by Scott Graham
The assistance of Yosemite National Park research librarian Virginia Sanchez and archivist Paul Rogers proved particularly helpful in verifying the historical plot points of Yosemite Fall. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the public-domain use of the nineteenth-century writings of Stephen F. Grover and Lafayette H. Bunnell, whose fascinating journal entries augment the story told here.
I offer my sincere gratitude to independent bookstores and booksellers across the West for their unflagging support, which has been critical to the growing success of the National Park Mystery Series.
Finally, I extend my appreciation to the people of California’s present-day Southern Sierra Miwok tribe and all descendants of the Yosemite people, whose ancestral lands today form the beautiful heart of Yosemite National Park.
ABOUT SCOTT GRAHAM
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.
TORREY HOUSE PRESS
Voices for the Land
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—Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day
Torrey House Press is an independent nonprofit publisher promoting environmental conservation through literature. We believe that culture is changed through conversation and that lively, contemporary literature is the cutting edge of social change. We strive to identify exceptional writers, nurture their work, and engage the widest possible audience; to publish diverse voices with transformative stories that illuminate important facets of our ever-changing planet; to develop literary resources for the conservation movement, educating and entertaining readers, inspiring action.
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PROLOGUE
Her death was her own damn fault.
He’d done everything right—research, surveillance, charge level, timing. His planning and execution had been perfect, his actions beyond reproach.
Which was why not a single question came his way. Instead, her friends directed their anger at NatResources while they mourned her “passing,” to use their spineless phrase. They didn’t even cancel that weekend’s Moab Counts 10K, the annual citizens’ run she’d directed each November for more than a decade. Instead, they declared that year’s race a “celebration of her life”—again, their pathetic term. She was dead, for Christ’s sake. But they couldn’t even bring themselves to say the word.
He jogged with everyone else that cold, sunny Saturday morning along the bike path beside the Colorado River away from town and back again. While he ran, he maintained a teary-eyed look on his face, proving himself just another wimpass, heartbroken local.
When, in fact, he was anything but.
The notion had popped into his head a year earlier.
He’d been out for an autumn run on Behind the Rocks Trail, following its serpentine path through the maze of red sandstone fins that jutted skyward south of town. The tall, thin slabs of rock sliced the landscape into linear strips of windswept dunes separated by shadowed slot canyons.
Tremors surged through the ground every few seconds during his run. The seismic vibrations pulsed upward through his legs and reverberated in his torso. With each mini-earthquake came the same question, over and over again. What if he could send his own seismic wakeup call to every citizen of Utah? Thump. What if? Thump. What if?
For decades, Utah’s politicians had fed voters the same tired line: Utahns could sell their souls to the petrochemical devil while continuing to attract millions of big-spending tourists to the state’s incomparable canyon country. In recent years, fierce young environmentalists from the Wasatch Front had disputed the politicians’ long-unquestioned claim. Hoisting the torch of Edward Abbey high above their heads, the conservation warriors declared nothing would be left of Utah’s stunning red rock country but savaged earth if the petrochemical giants kept on mauling the land with their bulldozers, excavators, backhoes, and graders.
So far, the environmentalists’ protest marches and online petitions had resulted in zero change. It was up to someone else to shock the citizens of Utah out of their willful ignorance before it was too late, and with each vibration that pulsed up from the ground through his body on his morning runs south of town, he realized with greater clarity who that someone was.
He began by purchasing a laptop off Craigslist and wiping its hard drive clean. He linked the computer to the internet and conducted his research only through his new, secret online portal. He made further purchases in cash at far-flung ranch supply stores throughout the winter, until he collected everything his research told him he needed.
All through those long months, the seismic truck continued its work south of Moab among the sandstone fins, its proposed move north of town bogged down in the courts.
Spring passed. Summer. By October, a year since he’d first felt the vibrations on Back of Beyond Trail, the truck’s pulses were a living thing inside him, a thrumming reminder of what he was prepared to do, and why.
The cottonwoods glowed with autumn gold, the brilliant yellow trees resplendent in the slanted fall sunlight. The leaves snapped free of their branches by the thousands each crisp, cold morning, fluttering to earth in shimmering cascades.
Finally freed by the courts, the massive thumper truck trundled through town early one morning the first week of November, its passage noted by only a handful of sign-waving protesters. It turned off the highway twenty miles north of town and crawled across public land on a winding two track to Yellow Cat Flat, just outside the northern border of Arches National Park.
The limbs of the cottonwoods in town were bare and skeletal a few days later, when the year’s first winter storm drew a bead on Moab. He checked the truck’s timetable on the Geo-Resources website as the storm bore down, set to bring decreasing temperatures, whipping winds, and icy sleet to southern Utah. He shuddered and took a deep, calming breath. When the storm arrived in two days, the truck still would be thumping its way across Yellow Cat Flat, immediately north of the park.
He double-checked the detonator and retested the timer and battery. He remeasured the premixed amounts of mercury fulminate, ammonium chlorate, and nitroglycerine, making sure they were exact.
