An unrelenting wind blasted Chuck as he reached the ridge-top viewpoint. Particles of dust rode the harsh breeze, carrying the gritty feel of absolute desiccation. He looked longingly down and to his left at the green slash of vegetation marking the course of Hermit Creek’s perennial waters. There would be no wind where the deep, side-canyon walls protected the creek. His nostrils filled with the imagined odors he knew awaited him there—the tangy scent of wild mint, the syrupy-sweet smell of tamarisk, the mineral aroma of wet sand. Openings in the brush along the creek were campsites for backpackers. The new latrine sat well away from the waters of the creek in the center of the open plot he’d assessed and dug.
Chuck turned away from the alluring greenery below. He pulled his phone from his pocket and punched in his call.
“We’ve got you at the ridge,” the disembodied voice said without preamble. “You’re close now, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
Here at the open viewpoint, the connection was clear and static-free.
“You know what you’re to get.”
“I don’t have enough water. I’ll never make it back out of the canyon.”
“Sure you will. Besides, you don’t have any choice. Carmelita’s counting on you.” The line went dead.
Chuck cursed. The odds that he could make it back up to the canyon rim without replenishing his water supply at the creek grew longer with each parched gust of wind. He was nauseous and lightheaded. Of all the canyon’s killers, heatstroke topped the list, and he was well on his way to reinforcing that statistic.
Hermit Creek was four trail miles deeper in the canyon. With a delay of less than five hours, he could descend to the creek, refill his water bags, and return safely to the ridge after the heat of the day passed.
Or he could do as the caller directed.
His destination lay only a few hundred yards away. And in truth, the delay caused by dropping down to Hermit Creek would be much greater than five hours. The final shuttle of the day from the end of Rim Drive back to Grand Canyon Village departed at 8:30 in the evening. If he visited the creek, he would miss the last shuttle and be forced to walk the eight miles back to camp along the closed road late into the night.
He pictured Carmelita looking to him for reassurance before setting off through the dark to the Mather Campground bathroom. He couldn’t leave her to face the coming night alone.
He would not descend to Hermit Creek. He would complete the retrieval here and now, and he would make it back out of the canyon this afternoon. As the caller said, he had no other choice.
FOURTEEN
2 p.m.
Chuck allowed himself one last yearning look at the greenery along Hermit Creek before turning to face the rugged ridge in front of him. The steep, cactus-studded east side of the ridge was a case study on the near impossibility of off-trail passage in the inner canyon, where every step had to be carefully considered lest an ankle be turned or a leg ripped open by a jagged rock or the hooked thorn of a barrel cactus. Rattlesnake bite was a constant off-trail concern as well, while slips and falls away from the canyon’s maintained trails could be instantly or, in the absence of help, gradually fatal.
The off-trail route across the face of the ridge was one he’d traveled a number of times, though he’d made the traverse only when mentally sharp in the coolness of spring or fall, not as he was now—sluggish and unsteady in the middle of a brutally hot summer day. He adjusted his pack, wavering in the heat.
How had the kidnapper known where he was? “We’ve got you at the ridge,” the computerized voice had said. And who was the “we” the voice had referred to?
Chuck faced due north. At his back, the ridgeline separating Hermit and Monument basins descended precipitously from the South Rim. Ahead, the ridge climbed upward in a series of encircling cliff bands to form a flat-topped knuckle of rock and desert scrub known as Cope Butte. The ridgeline fell away again, on the far side of the butte, the final two thousand vertical feet to the Colorado River at the bottom of the canyon.
Twenty years ago, as a solo backpacker taking advantage of a long fall weekend off from his studies at Fort Lewis College, Chuck had stopped to rest and take in the view from this very spot. The trail had been crowded with other backpackers that day. Chuck visited with several of them until the call of nature sent him scrambling away from the viewpoint and down into the Monument Creek drainage in search of a place out of sight of the trail.
