Mountain Rampage

by Graham, Scott

  “What about the name, Cordero?”

  “Let’s take a look.” The librarian took command of the computer once more. Screenshot after screenshot flashed across the monitor as she worked. She pointed at the screen. “There. See?” A hand-rendered map of Rocky Mountain National Park glowed on the monitor. Fall River Road appeared as a curving line on the map, but Trail Ridge Road, opened in 1932, did not. And there, high on the east side of Mount Landen, as if by magic, was a black dot with the words “Cordero Mine.”

  “Where’d that come from?” Chuck asked in surprise.

  “Look at the lower right-hand corner,” the librarian said.

  Chuck squinted, leaning forward. In the bottom corner of the map was an unintelligible signature. Below the signature, in careful, handwritten print, was the annotation:

  Alfred Cordero, Lead Cartographer

  Rocky Mountain National Park Cartographic Expedition

  July-October, 1918

  Chuck rubbed his chin with his finger. “You mean to tell me, some mapmaker decided to name an abandoned mine after himself?”

  “It wasn’t uncommon. Expeditions across America in the 1700s and 1800s named geographic features after current politicians in hopes of securing funding for their next adventures. Expedition leaders and their cartographers almost always took advantage of the opportunity to name things after themselves along the way, too.”

  “But a mine?”

  “By the time the 1900s rolled around, pretty much everything was already named. I imagine Alfred Cordero couldn’t resist naming a piece of what was left for himself.”

  “So he decided to stick his name on something somebody else had built.”

  “Look where it’s located,” the librarian noted. “Dead center in the park. He put his name right in the middle of his map, where anybody and everybody would see it.”

  “A mapmaker,” Chuck said, shaking his head.

  She spun away from the computer to face him. “You sound disappointed.”

  “I am.” He hesitated. The librarian’s blue-gray eyes gleamed with interest, prompting him to ask, “What’s your name?”

  “Elaine. Elaine Bartholomew.”

  “I appreciate your help, Elaine. I really do. But what you found was less than what I was looking for.”

  “That much is obvious.”

  He took a breath, let it out. “Something happened today,” he said. “Actually, a lot of things happened today. But the thing I’m trying to find out about…” He clicked his tongue off the roof of his mouth in frustration, started over. “What if I told you somebody worked really hard to hide something in that mine?” He pointed at the screen. “An entire vertical shaft, running straight down from a horizontal tunnel, perfectly overlaid with floorboards to make sure no one would know it was there.”

  Elaine’s penciled eyebrows rose, deepening the wrinkles on her forehead.

  “The Cassandra Treasure,” she said.

  TWELVE

  “The what?” Chuck asked.

  Elaine turned to the computer, speaking as she tapped the keyboard and clicked the mouse. “I moved to Estes Park after I finished teaching in Denver. Retirement didn’t agree with me, so I applied to work here at the library. That was ten years ago. The Cassandra Treasure was one of the first things I heard about.” She pushed her glasses up on her nose and peered at the screen. “Here we go.”

  Elaine rolled back from the computer so Chuck could take a look. The monitor displayed a newspaper article from the Estes Park Trail-Gazette dated May 6, 1972.

  Former Mayor Declares Cassandra Treasure a Hoax

  Stanton Gillispie, former mayor of Estes Park, declared the local tale of the Cassandra Treasure a “hoax” at the annual Estes Park Founders Day celebration dinner last week.

  For years, Estes Park has been rife with the rumor of the treasure, a fortune in gold said to be lost or hidden in the Mummy Mountains west of town. But the former mayor used the opportunity as keynote speaker to proclaim his contention that the Cassandra Treasure is nothing more than a childish story.

  “I think we need to stand down on this whole thing,” Gillispie told the Trail-Gazette the day after his speech. “It’s embarrassing for us as a community to be seen as a bunch of people who would believe in this sort of nonsense.”

  In his address, Gillispie pointed to the lack of evidence of the Cassandra Treasure as indication the whole idea was made up.

  “It probably originated with some locals having fun among themselves and took off from there,” Gillispie said. “I would just as soon we quiet down about it from now on. The people of Estes Park are better than that.”

