack, his right arm tangled with the material, POP, the tent instantly became a balloon and it and Dad were gone just like that. One moment he was there, the next he was sailing across the face of Mt. Hood, simply gone.

  Eyes wide Penny screamed once more, but then saw it would do no good. She reached down and grabbed at Frankie Carlson, who if possible would shrivel into the size of a crushed all of paper. She turned to Mr. Carlson and yelled. “We’ve got to get down off this fucking mountain!” It was the first time she’d used the f-word in that context; pointing down the carved backbone nicknamed The Hogsback. A small light of understanding lit behind Mr. Carlson’s eyes. He grabbed his son and their two backpacks and began to follow Penny as she descended, ran, tumbled, blindly down a narrow path between two berms of hard-packed snow.

  It was pitch dark when she came to the end of The Hogsback; like running into a brick wall at the end of a dark tunnel. Out of breath, yet perspiring heavily, a dangerous condition, the trio stopped to reconnoiter. All three of them were panting heavily, both Mr. Carlson and Frankie with the thin, wheezy sounds of asthma. Nobody was thinking of Dad. Dad was gone.

  To her left were steps carved into the icy snow that climbed fifteen feet up to the inverted part of The Hogsback. She remembered the climb from the hotel, up an exposed ridge. It took two hours to climb. How long to come down?

  “Come on!” Penny shouted as she started climbing the ice steps.

  “No wait!” shouted Mr. Carlson, Frankie nearly limp. “We stay here. We’re protected. We have something to eat. We’ll be OK. This will blow over,” he was talking to her adult-to-adult instead of adult-to-kid.

  Penny heard a voice inside her head that was like the background music in the Halloween Part Whatever movies; RUN RUN RUN GET THE HELL OUT OF HERE!

  “I’m going! The hotel is right down this ridge, stay to the left of the ridge and follow it down, no more than 45 minutes. Frankie!” her eyes pleaded with the young boy. “We’ll be in the sauna! Come on!” Frankie’s eyes were beyond decision mode. Mr. Carlson’s left arm suddenly reached out for Penny, trying to grab her. Penny squealed and jumped up the icy steps.

  And into the blizzard; there was a glimmer of morning light, enough for her to see the ridge to her right that fell off into the darkness beyond her miner’s light; beneath her feet was the well-worn icy path, now quickly covered with snow. Penny turned once. The entrance to The Hogsback was gone. The only way was down.

  Two hours later, like a character in a cartoon movie, she smacked into the small upper-level building of the Palmer Ski Lift; smack, head down, then butt on the ground, snow piling everywhere. Elated, she yelped a cry of pain and relief. The Timberline Lodge was only another—how far? She found the door to the starter’s building, rattled it, but it was locked. Not fair. Not fair to me! The lifts were closed because of bad weather.

  Then she started to feel the affects of the cold, of perspiring when she shouldn’t have been. She was tired, no, exhausted. Her miner’s hat light began to flicker as the batteries reached their limits. To the east the grayness of the blizzard was a little less dark. She frantically began to search around the perimeter of the starter’s shack. Nothing. A flight of wooden stairs went up twenty feet to the platform where the lifts departed and arrived. She scrambled up the steps with her last supply of energy; saw what she remembered in her mind’s eye and started to dismantle the gate that separated those in line from those not in line; bending the gate the wrong way, she put maximum reverse torque on it until it broke, then began to waggle the fence gate until the hinge snapped.

  She dragged the gate down the snowy steps, and hefted it to her shoulders; it was heavier, a lot heavier than she expected, and tossed it through the glass window on the Mt. Hood side of the shack, crashing the window. Scrambling up and over a padlocked locker (filled with emergency supplies), she kicked a hole in the window large enough to scramble through.

  The shack had electricity. She flicked the overhead light on. From a distance nothing but a pinprick of light shone through the miserable morning.

  About ready to drop flat on her nose, Penny tried the telephone, an old-style black phone on a hook. “Hello!” she shouted; dead air. In disbelief, she whacked the phone against the wall “Not fair! Not fair! Not fair!” she shouted.

  “Hello, this is the hotel operator. Who is this?” the thoroughly beaten phone answered begrudgingly.

  Dad had never been found, now a permanent part of the Mt. Hood glacier. Frankie and Mr. Carlson had been found, four days after the storm subsided enough to send out a rescue party. Penny’s description of where they were had been right on mark. The raceway groove in the mountain, The Hogsback, had been covered with eight feet of snow. Mr. Carlson and his son had been frozen to death inside an ice cave. They’d gone to sleep and awoke too late to keep an air hole. Inside their perspiration had frozen, thawed, and been refrozen repeatedly. They died without knowing what happened.