His search proved unexpectedly difficult. It took two hundred yards of arduous scrambling along the face of Cope Butte to reach a spot far enough around the east side of the butte to be screened from the trail. It was from his precarious perch there that he spotted a depression in the center of the topmost cliff band encircling the butte’s summit massif. The small, cave-like opening was tucked into a south-facing fold in the cliff, 150 feet above where he stood and another three hundred yards around the east side of the butte.
Chuck was adept at recognizing likely locations of abandoned Anasazi ruins based on criteria presented by his Fort Lewis professors: south-facing to catch the winter sun, built into or at the foot of cliff walls to avoid storms and provide good defensive positioning to fend off invaders, and close to perennial water sources. The cavity high on Cope Butte met the first two of those three criteria, but it was far from both the perennial waters of Hermit Creek to the west and the intermittent waters of Monument Creek to the east. Furthermore, its location halfway up the vertical cliff band meant reaching the alcove would have been difficult for the Anasazi, though a ladder of tree limbs and yucca-cord lashings could have overcome that problem.
Chuck had just read The Man Who Walked Through Time on the recommendation of one of his professors. The book was an autobiographical account by famed distance hiker Colin Fletcher of Fletcher’s 1962 journey along the 150-mile length of the inner Grand Canyon on foot and largely off-trail. In it, Fletcher described coming across numerous small Anasazi structures built into the cliff walls of the inner canyon, many far from water sources. The structures Fletcher discovered were uniformly a few feet high by a few feet wide and constructed of tightly stacked rock mortared into place. Each featured a single opening that could be sealed shut with a thin slab of sandstone.
Similar ruins, found by the hundreds across the Colorado Plateau, were assumed by Arturo Dinaveri and other early Southwest archaeologists to be granaries used for the storage of maize. But Fletcher disagreed after he climbed inside the first of those he found. Upon lying down inside the structure, he discovered its interior dimensions were a good fit for his reclining frame, while the opening in the structure aligned with his line of sight, giving him an expansive view of the inner canyon from where he lay inside, protected from inclement weather.
After Fletcher overnighted in that first ruin, he found and examined others in the canyon. All, like the first, provided a perfect fit for his body, and all their openings were positioned to offer sweeping views to someone reclining inside. Fletcher grew convinced that the small stone structures, when not filled with corn, had served as one-man bivouac sites for Anasazi scouts on the lookout for nomadic invaders.
Chuck had wondered if the alcove high above him on Cope Butte might harbor just such a ruin. While the depression itself was well hidden, certainly the view from the mouth of the cavity would be as expansive as any in the canyon. He was captivated by the remoteness of the alcove as well. Its location halfway up the cliff band virtually assured it had never been visited in modern times, if ever.
Armed with little more than the recklessness of youth, Chuck had set out to see if he could reach the depression. Two and a half bands of cliff ranging in height from forty to sixty feet separated him from it. He inched his way up a cleft in the first cliff band to reach its top, then worked his way around to the butte’s north side. There, he came upon a tight, three-walled chimney that cut into the second cliff band from bottom to top. After wrapping a length of rope around his waist to use in descending from the cavity, prov
ided he managed to reach it, he left his backpack at the base of the second cliff, wedged himself into the chimney, and climbed upward. From the top of the chimney, he scrambled back around the summit massif to a point directly below the alcove.
The cavity was nearly within reach above him. However, thirty feet of cliff wall separated him from the floor of the alcove, and on first glance, the cliff appeared impossible to scale without the aid of climbing devices. When Chuck searched the wall, looking for linked breaks in the face of the rock, he spotted a series of cracks, ledges, and handholds that just might provide a route to the depression.
A hand jam into a fist-wide crack got Chuck five feet off the slope, which angled steeply downward away from the base of the cliff. A series of quick, hand-over-hand moves enabled him to grasp a small ledge a few feet higher. He mantled himself upward, achieving a precarious standing position on the narrow ledge while maintaining his balance by clinging to protrusions above it.
