by Jerold Last
After we introduced ourselves and answered the standard, “where are you folks from?” question, the conversation returned to the topic of Denali. Fred Fleming told us about yuppie skiing on the mountain. “If money isn’t a problem you can catch a ride on a helicopter to the area just above the glacier, then ski down the snowy part of the glacier to right about there.” He pointed to a spot just above where the snow turned into ice. “It’s some of the best and fastest skiing in the world. At that altitude the snow is pure powder, nice and dry. Not the ‘Sierra Cement’ you’re used to if you ski in California.”
We chatted a bit longer before the three rangers excused themselves to get back to work. Suzanne and I caught up with the Kaufman sisters and wandered through the Visitor Center looking at a mixture of educational exhibits, native crafts, and tourist items for sale. Ten minutes later we were called back to the tour bus.
Our bus continued its long journey deeper into the park. Infrequently, we passed other tourist buses, all headed in the same direction we were but to different destinations, usually one or more of the campgrounds. For the most part we were alone except for the animals living their lives in the huge taiga prairies, tundra, and forests of Denali.
Steve, our driver and guide, continued to describe interesting geological features and places the more adventurous of us might want to hike to. He pointed out Wonder Lake, a popular fishing and camping area, as we approached Kantishna Lodge. Off the road, transportation was strictly by hiking. Four-wheel drive vehicles or ATVs needed a special permit to enter the park and were actively discouraged. Finally, at about 1:30, he announced our lunch break at the Kantishna Lodge. The bus pulled up to a parking slot in front of a large rambling two-story log building and discharged us with an admonition that we were expected back promptly at 3:30 if we wanted to ride this bus back to the place we had boarded it.
Lunch was included in the tour price. We all sat down and were served today’s tourist special---a cup of some kind of vegetable chowder, a small chunk of grilled salmon with boiled potatoes and canned peas, a generic cake for dessert. OK, if inelegant and definitely not gourmet, and we were hungry.
In addition to its common dining room with long tables and attached kitchen and bar, the Kantishna Roadhouse had a souvenir shop attached to the dining room and a couple of smaller rooms for hanging out while waiting for the bus. Upstairs was a large meeting room where we were invited to attend a talk about sled dog racing after lunch, and a couple of smaller rooms with exhibits about sled dogs and the history of the Lodge. A small collection of books for guests staying at the Lodge to borrow completed the amenities.
There was also a large expanse of well-tended grassy lawn, bisected by the road the busses came in upon and departed from, in front of the roadhouse. The ground sloped gently down to a fast-flowing creek in front of the building, with a pedestrian bridge crossing over the creek to the woods on the other side, several geese and chickens running around loose, and several people fishing in the creek or kneeling by the water panning gold from the shore on the roadhouse side.
Suzanne and I finished our meal ahead of most of the others from our tour group at the table. The Kaufman sisters had already wandered off to do whatever FBI agents do when they’re in the middle of a 6 million acre National Park. We wandered aimlessly into the souvenir shop, where a perky young lady walked over to us and asked, “Can I help you with anything?”
“I don’t think so, Cathy,” I replied, reading her name from the omnipresent ID badges all of the Park employees wore on their chests. “We’re just browsing around while we wait for our friends to finish their lunches.”
“Take your time and enjoy the browsing,” she replied. “I’d recommend you wander around the back yard of the roadhouse before you leave. There are sled dogs, gold rush exhibits from a century ago, and some of the old mining paraphernalia to look at. In fact, I’m about to take a break and I’d be glad to show you what’s most interesting to me back there if you’d like some company.”
“Sounds good to me,” Suzanne volunteered.
A few seconds after we went out the back door from the small shop, Cathy lit a cigarette, took a deep drag, and sighed contentedly. “I’ve been looking forward to that for the last hour! Now, let’s start the nickel tour for you two,” she said, leading us to a set of dog runs with six large Husky mixes laying contentedly in the sun in individual caging units. The dogs were powerful looking with huge broad chests and lots of fur. They were brown or black and white with thick white undercoats. Rather than following the huskies, the tails curled over the dogs’ backs like the letter “C” in a mirror as if the tails wanted to win their own races with the sled dogs.
“Plan on coming back here for the 2:30 show,” Cathy told us. “You’ll actually be able to see how dogs are harnessed to a sled and how the sleds are set up for big races like the Iditarod.
“If you look over there you’ll see some of the actual equipment the old timers used to mine gold a century or so ago,” she continued. “It’s rusty and could use some cleaning, but most of the equipment could still be used to mine the gravel under the creek if it weren’t illegal to do so. That old rock crusher is my favorite. It took rocks and coarse gravel and ground them to a really fine powder that released its gold when the miners washed it in that big sluice box next to it. They separated gold from pulverized rock and dirt by its density. Sometimes they added mercury to make the separation more efficient, especially for the really fine particles of gold in the mixture. Further over there on the left is a metal stamping machine, to take the partially purified gold flecks and nuggets and make them into bricks they could identify with a special mark as coming from this mine after it was transported to a smelter. That way each of the different mines got credit for the actual amount of gold they produced when the big companies that ran the smelters were paying them.”