  “Come on, Jimmy,” Penny urged, standing above her friend. Jimmy straightened up and started to carve his way uphill across a treeless snowfield; two pushes and he stopped.

  “Too much sex, I guess,” he tried to smile.

  Ash began to fall on them as the black curtain began to cross the wide-open snowfield; the surface of the power now salt-and-pepper.

  “Jimmy! This isn’t good. This crap is going to kill us if we don’t get over the top.”

  Her statement was punctuated by a series of explosions, far away beyond what they could see, which wasn’t much to the west. To Penny it still seemed as if the death veil had reached its limit at the crest of the mountain; she could still see blue sky to the north, even as the evil cloud began to settle. High above her was obscured. Penny pulled out a bandana and wra
pped it around her face, covering her nose; then covered her head with a lightweight balaclava. She tried to do the same with Jimmy, who suddenly fell over, leaden.

  “Just gotta rest, babe,” he muttered.

  “Jimmy! Listen to me. If we don’t get over that pass we’re going to die here. Do you understand? Now get your butt up and kick monkey!” she shouted. “I can’t carry you. You have to do this yourself!”

  Jimmy’s eyes reflected understanding. He nodded yes and got to a knee, and then up again.

  “Let’s go!” Penny shook him. Her parka was covered with black ash and she could feel breathing was much more difficult. She wrestled with his pack, finally freeing it. “Come on, Jimmy! Get up!”

  Shouldering his pack as well as hers, Penny started forward up the hill. “GO, GO, GO!” she shouted as she pushed away, urging him on. Can’t look back can’t look back he’s got to do this himself I can’t carry him God please help him please help him. Above her she could see the black cloud depositing ash to the summit, but not beyond. It was raining crap, first as crinklecrinkle then as smacksmack.

  “Come on, Jimmy!” she shouted. “You can do it!” again she shouted, huffing her way to the summit, her strong legs cutting through the snow. Thirty feet below her was the highway. A long-time visitor to the mountains, she knew the tease of climbing; the number of false passes was never-ending. There was always one more pass to climb. But no! This was the top. She pushed hard, oblivious to the fact that she’d just plowed through the black cloud. The ash wasn’t falling on her. She’d gone through the curtain.

  “Penny help. I can’t make it. Help me!” she heard, whether it was a real voice or a memory, she wasn’t sure. Panting, she stopped. The veil of Black Death had caught up to the upper current jet stream and for the time being would begin to tail off back into Wyoming.

  “Jimmy!” she shouted, then started back.

  “Help me, Penny. I can’t…I’m too tired…Jesus, sweet Jesus…”

  “Noooooooo!” she shouted, then with a seemingly effortless shove, started back down from Beartooth Pass. She entered into the black veil, her bandana, now soaked in perspiration quickly began to accumulate the black ash from the eruption. Just as quickly it was darker than the last trip into hell’s tunnel.

  “Penny….I can’t…”

  Something in Penny’s brain said STOP STOP STOP!

  She came to a stop. Somewhere in the distance was Jimmy James. She knew behind her was safety, if she just turned around she could ski right through that death curtain again. She stopped and listened, her heart beating quickly.

  “Come on, Jimmy,” she urged. “Come on, babe, tell me where you are. I know where I am. Come on Jimmy!”

  “Penny…”

  Penny stood up straight in her skis. Volcano crap fell all around her. She knew that if she went down the hill there was more than a reasonable chance she would get disoriented, not be able to drag Jimmy up the hill; he could be two hundred yards away. The dust started her coughing. Behind her was a veil of light.

  Penny started to cry; at first drips and drabs, then sobs; coughing sobs filled with volcanic crap from the center of the earth. She turned and skied toward the light.

  Not sixty seconds later she was at the top of Beartooth pass. The black veil had advanced another half mile toward Cody. It was just too fucking weird. Straight above her she could see blue sky to the north, a black veil to the south.

  Regardless, Jimmy, like her Dad, like Frankie and Mr. Carlson, hadn’t been able to keep up. Guilt would come later.

  “I’m sorry, Jimmy,” she muttered under her breath as she turned to the north and started skiing down that side of Beartooth Pass toward Red Bank, Montana. It didn’t make sense to sacrifice yourself, to sacrifice life, and you only have one life, because someone couldn’t keep up.

  Johnson Hall, University of Washington

  Seattle

  Karen Bagley slowly made her way through the chaos that was the Geo Survey’s lab and office. The power was out, not even a flicker from the emergency light. The tiny help she’d heard hadn’t been repeated. Orienting herself in the room, she knew the entrance to the lab was to her left; outside there was a small lobby with access to the heavy wooden front door. The building was early Gothic, built like a mini-castle in Knights of Round Table; only in this case the Knights would have laughed because it was so small; four stories high with no mote.