The storm crossed into Utah late in the afternoon on November 14. As darkness fell, gray clouds gathered over the state, bringing heavy snow to the northern mountains and sleet to the red rock country in the south.
That night, he deleted his online account and powered down the laptop. He drove north out of Moab over the Colorado River bridge, slowing to toss the computer over the guardrail into the dark waters below.
He remained on the highway, bypassing the entrance to the national park to avoid the park welcome station and the twenty-four-hour webcam on the building’s roof that recorded the license plates of all entering vehicles. He swung off the highway into the Klondike Bluffs Trailhead parking lot fifteen miles north of town.
Cold gusts of wind and icy blasts of sleet bit into him when he climbed out of his car. Low, scudding clouds hid the stars. Though it was after midnight, sedans, SUVs, and tractor-trailer rigs coursed along the wet highway, their wipers flapping in the storm.
He shouldered his pack, clicked on his headlamp, and hiked away from the parking lot. The distinctive rise of Entrada sandstone at the heart of the national park loomed to the east. Two miles from the highway, he left the trail and crossed the unmarked boundary into the park, wending his way through sagebrush and chamisa. Ahead, the uplift of stone beckoned, black against the overcast sky.
He finished hand-drilling the shallow hole in the arch as the sky lightened with dawn. He tamped the charge into the hole, sank the parallel prong
s of the detonator into the charge mixture, set the timer for 7:36, and backed off. Needles of wind-driven sleet gathered on his shoulders as he crouched in a sandstone fold two hundred yards from the narrow rock span. The arch soared above a meadow of sagebrush, connecting humped ridges of sandstone.
The first thump of the day pulsed through him in his hiding place in the stone crevice at 7:30, right on schedule. A second thump followed from the north a few seconds later, then another, and another.
Minutes passed. The pulses continued their slow, inexorable beat. Thump. Pause. Thump. Pause. Thump.
A light tap-tap-tapping noise reached him—the sound, propelled by the gusting wind, of running steps. He stiffened and checked his watch. 7:35. He leaned forward, eyes wide, heart pounding.
She appeared a hundred yards beyond the arch, her blue running jacket and black tights silhouetted against the gray clouds. She ran with the light, easy gait of a gazelle, crossing the spine of stone high above the sage meadow, headed straight for the arch.
He very nearly jumped up and screamed at her to stop. But that would have meant giving himself away.
He knelt in place instead, his head ducked. Surely, she would stop before venturing out onto the span itself.
She slowed and edged down the sloping shoulder of sandstone to the point where the arch soared away from the hump of rock into space. Rather than stop, however, she stepped from the solid shoulder of stone onto the bridge of stone.
The digital numbers on his watch flicked from 7:35 to 7:36. He dug his fingernails into his palms, his breaths coming in quick bursts.
She extended her arms from her sides and placed one foot directly in front of the other, walking slowly down the middle of the span. She was fifteen feet out on the arch, surrounded by sifting mist and swirling sleet, when a sharp, concussive crack sounded at the near end of the rock bridge. She dropped her arms to her sides, her gaze fixed on the narrow arc of stone stretched through thin air before her.
The near end of the arch cleaved in two. Dark lines shot like black lightning through the remainder of the span. For an instant, the arch maintained its shape, hanging in the sky. Then it fractured into hundreds of jagged chunks of sandstone.
He leapt to his feet. “No!” he cried out, finally finding his voice.
Too late.
The woman’s eyes found his just as the shattered arch fell away beneath her. She screamed and grabbed at the air with outstretched fingers as she plunged amid the falling pieces of the span to the sagebrush flat five stories below.
PART ONE
“A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.”
—Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
1
Thump
Chuck Bender quivered from head to toe as the pulsing vibration passed through him.
He lay awake beside his wife, Janelle Ortega, in their camp trailer. Carmelita and Rosie slept in narrow bunk beds opposite the galley kitchen, halfway down the camper’s center aisle, their breaths soft and steady.
He didn’t need to check his watch to know the time. The NatResources truck had begun its work promptly at 7:30 the previous two mornings. No doubt the crew was on time this morning as well.
Chuck pulled back the curtain over the window abutting the double bed at the back of the trailer. Wind-driven sleet pelted the glass. Dark clouds hung low over the campground. He dropped the curtain. Another thump sounded, followed by another rolling vibration through his body, as the seismic truck pounded the earth outside the park to the north, trolling for underground deposits of oil and natural gas.
He rolled to face Janelle. Her eyes were closed, but her breathing was uneven, wakeful. He drew a line down her smooth, olive cheek, tracing the gentle arc of her skin with his fingertip. Her eyes remained shut, but the corner of her mouth twitched.
“Hey, there, belleza,” he murmured, lifting a lock of her silky, black hair away from her face.
She opened her eyes. Turning to him, she tucked her hands beneath her small, pointed chin. “Belleza nadie. Nobody’s beautiful this early in the morning.”
“It’s not that early. We slept in.”