He was nearly two-thirds of the way there. Above, a few small outcrops provided the only holds between him and the bottom lip of the cavity. Once he left the relative security of the ledge, he would have no choice but to keep moving until he reached the floor of the depression. If he slipped or ran out of arm strength before he reached the alcove . . . well, the mystery of the alcove overrode those concerns.
He took hold of a pair of small outcrops above his head and hauled himself off the ledge. Quickly, he brought his feet even with his waist, pressed his toes to the rock face, and lunged upward. He grasped a small protrusion three feet higher with his left hand, only to find that the top of the outcrop sloped away from the face of the cliff. Even as he grasped it, nearing the extent of his strength, his fingertips began to peel from the hold.
He was more than twenty-five feet up the cliff face, a few feet below the floor of the cavity. If he lost his purchase, he would plummet to the slope at the bottom of the cliff and tumble to his death at the boulder-strewn base of the butte. Yet retreat was not an option; the holds below him were too tenuous to enable him to descend unroped to the narrow ledge.
Terrified, he redoubled his slippery hold on the outcrop and pulled himself higher in an all-or-nothing play for the lip of the alcove. His boots maintained their place on the face of the cliff and he clung to the protrusion just long enough to extend his right hand to the floor of the cavity. He exhaled with relief as his fingers closed over the lip of the depression. He hauled himself up and over the lip and into the alcove and collapsed in the shaded mouth of the depression, his eyes closed and his cheek pressed to the alcove’s flat sandstone floor. Gradually his breathing slowed, and he raised his head and looked around.
Tucked at the back of what proved to be a low-roofed cavern extending fifteen feet into the face of the cliff was a granary-like structure unlike any Chuck had seen. The rock structure, five feet high from floor to ceiling and spanning the entire eight-foot width of the rear of the cavern, presented workmanship of unbelievable quality. The structure’s mortarless front wall, constructed of chunks of rock chiseled to fit so closely together a gnat couldn’t squeeze between them, was an exquisite length of jigsaw puzzle in the medium of stone.
Chuck’s boots kicked up small clouds of dust as he duck-walked to the sandstone wall. The wall appeared even finer upon close inspection than it had from the lip of the cavern. He touched the chiseled chunks of fitted sandstone with trembling fingertips, then turned his attention to the structure’s entrance, a sandstone-slab door featuring a knob, something he’d never known the Anasazi to have used in any other instance.
The doorknob was made of a leather strap wrapped around and around itself to form a ball. The two ends of the strap disappeared through a hole chiseled in the oval door. Chuck pulled gently on the knob. The strap crackled but did not break. The door, two feet high and a foot and a half wide, slid easily from its slot. A lip lining the inside of the doorframe fit the single-piece door precisely. The ends of the leather strap that formed the knob were tied around a stick snugged against the door’s back.
Chuck set the sandstone-slab door aside and crouched in front of the opening. The interior of the walled-off space at the back of the cavity, roughly six feet deep, was dim and shadowy. No light shone through chinks in the wall; the structure was as tight as when it first had been constructed. He inhaled through his nose, sampling the air inside and finding it musty and free of moisture. Whatever lay within was still dry, not ravaged by mildew and rot over the course of all these years.
He leaned into the small room at the rear of the alcove. When his eyes adjusted to the semi-darkness, he nearly fell to his knees before the astonishing pair of objects sitting in front of him on two carefully arranged stacks of round river rocks.
FIFTEEN
2 p.m.
Two decades after first reaching the alcove, standing on the ridge with Cope Butte rising ahead of him, Chuck fought the growing fogginess in his brain. How did Carmelita’s kidnapper know his exact location? He ran a mental inventory of the contents of his pockets and pack. The only technological device he had with him was his cell phone.
That had to be it.
Miguel knew how to disguise his voice using some sort of high-tech computer application—the same technological know-how enabled him to track the location of Chuck’s phone.