  Inside was housed the equipment supporting the Pacific NW Seismic Network, monitors that measured the earth’s various movements; sponsored by the US Geological Survey, the UW Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the University of Oregon (for maintenance of the seismic equipment); you’d think UW would be able to provide someone with a squirt gun to support the devices; and Oregon State (the final straw) for its broadband support and the US Advanced National Seismic System which was the connection vehicle to all the other measuring stations in the US.

  It was apparent that the tower portion of the building had collapsed, perhaps straight down through the stairwells and the elevator. From inside her seismic lab Karen could make out nothing but dim, ethereal images, dark against darker. The shaking stopped; the only sounds came from her heavy breathing, scared to death.

  OK, this isn’t a good place to be. She thought. Let’s get out of here. And, I don’t want to hear--

  Help

  --again. God damn it!

  “What? Where are you?” Karen shouted, having not moved more than five feet from her now-stinky-with-coffee-tipped-over-workstation.

  Don’t lose your direction or else you’re going to be like those poor little fucking mice in the bio lab.

  What a great graduation present. Six years of study, well, mostly study and she was free to do anything she wanted, not get a job, not get pregnant, not be attractive, and not have friends.

  It was so spooky. Karen could hear nothing but her own breathing. She could taste the air it was so heavy with dust.

  Lucy’s desk, Dr. Peters’ desk, shit a trashcan, which she accidentally kicked hard. Then her groping hand happened onto a flat screen monitor which unseen was perched on the edge of a desk ready to collapse. The screen pitched over and bounced heavily onto the floor, then shattered. I think that’s minus three on the green scale. She thought to herself, amazed she could think sarcastic humor. You’ll be OK, next time take all of your medicine.

  Then there was space, almost too much space. Staggering, she fumbled, and stumbled against a sharp-edged desk that would bruise her thigh by tomorrow. “Stop it!” she shouted to herself.

  Whack. She ran into the heavy door that led from the lab to the lobby.

  “Shit!” she exclaimed, her face smarting from the direct encounter. What would momma say if she heard her talk?

  She tried the knob. It turned but the door didn’t open, at least not easily. It was like something or somebody was leaning really hard against it. Karen ran her hand along the door frame and quickly realized what the problem was. The door frame had been scrunched, for a better word. The heavy door itself was cracked in the upper right side. Other than ripping the door as best she could, the building simply wasn’t going to cooperate.

  Now angry, Karen pulled and turned on the doorknob until it opened no more than eight inches and told her by the resistance that babe we ain’t goin’ no further.

  Not entirely nagged by the thought of sausage being made, Karen forced herself through the cracked door. Fortunately, the long ago Freshman 15 and Sophomore 10 additions to her body wobbled enough to allow her ample breasts to cram through the cracked door, now into the lobby. Or what could have been a lobby, or once was a lobby. The granite tile on the floor, now covered with debris, was smashed irretrievably by unseen forces. Ahead and down three steps would have been the front door to Johnson Hall, except there was nothing but a rubble blockade.

  “Help! I can hear you. Please don’t leave me here!”

  The voice was louder. It was a man’s voice. While the atmosphere in the des
troyed lobby was toxic, Karen could at least see across the room, with ambient light coming from somewhere to her left. She walked across the slick tiled floor, littered with building debris and put her ear to the closed elevator door. She could hear him breathing heavily above her, who knows how far up. She tapped on the elevator door with her knuckle.

  “I hear you!” she shouted.

  A woo-hoo came from elevator-land, although it seemed a mile away.

  “I’ll be back!” she shouted again, this time not received as well. “No—wait…”

  Jesus, was that dad? It sounded like Dad! Come, on! That’s not Dad. Dad’s dead. Stop it! But, it sounded like Dad.

  “God, damn, it! It’s not Dad!” tired, dirty, arms already weak from more physical effort that she’d had to do before in her life, Karen tried to re-focus.

  Karen turned and made her way toward what she imagined was the front door to Johnson Hall. She heard remote pounding from Elevator Man, but that was OK, he wasn’t going anywhere. The lobby of Johnson Hall had collapsed. Through the rubble she could make out where the front door either was, or should have been. Fresh air filled the lobby. There was a hole someplace. Karen went toward the dim light, every step a loud crunch. She had to scrunch through some tight spaces, wiggling herself through, but finally made it to the door, which was split in half and lay face out onto the quad.