I took a good long look at Cathy. Probably in her late 20s or early 30s, dark-streaked blond hair worn in a ponytail that came down to her shoulder blades, wide shoulders and a permanent suntan that marked her as outdoorsy. Almost as tall as Suzanne and very pretty, with a nice well-toned body, she radiated cheerfulness and bounciness.
“What brought you to the Lodge here, Cathy?” asked Suzanne.
“I’m going into my final year of graduate school at the University of Alaska here in Fairbanks,” she replied. “This is the perfect summer job for me. The pay is good, the hours are great, and we get free access to the entire Park when we’re not working.
“A few of my friends from the university are working here at the Kantishna Roadhouse for the summer. We’ve been doing this for the last three or four summers, so we’re all buddies and hang out together. The other concession employees who do all the cooking and cleaning around here are older and don’t hang out much with us. They mostly live in the lower 48 and just spend one summer in Alaska until they find full-time jobs back home, and never come back. It’s hard work and low pay for the local cost of living.”
The three of us chatted a bit longer before Cathy finished her cigarette and excused herself to get back to work. Suzanne and I decided it was time for us to do some exploring.
We walked back around to the front of the roadhouse, finding ourselves standing by a narrow, but fast running, creek with beautiful lush tree-lined banks. Tourists stood along the bank on the Kantishna Lodge side of the river. A few of the tourists were fly-fishing for salmon. The majority of the people along the bank were panning for gold. The splashes in the water could have been either rapids or salmon.
The Kaufman sisters were standing behind a couple panning for gold in the creek when we reconnected with them. After exchanging greetings we watched the river flowing for a bit, then joined a group going back toward the dog runs to watch a demonstration of sled dog harnessing and racing presented by an Iditarod veteran.
His dogs and the stories he told about competitive dog sled races were fascinating. Apparently Huskies are fast and tolerate cold very well, but
lack endurance and social skills. There’s no requirement that the sled dogs in the famous race be purebreds, so mushers are experimenting with new breeding programs to improve performance. Since we owned a couple of German Shorthaired Pointers, Juliet and her son Romeo, we were fascinated to hear that German Shorthaired Pointer-Husky and German Shorthaired Pointer-Malamute mixes are currently being bred quite successfully to use as sled dogs. The long dense Husky/Malamute coat gives some protection from the cold, while the Pointer’s stamina and endurance are highly desired traits, and their social skills as part of a well-behaved pack are the envy of working dog owners.
Suzanne did a bad job of suppressing her laugh during this part of the presentation.
“What?” I asked.
She laughed again. “I just had this image in my head of Juliet being the lead dog for a sled in the Iditarod race. The sled is way in the lead when they come up on some kind of game bird, maybe a ptarmigan or partridge. She locks onto a rock hard point while all of the other sleds go racing past. I just don’t see a hunting dog being the best choice for hauling a sled, especially one with a lot of prey drive like ours.”
I answered with the first thing that popped into my head. “No sweat. All the birds would be covered with snow in the winter around here, so no distractions to worry about and not much bird scent either. It would be like Juliet was hunting in a freezer.”
I earned a dirty look from Suzanne and hushing sounds from a few of the other tourists at the presentation.
Gretchen Kaufman’s cell phone buzzed. “Let’s go!” she said. “The ATVs are ready for us. The crime scene isn’t too far from here.”
Two men, the younger one about my age, dressed in rough hiking gear stood by six ATVs. Gretchen introduced them as Ed Barclay and Jason Culpepper, the local FBI agents investigating this case. Nobody mentioned our previous meeting in Anchorage. We went through the motions as we all shook hands.
Our previous adversary in Anchorage, the lead agent of the pair, looked at Suzanne and me for a few seconds before turning to Gretchen, “Are you sure you want to bring these two civilians along? All they can do is mess things up. The Bureau doesn’t need untrained amateurs tagging along while the professionals do their job!”
Gretchen insisted we be allowed to come along. As we climbed up on our ATVs she commented, “That’s my call, Ed.” The use of the first name without a title was clearly meant to remind Ed who was in charge here, and Gretchen was by rank and skill set the winner of this little test of wills. I wisely kept my mouth shut and deferred to protocol.
Agent Culpepper, the taller FBI man and our former tour guide in Anchorage, asked if we knew how to handle these models of ATV. They were smaller and more powerful than the ones we’d driven on the ATV tour in Denali, more like motorcycles than golf carts, but the controls were similar so we were both prepared for this challenge. Suzanne and I both said yes, and off we all went. One of the local agents led the pack, while the other followed behind. Gretchen, Barbara, Suzanne, and I strung out at about 50-foot intervals between Ed and Jason.
The terrain was forested taiga, marshy grasslands with clumps of trees we avoided as we sped by. Our ATVs weren’t doing the marshy grasslands a lot of good, but there wasn’t any sign of previous intruders on ATVs, so I assumed the rangeland grasses were resilient.