  Chuck turned to Elaine.

  “There’s nothing else,” the librarian told him. “Not in the newspaper, and not, more recently, online. No chat-room mentions, nothing. The locals appear to have taken this Gillispie guy at his word.”

  “But you heard about it.”

  “Just the one time. A high-school student came in. She was working on a paper. She said her grandfather had told her about a treasure hidden up in the mountains above town. I did a search with her, came up with the Trail-Gazette story. That’s why I remembered it just now.”

  “The treasure supposedly was gold.”

  “The gold rush is what everybody came out here for.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “Of course not. I mean, how many hidden treasures have you ever found?”

  Chuck leaned back in his chair. “Quite a few,” he said. “My entire career has been dedicated to finding them. I’ve been an archaeologist for a lot of years.”

  Elaine pooched her red lips. “Then maybe you’re the one to disprove the idea of the Cassandra Treasure once and for all. Or find the thing.”

  “By doing what?”

  “For starters,” she said, “this shaft you uncovered—what made it worth hiding?”

  As he left the library, Chuck looked up at the high peaks of the Mummy Range looming to the west. He rolled his shoulders, working the stiffness out of them. The librarian’s question was dead on. Why had someone gone to so much trouble to camouflage the shaft’s existence?

  He drove west on Elkhorn Avenue, passing the turnoff to the resort. He showed his pass to the East Entrance Station ranger and drove up Trail Ridge Road, climbing into the Mummies. He pulled to the side of the road just before he left cell-phone range and texted Janelle.

  Good visit with Parker. Checking on the mine. Out of service for a bit.

  He drove on up the road before Janelle could reply, parked at the mine trailhead, and rummaged in the cross-bed toolbox bolted behind the truck’s cab, filling his rucksack with gear. The late-afternoon sun silhouetted the tops of the peaks to the north as he hurried along the trail, almost jogging, making use of the waning light.

  He reached the mine well before full darkness descended, not that it mattered—where he was headed, absence of light was a given. He pulled his seat harness from his pack, stepped into its leg loops, and cinched it tight around his waist. His hardhat with its affixed headlamp rested at the bottom of the shaft. In its place, he slipped the elastic band of a camping headlamp over his head, centered it on his forehead, and switched it on.

  The tunnel gobbled up the light of his headlamp when he entered. A too-still silence filled the mountain. He shivered, stricken by the sudden, unaccustomed desire to retreat.

  He couldn’t remember ever feeling this uncomfortable on his own in the field; in little more than a year with Janelle and the girls, he’d forgotten how to be alone.

  “Come on, Chuck,” he scolded himself, fog from his breath gathering in the beam of his headlamp. He walked the length of the tunnel, turned on the floodlights, and set to work, double-anchoring his climbing rope to the floor’s base timbers with loops of nylon webbing ten feet back from where the floor had collapsed. He threaded the rope through his rappel device, attached the device to the oversized, D-ring carabiner clipped to his seat harness, and backed to the edge of
the vertical shaft, paying the rope through his brake hand as he went.

  He peered over his shoulder at the opening behind him. Everything was as he remembered it—the splintered floor timbers at the edge of the six-foot-square hole, the rusted stanchions that had affixed the broken length of ladder to the shaft wall, where Samuel had clung until he’d clambered up Chuck’s body to safety.

  Chuck leaned farther back on the rope and aimed his headlamp at the bottom of the shaft. The beam illuminated his and Samuel’s hardhats, two spots of white sixty feet below, with broken pieces of the floorboards and ladder scattered around them. Longer pieces of the shattered ladder’s rails rose from the bottom of the pit, leaning against the shaft walls.

  He let the rope slide through his hand at a steady rate and walked backward down the shaft with small, catlike steps, leaving the glow of the floodlights behind after the first few feet.

  The upper thirty feet of the vertical wall down which he walked was solid granite, its rock face dull gray in the beam of his headlamp. Halfway down the shaft, however, the granite gave way to a series of vertical black striations etched in the stone.