A powerful gust roared through the campground, tearing at the trailer’s thin, aluminum shell.
Janelle raised her eyebrows. “That’s some storm.”
“As predicted,” Chuck said. He gathered her in his arms and pressed his body to hers.
Sheets rustled in the lower bunk bed. Janelle raised her head to peer down the walkway past Chuck’s shoulder. “Look who’s awake,” she said. “Buen día, m’hija.”
“Hola, Mamá,” eleven-year-old Rosie replied from the bottom bunk in her deep, raspy voice. “You two woke me up with all your lovey-dovey talking. Are you having sex?”
Chuck stiffened and released Janelle, who slid away from him to her side of the bed. A snort of laughter sounded from behind the drawn curtain hiding thirteen-year-old Carmelita in the top bunk.
Janelle grinned at Chuck as they lay facing each other. She said to Rosie, “No, honey, we’re not . . . we’re not . . .”
“. . . having sex? But you said that’s what people do when they love each other.”
“There’s a time and place for everything, m’hija. I can’t say this is exactly the right time and place to be asking about that sort of thing, but I guess it’s good you’re remembering all the stuff we’ve been talking about.”
“The birds and the bees,” Rosie confirmed from her bed. “Sex, sex, sex.”
Janelle pulled her pillow from beneath her head, pressed it over her face, and issued a sigh of resignation from beneath it.
Chuck folded his pillow in half, settled his head on it, and looked on as Carmelita drew back the upper-bunk curtain and leaned over the side of her bed. Her hair, dark and silky like her mother’s, hung past her head, hiding her face. Rosie lifted herself on her elbows and looked up at Carmelita. Rosie’s hair, also dark, was short and kinky and smashed against the side of her skull from her night’s sleep.
“You’re never gonna learn the right time and place for anything,” Carmelita scolded her younger sister.
Rosie flopped to her back on her mattress and crossed her pudgy arms over her thick torso, her hands clenched. “Will, too.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it.”
Chuck broke in. “I would,” he said to Carmelita. “Your sister’s going to keep on getting smarter and smarter, just like you. I mean, look how wise and all-knowing you’ve gotten, just in the last few weeks.”
Carmelita sat up straight in her bed, her spine rigid. She gathered her top sheet around her waist and narrowed her hazel eyes at Chuck before whipping the curtain back across her bed, closing herself off from view.
Janelle lifted her pillow from her face. “There’s no need for that,” she whispered to Chuck.
“I couldn’t help myself,” he apologized, speaking softly. “I can’t get used to her, to our new Carmelita.”
“We don’t have any choice.”
Chuck worked his jaw back and forth. Carmelita had been a loving big sister to Rosie and kindhearted daughter and step-daughter to Janelle and Chuck until a few weeks ago, when she’d woken one morning with a scowl on her face and a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth. Since then, as if inhabited by an alien being, she had subjected her little sister to nonstop teasing and had responded with little more than monosyllables and grunts of exasperation to all attempts at conversation by her parents.
Chuck knew Carmelita was simply expressing her growing sense of independence as she entered her teen years. But knowing what was going on with her didn’t make dealing with her any easier.
“You can’t be the one going on the attack,” Janelle insisted, her voice low. “You have to control yourself—which is to say, you have to stop channeling your mother.”
Chuck recoiled. “Shonda has nothing to do with this.”
Janelle rested her hand on his forearm. “She has everything to do with this. Especially now, for the next two weeks.”
He pressed the back of his head into his pillow. “Between the two of them, it’s like they’ve got us surrounded.”
“The only way we’ll survive is if we stick together. Juntos. And we have to keep on being nice to Carm. Just like we’ll be nice to your mother.” She tapped his nose with her finger. “Remember, this was all your idea—Shonda, your contract, the four of us crammed together into this teeny, tiny trailer for two whole weeks in the middle of winter.”
“It’s not winter yet. Not quite. Yesterday and the day before were great—sunny, warm. Plus, we’ve managed to avoid Shonda so far.”
“The first two days were the calm before the storm.” Janelle lifted the curtain on her side of the bed and peeked out. “Literally.”
Chuck stared at the camper ceiling, close over the bed. At seven feet by twenty-four feet, the trailer had seemed palatial when he’d bought it off a used lot in Durango a month ago for their planned stay in Arches. But by the end of their first day in Devil’s Garden Campground, at the terminus of the deadend road into the park, palatial had transformed into cozy. This morning, with the gale raging outside, the camper felt hopelessly cramped.
The four of them couldn’t possibly stay inside all day, trapped by the storm. They’d drive each other crazy. Nor could Chuck avoid Shonda forever. Maybe today was the day—finally, after four years—to introduce Janelle and the girls to his mother.
He tensed, anticipating the next pulsing beat from the NatResources truck. Instead, a sharp crack sounded from somewhere just north the campground, much closer than the truck’s location outside the park. A thunderous rumbling noise followed, accompanied by a shock wave that rocked the trailer on its wheels.