Every time Chuck had boasted about his Grand Canyon find over the years, he’d been careful to describe its location in vague terms, saying only that it was somewhere below Hermit’s Rest between Hermit and Monument basins. There was no reason to alert Miguel to the alcove’s exact location now, he decided. After peering up and down the empty trail, he tucked his phone out of sight beneath a waist-high boulder near the viewpoint. He left the trail and made his way across the rugged east face of the ridge.
He worked his way to the top of the cleft in the first cliff band. From there, he continued around the steep slope to the chimney that led to the top of the second cliff band on the north side of Cope Butte. As he had the first time and each visit since, he wedged himself into the three-sided break in the forty-foot cliff and climbed upward. Though the three tight walls were shaded, they were hot to the touch. Moving fast, he reached the top of the chimney in little more than a minute. He paused to shake the burning pain from his hands before traversing back around the slope to the east side of the butte’s summit massif.
A length of mottled-brown climbing rope, invisible from more than a few feet away, dangled from the mouth of the cavity to the base of the cliff. The desert-camouflaged rope held when he gave it a yank and leaned away from the cliff, putting his full weight on it.
Chuck left his original length of rope after his first descent from the alcove twenty years ago. He’d left a new rope in place of the preceding one each visit since. The last time he’d visited the cavern had been while working the latrine site at Hermit Creek more than two years ago—two-plus years of sun, wind, and rain having their way with the exposed length of rope now hanging before him. Of the three elements, sunshine was the most damaging. Day in and day out for the last two years, the sun’s ultraviolet rays had struck the rope’s nylon fibers, rendering them increasingly brittle and prone to breakage.
Chuck leaned back to study the route to the depression thirty feet above him. He’d barely managed his only unaided climb to the alcove as a wiry college kid twenty years ago, and he did not have the specialized climbing gear necessary for a protected solo climb to the cavity. His only option was to trust the rope. He gave it one more tug, took hold of it with both hands, and started climbing.
The bare rock wall, exposed to the sun, was blistering to the touch. He clasped the rope to his chest and used his feet to bear as much of his weight as possible, taking hold of outcrops only when necessary. While clinging to the rope and taking a short break halfway up the face, he heard the telltale pop-pop-pop of individual fibers giving way where the rope turned ninety degrees downward at the lip of the alcove.
Spurred upward by the sound of the fa
iling rope, he reached the cavern seconds later and knelt on its floor, catching his breath and rubbing his singed fingertips together. He was dizzy and disconcerted in the stifling heat, but he was sweating heavily, which meant he wasn’t fully dehydrated.
The stone structure at the rear of the cavity appeared as it had when he’d first seen it, the intricate front wall, the sandstone-slab door with its leather knob. And there, still in place where he’d tucked it at the side of the closed door, was the dried grass stem that would have fallen to the floor of the alcove unnoticed had anyone opened the door since his last visit.
Chuck made his way to the rear of the cavern. Carmelita’s kidnapping notwithstanding, he was eager, after all these years, to lay hands on his discovery.
Though he’d always known he would disclose his find to the world someday, he’d put off doing so year after year, enjoying the secret, and recognizing that the news would change his life forever—akin, certainly, to the way the life of Waldo Wilcox, an elderly Utah rancher, had been disrupted after the rancher had disclosed the existence of extensive ruins left by Fremont Indians, contemporaries of the Anasazi, along Range Creek in south-central Utah.
Range Creek Canyon, encompassed within the boundaries of the rancher’s large private holdings, contained dozens of undisturbed Fremont ruins, a fact the rancher kept secret for more than half a century. Only with mortality staring him in the face did he tell officials of the artifact-filled canyon’s existence, after which he sold his ranch to the government, fearing the destruction he expected would come to the canyon if he left it to others to stumble upon after his death.
The sale of the ranch with its heretofore-unknown trove of artifacts made national headlines. Within months, archaeologists and treasure hunters overran the formerly secret canyon, leading the rancher to voice his regret at ever having told anyone about it.
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