  The black streaks grew thicker as Chuck descended past the shaft’s midpoint. He tightened his grip on the rope, arresting his descent two-thirds of the way down. He swung the beam of his headlamp around the walls of the shaft. Some of the bands of black, bounded by granite, were as narrow as six inches, others as wide as a foot.

  Chuck touched one of the black bands in front of him. It gave slightly beneath his fingertips. When he removed his fingers, indentations remained.

  Curious, he dug his fingers into the black streak. The black matter crumbled at his touch; it had the consistency of moist coffee grounds. He brought a handful of the stuff to his nose and sniffed, finding that the substance exuded an alloy-like tang.

  He turned his hand over and dropped the black material, which landed at the base of the shaft with a wet plop.

  He looked more closely at the black bands striping the wall in front of him. Many of the striations were concave, as if some of the crumbly black matter had fallen away. Several of the cavities in the black bands extended as much as an arm’s length into the wall of the shaft.

  He resumed his descent. The striations continued to broaden. After another ten feet, the black bands made up most of the walls around of him, broken in only a handful of places by thinning strips of granite.

  “Huh,” he wondered aloud, the sound of his voice reassuring in the cold heart of the mountain.

  He reasoned that the miners who’d dug this vertical shaft must have come upon the tops of the black striations while chipping the horizontal tunnel into the otherwise solid granite interior of Mount Landen. They’d turned the mine ninety degrees, tracking the expanding striations downward.

  But why would they have done that?

  Hard-rock mining in the 1800s was about the search for crystalline seams of quartz running through granite. If prospectors were lucky, those seams led to veins of gold ore. In rare instances, seams grew thicker, and thicker yet, as miners followed them, leading, ultimately, to rich deposits of gold ore called “lodes” or, in extreme cases, “mother lodes” that resulted in unimaginable riches for the very few who discovered them.

  Yet the black material lit by Chuck’s headlamp bore none of the crystalline characteristics of quartz veins.

  Puzzled, he descended to a couple of feet above the bottom of the pit. Below him, resting in a few inches of water gathered at the base of the shaft, the broken remains of the fallen ladder reflected in the light of his headlamp.

  He slid another foot down the rope, noting that the vertical shaft ended where the solid gray granite petered away to nothing and the expanding striations came together to form a full pocket of the crumbly, black material. He reached the sole of his boot to steady himself, his foot coming to rest on the face of the shaft where a narrowing sliver of granite ended in a knifelike point and two striations of the black substance joined to become a single dark mass, moist and glistening in the light of his headlamp.

  Where his boot came in contact with the wall, the black material fell away from both sides of the granite point. The water-saturated gunk cascaded downward, leaving the jagged shard of granite in place. More of the material gave way beneath his foot, then still more, until a black avalanche of the stuff fell away from both sides of the sliver of granite, creating a flowing, black waterfall that oozed across the bottom of the pit.

  In front of him, the granite shard bulged outward. A muffled crack sounded inside the wall of the shaft, and the sliver of granite, two feet long and several inches across, shot outward, slamming him in the stomach.

  The impact caused Chuck to lose his grip on the rope. He fell to the bottom of the pit with the heavy stone in his lap.

  He cried out as he sprawled sideways in the shallow pool of freezing water, the side of his head striking one of the broken planks, the chunk of granite tumbling away. He put his arms over his head to protect himself as smaller pieces of granite rained down on him from the collapsing wall.

  The avalanche of black material oozing from the side of the shaft rose around him until, in seconds, he was covered. He opened his mouth for air, but only the black material flowed in.

  THIRTEEN

  Chuck sat up, choking and sputtering, as the last of the gunk falling from the wall settled around him. He spat grit from his mouth, filled his lungs with air, and clambered to his feet. The viscous black material rose to his thighs, the floorboards and ladder pieces afloat on its surface. His boots slipped on the mucky bottom of the quicksand-like pool.

  His headlamp projected only a feeble beam. He swiped its lens with his finger. Light sprang forth. He knuckled his eyes clean and flashed the beam around him. The wall of the shaft in front of him had stabilized, at least for the moment. The climbing rope still hung beside him, attached to his harness.

