“St. Elmo oughtta be up ahead somewhere,” Liam shouted over one shoulder. His voice was muffled in the canyon, almost lost in the wind whispering in the pine trees and the swoosh of snow falling from the branches. He hunched forward over his cross-country skis, knees slightly bent, and stared at the GPS cushioned in the palms of his black ski mitts. He’d planted his skis across the trail. “Another half mile,” he said. Then he looked back. “Think you can make it?”
Charlie dug both ski poles into the snow and pushed another few feet up the steep incline. Half a mile? They might as well be going to the moon. She flashed Liam the most reassuring smile she could muster. The temperature must have dropped fifteen degrees in the last ten minutes. Her fingers felt like icicles inside her gloves. The cold was seeping past her scarf and crawling around inside her jacket. It was starting to snow. They hadn’t seen any other skiers on the trail in more than an hour. Probably the other skiers had already turned back. But she and Liam had set out this morning for the old ghost town of St. Elmo, and she didn’t want to admit that the steep trail, the falling temperatures, and a little snow were more than she could handle.
“You have to see St. Elmo in winter,” Liam had told her—what, a thousand times? “It’s just like it was in the 1880s. All the shops and houses up and down Main Street are the same. The wooden sidewalks are still there, and the log railings where they used to hitch the horses.”
“And how would you know St. Elmo looks the same?” She could never resist teasing Liam about his ongoing love affair with Colorado history. It rivaled his affair with her, she sometimes thought, and she wondered which he would choose, if he had to choose between them. A graduate student in physics, in love with history! “You’re in the wrong field,” she’d told him, but had he taken up history, she never would have met him. He’d been her instructor in physics lab class. She guessed she probably wasn’t the first student who had fallen in love with Liam Hollings, with his black curly hair and green eyes, and when he wore his cowboy hat and boots, he looked as if he’d stepped out of the Old West. There were times—when he was lost in a novel about the Old West or one of those grainy cowboy and Indian films—that, she thought, he wished he had lived back then.
“We could drive to St. Elmo next summer,” she’d suggested. But Liam had gone on about how St. Elmo in the summer just wasn’t the same. It was perfect in the winter, so isolated and still in the snow, like one of those miniature towns in a snow globe or a little town under a Christmas tree. He’d gone to St. Elmo many times, summer and winter. Winter was best.
Liam smiled at her now as Charlie dug her poles in hard and pulled alongside him. There was a light dusting of snow across his backpack and shoulders, and snow flakes were popping out like ice crystals on the sleeves of her own jacket. She edged her skis to keep from slipping backward and tried to catch her breath. She could hear her heart pounding. The freezing air stung her lungs. The world had been blue and white and golden when they’d started out, the sun blazing in a clear blue sky, the snow on the ground glistening so white it had stung her eyes. The sun had disappeared some time ago, and now the sky looked like a sheet of lead pressing down. The snow on the trail had turned gray.
“Looks like a few flurries, that’s all.” Liam shrugged the snow off his shoulders. “The storm isn’t forecast until tonight.” He threw a glance up the trail. “See the fork ahead?” he said, but even as he spoke, the gray sky seemed to drop down and envelop the fork. “St. Elmo’s just a short distance on the right. We have plenty of time to see the place before we have to ski back down.”
They were staying at a cabin at Mount Princeton at the foot of Chalk Creek Canyon, and the thought of the fireplace and the way the warmth of the fire last night had spread into the small living room and the red firelight had licked at the log walls sent a shiver down Charlie’s spine. Even if they were to start back now, it would take the rest of the afternoon to reach the cabin. Her legs and arms felt numb with the cold.
“Ready?” Liam said, but he was already skiing up the trail, poles pounding the snow.
Charlie started after him. It felt better to move, loosen her muscles, get the blood flowing. She could see her breath floating ahead in gray puffs. Liam was right, she told herself. He was always right. He knew Chalk Creek Canyon, all the old gold mines and mining camps, all the ghost towns. He’d hiked and skied the trails with his grandfather when he was a kid, filling up on stories that his grandfather told about the way things used to be. And Liam had been hiking and skiing to ghost towns ever since.