About half an hour later Ed slowed down and motioned we should stop beside him. We dismounted and waited for instructions. He was apparently in charge of this part of our trip out to the crime scene, a logical choice since he’d been here previously. “The crime scene is probably useless from an evidentiary point of view,” he said pompously. “But, just in case, follow me closely and try to walk only where I walk.”
We followed him through a thick clump of birch or alder for about a hundred feet into a clearing. A fire pit in the middle of the clearing had been used to make a fire and the twisted remains of two mountain bikes lay forlornly to one side of the clearing. “The bodies were found over there,” he said, pointing to a spot about midway between the fire pit and the bicycles. “They were literally torn wide open by the bear’s claws.”
Gretchen, Barbara, Suzanne, and I walked over to where he pointed. The ground was disturbed by countless footprints and by signs of a struggle. It was hard to see anything else amid all the mud and disturbed earth and grass. Suzanne walked over to the fire pit. There were several large branches that had clearly been in a fire and a couple of charred logs in the pit. “May I touch these?” asked Suzanne.
“Sure, go right ahead,” said Gretchen. “The technicians have finished here.”
Suzanne picked up a stick lying on the ground and used it to pry up the branches and move them out of the pit. She looked closely at the pit, shook her head, and did the little trick with the stick again, this time with the two charred logs. She looked closely into the pit again.
“Hey, Roger,” she called. “Come over here and take a look.”
I walked over and looked into the fire pit to the place Suzanne was pointing at with her stick. “What do you think those are, Roger?”
Gretchen and Barbara wandered over to join us and look at what Suzanne had found.
Suzanne was pointing at several stones and small rocks that had been hidden under the logs. I picked one up, wiped the ash off it as best I could with my handkerchief, and looked closely at it. “This looks like quartz. And those tiny little flecks in the rock could be gold. Or, more likely, they’re iron pyrite. What they call ‘fool’s gold’ when you go gold mining.”
“What did the technicians say about these rocks when you looked at them when you were searching the camp site?” Gretchen asked Ed.
“We never looked at them. There wasn’t any reason to search the fire pit at an accident scene. Why? Do you think the bear killed them to steal their gold?” he asked facetiously.
This guy was obviously arrogant, pompous, stupid, and incompetent. Not a good combination for a detective, especially one in charge of the investigation. I snuck a look over at his partner. From his pained expression I realized he was well aware of his colleague’s shortcomings at the moment.
Suzanne returned to the fire pit, kneeling down to poke randomly among the ashes with her stick. “Aha!” she exclaimed, reaching into the ash pile to pick out several more objects. “Does someone have a clean rag or handkerchief I can use?”
The lead agent’s partner, Jason Culpepper, produced his handkerchief. His expression of interest suggested a brain lurking under his normally impassive look.
Suzanne rubbed the ashes off the surface of two quarters, a nickel, a penny, a swastika, several buttons, the remains of a zipper, and a key that looked like it might fit a padlock. Suzanne handed the assortment, still wrapped in the handkerchief, to Gretchen. “These are what we amateurs like to call clues, Gretchen. My best guess is someone burned clothing in here, maybe because it was soaked with blood and potentially incriminating. It looks like we have things from the fabric and pockets mixed together in these ashes. I assume you can come up with a better idea of what to do with these clues than the previous lead investigator seems to have had.”
Gretchen gave her a look, took the handkerchief, folded it over the objects, and tucked it into her pocket. She turned to Barclay saying, “I want all of the case files on my desk at the hotel when we get back to town. I assume you can arrange for that by phone. Please also arrange to get a crime scene unit out here immediately. I want every square inch of this clearing checked, as well as a perimeter of at least 50 yards in every direction. And, of course, these ashes need to be sifted and thoroughly analyzed.
“You’ll stay here and supervise the search. Don’t come back until it’s completed, and make sure it’s done right this time. Now, where’s that helicopter? We need to get back to review those case files and see what else you messed up in this investigation.”
Ed blustered, “Who do you think you are and who do you think you’re talking to? I don’t need some dumb broad coming in here telling me how
to do my job!”
“Let’s see,” Gretchen mused out loud. “Who am I? I’m the special agent in charge for the entire region, which makes me your big boss. Who do I think I’m talking to? A pompous ass that’s getting a dismal performance review when I get back and write up this case. If you prefer to opt for early retirement, say something else and I’ll add insubordination to the write-up. Do you understand me now?”
A thoroughly chastised pompous ass glowered at her for a minute before he nodded meekly. “I’ll radio for the chopper. It should be here in ten minutes. I’ll also start the arrangements to get this scene searched properly.”
Ten minutes later Suzanne, the Kaufman sisters, and I climbed into an idling helicopter. The two local agents from Anchorage stayed behind. It took less than an hour for the chopper to deliver us to the roof of the FBI headquarters building in Anchorage where a waiting car drove us to the Kaufman sisters’ hotel. A few minutes later we were all reading the skimpy case file in Gretchen’s small suite.