  The black muck at the bottom of the pit was bitterly cold and he was soaked to the skin. A shiver wracked his frame. He bent forward, elbows pressed to his sides, and blew into his hands. The cold would soon rob him of the ability to climb out of the shaft.

  He shrugged his pack off his shoulder and around to his chest and dug into it, coming up with his pair of aluminum ascending devices. With a wary look at the wall in front of him, he attached the oblong devices to the rope one above the other, their attached nylon webbing loops hanging down into the muck. He clipped the higher of the two devices by its loop to the oversized carabiner on his seat harness. As he struggled to shove his foot into the loop of webbing hanging from the lower of the two ascending devices, he lost his balance, his shoulder striking the wall of the shaft.

  “Oof,” he grunted.

  The blow caused more of the black matter to ooze from the wall and settle around his legs. A softball-sized chunk of granite fell from the wall as well, bruising his forearm before falling into the black pool.

  He gritted his teeth against the pain and settled his boot in the nylon loop. The instant the loop took his weight, his foot slalomed through the muck, knocking a piece of ladder out of the way. He hoisted himself up the rope and stood with his full weight in the loop, ankle-deep in the pool, his face to the mineshaft wall. He shoved the higher of the two ascending devices up the rope and leaned back to put his weight on the device and lock its ratchet into place. Working fast, he slid the unweighted lower device up the rope until it rested against the upper device.

  He returned his weight to his foot and hoisted himself to a standing position in the lower loop, now twelve inches above the muck. Again he pushed the device attached to his waist higher on the rope, and again he leaned back until it took his weight. This time, however, as he transferred his weight to the upper device, he toppled sideways, performing an awkward pirouette until he came to rest with his back to the near wall of the shaft. He fought to regain his balance, pumping his legs like pistons, his headlamp illuminating the shaft’s far wall.

  He stopped, hanging s
ideways, and steadied his light on the opposite shaft wall. There, six feet away, a slit-like crevice opened. The beam of his headlamp reflected off a light-colored object deep in the crevice, wholly out of place in the bottom of the shaft.

  The cleft, barely two feet wide where it met the shaft wall, tapered to nothing eight feet back. The object stood out against the black walls of the narrow fissure near the cleft’s terminus.

  Chuck recognized the shape of the object from his years of archaeological digging.

  He calmed his breathing and steadied the beam of his headlamp.

  The object was smooth, round, and bone-white—the size, shape, and color of a human skull.

  FOURTEEN

  Chuck reached back to steady himself. The semi-solid wall oozed again at his touch. A stream of black gunk fell away from his fingers, followed by pieces of granite loosened by the collapsing black material. The freed granite chunks—none, fortunately, larger than his fist—bounced off him and plopped into the muck below.

  He spun to face the disintegrating wall and fought his way to a standing position on the rope. Covered in grit and shivering with cold, he weighted and unweighted the ascending devices in quick succession, climbing away from the bottom of the pit as the last of the loosened black material fell from the wall below him and silence returned to the mine shaft.

  He passed the halfway point of the shaft, where the black striations gave way to solid granite, and kept climbing, the glow of the floodlights above growing brighter.

  Was the object he’d seen in the crevice indeed a skull? He couldn’t say with certainty; he hadn’t had time to find out for sure as he’d struggled to escape the collapsing wall of the mine.

  He heaved himself up and over the lip at the top of the shaft and sat, gasping, with his back to the wall of the mine tunnel. Still soaked from his immersion at the bottom of the pit, he was shivering hard by the time he caught his breath. He gathered his gear, turned off the floodlights, and headed down the tunnel, glad to be on the move.

  He shifted his pack, centering it on his shoulders, as he made his way out of the mine. He hadn’t accomplished much in descending to the bottom of the shaft. He’d nearly died for a brief glimpse of an object that perhaps had something to do with the shaft’s concealment, and he’d been forced to leave it behind. Whatever secrets Cordero Mine might hide, it still hid them—which was perfectly fine as far as he was concerned. Staging an attempt to retrieve the object in the crevice held no interest to him at the moment. Better to get back to Estes Park as quickly as possible, and head for Durango with Janelle and the girls as soon as the field school ended on Friday.