“We’ll follow the old railroad bed up the canyon,” he’d told her this morning, a map of the area spread on the table in front of them, their coffee mugs holding down two corners. “The Denver South Park and Pacific ran up Chalk Creek Canyon to the gold mines. Four or five trains a day, imagine, and every one of them stopped at St. Elmo. Passengers coming and going, all kinds of freight being loaded and unloaded. The depot was like Grand Central Station. St. Elmo was the biggest town in the area in the boom days of the 1880s and 1890s. Miners and railroaders lived there. Ranchers came into town on the weekends. There were boardinghouses, all kinds of stores—merchandise and hardware—a livery and fire station, the town hall where dances were held every Saturday night. Saloons and gambling parlors and whore houses. Then the mines played out. The trains kept running for a while, but pretty soon there wasn’t much reason to go up Chalk Creek Canyon. The tracks were finally pulled up in 1926. The few folks still living in St. Elmo just walked out the front doors and left everything the way it was.”
“I get the picture,” she’d told him, and she’d even admitted that St. Elmo would be something to see, a town that had stayed on in the canyon when everything else had left. Mines shut down, tracks pulled up, people gone away.
“We’ll have to watch ourselves on the trail,” Liam had said. “It’s not very wide. The old narrow gauge trains didn’t need much room.”
Now Charlie planted her poles as hard as she could and tried to ski faster. Still Liam seemed farther and farther ahead, a gray splotch moving up the trail carved into the mountainside. The dark shadows of pine trees, boulders, and gray snow covered the slope that loomed over the south side of the narrow railroad bed. On the north side was the sheer drop off into the canyon several hundred feet below. Charlie tried to stay close to the slope, but the snow was getting heavier, blowing across the trail and stinging her face. She had to keep her head down, her chin tucked inside the folds of her scarf. Her face felt like ice. Her goggles were fogging. It was hard to make out where she was on the trail. She concentrated on staying close to the line of trees. If she swerved too far to the right, tipped her skis over the edge, she could tumble into the canyon before she knew what had happened. No one would ever find her. She could taste the panic beginning to rise inside her, like the burning aftermath of a spicy dinner.
She couldn’t see Liam! The realization took her breath away. “Liam!” she shouted, but it was only the sound of her own voice that echoed in the silence of the falling snow. She made herself ski faster, digging the poles in hard to pull herself along. The snow cracked like ice beneath her skis, and the driving snow crusted on the front of her jacket and ski pants. She shouted again: “Liam, wait up!”
She’d reached the fork in the trail, she realized. It had to be the fork because directly ahead were the dark shapes of trees looming out of the snow. She was in a whiteout, nearly blinded by the whiteness everywhere: air, sky, ground. She felt disoriented, slightly dizzy, and she had to lean forward on her poles a moment to regain her equilibrium. The storm predicted for tonight, when she and Liam had planned to be back at the cabin cooking steaks on the little grill in the kitchen and roasting potatoes in the fireplace and sipping hot wine—that storm was here now. Weather forecasts seldom got it right about the mountains: sunny and beautiful one moment, a blizzard the next. She could barely make out the branches of the fork. St. Elmo on the right, Liam had said.
She headed to the right, still trying to stay with the line of trees, using their dark shadows as a guide. St. Elmo had to be close by. Houses and other buildings were still there, Liam had said. He was probably already in town looking for someplace where they could get in out of the storm. He’d come back for her. He wouldn’t leave her alone out here. “Liam!” she shouted again, hearing the panic rippling through the echo that came back to her.
The trail was getting steeper, and that was almost funny, because she couldn’t see that she was climbing higher. But she felt the tightness in her chest, the strain in her calf muscles. Only the grooves in the base of her skis kept her from slipping backward. Exhaustion pulled at her, as if iron weights had attached themselves to her legs and arms. Her backpack felt like a hundred pounds. The cold had worked its way into her bones. She tried to flex her fingers, but they were numb. You could die in a storm like this, that was a fact, just lie down in the snow and go to sleep. She had to keep moving. Every few minutes, she heard someone shouting for Liam, and she realized that she was shouting and that she had settled into a weird rhythm: Ski, ski, shout. Ski, ski, shout.
And then she was skiing downhill. She started telemarking to slow herself. Gradually the dark shadows of the trees gave way to another shadow coming toward her. She blinked hard to bring the shadow into focus: a rectangular building of some kind, snow clinging to the sloped roof and bunching beneath the windows. A house! She’d skied down into St. Elmo, but where were the other houses? The main street with vacant shops? The town hall and the saloons? She called out again. “Liam, Liam! Where are you?”
Nothing but the hush of the falling snow and the shush of her skis as she turned left off the trail and headed for the shadow. A log cabin, she could see now, slanted to one side, as if it had followed the slope of the mountain, with a little porch at the front almost buried in the snow. She got to the porch before she stepped out of her skis. Then she picked them up so they wouldn’t get lost in the snow and, struggling with the skis and poles, stomped across the porch. Her boots made a soft, thudding noise in the snow. She tried the doorknob, but when it didn’t turn, she threw herself against the door. It creaked open, and she stumbled into the darkness inside, dragging the skis and poles with her, knocking her backpack against the frame.
The house was as cold as the outdoors, but it was a different kind of cold, like the cold in a freezer, compacted and still. She was shaking with the cold. She managed to swing her backpack off her shoulders, then she removed her gloves and began rummaging in the backpack for the emergency kit that she always carried on a cross-country ski outing. Her fingers were frozen claws, her hands refusing to work. Finally she managed to drag out the kit. She let the backpack drop to the floor and concentrated all of her energies on the kit. It was a moment before she found the flashlight. Still shaking, she shone the dim light around the little room. The light beam flitted over the plank floor, jumped across the clumps of paper wallboard peeling off the log walls.
This was it then, a one-room cabin, and yet, what more did miners need? They had never planned to stay in the West, Liam had said. A place where they could eat and sleep and stay warm in a storm was all they needed until they hit the big lode of gold. Then they planned to go back East and live like kings.
But here was something: a fireplace built out of stone, no wider than a column set into the far corner. And she could see she wasn’t the first to seek shelter in the cabin. Someone had been here in the last few days, judging by the trace of ashes in the fireplace and the two small logs stacked next to the hearth.
She set the flashlight on the floor and started digging in the kit for matches. She always carried matches; where were the matches? The beam from the flashlight made a starry pattern of light on the plank floor. Then her fingers closed on the narrow matchbook. Five matches inside, but that would be enough, if she were careful. She realized that the possibility of getting warm—the fireplace and logs and now the matches—had rolled over her, obliterated every other thought, even that of Liam. But if she could get warm she told herself—if she could just not be so cold—she would go back onto the trail and look for him.
She began ripping off pieces of the paper wallboard, tearing at it with raw, frozen hands. The wallboard came off in chunks, brittle and hard. She built a pile in the fireplace and went back for more, moving through the dim beam of light patterning the floor, trying to ignore the tiredness that dragged at her. Then she lay the logs on top of the wallboard, just the way Liam had stacked logs on top of crumpled newspaper to build the fire at the cabin last night. She crouched next to the fireplace and struck a match. It flickered a second, but before she could get it to the wallboard, it went out. She leaned in closer and held the matchbook next to the wallboard. Her hands were still shaking. She tried to steady them before she lit the second match. This time the wallboard caught on fire. Another moment and the logs started burning.
Charlie crawled over to the flashlight and turned it off. The little house shimmered in the firelight, and the air was filled with the crackling sound of fire. Inside her backpack, she found the folded plastic cloth that she and Liam had spread in the snow about halfway to St. Elmo, when the sun was still shining. They’d sat on the cloth and eaten nuts and dried fruit and shared a bottle of water and turned their faces to the sun. She crawled back to the fireplace, smoothed the cloth on the floor in front of the hearth, and lay down, hugging herself. The warmth leapt out and caressed her tingling face and hands. A few minutes was all she needed. Then she would find Liam and bring him back to the house. Liam would know how to get more logs, and they could wait out the storm and stay warm.
Liam, Liam, where are you?
Charlie awoke in the freezing cold. Coming through the darkness was the faint sound of laughter and music. It took a moment to get her bearings. At first she thought she was in the cabin at Mount Princeton, but why was it so cold? Liam must have let the fire die down. Then it came to her, like an arctic blast of wind, that she was in an abandoned house in a ghost town, and the fire had burned out, and she was alone. Except that she wasn’t alone. Outside somewhere, somebody was having a party!
She managed to get to her feet; her legs and arms as numb and heavy as logs. She struggled into her backpack and gathered up the skis and poles. She hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Liam was out there somewhere looking for her, but now there were other people around. Someone could have seen him. She could get other skiers to help her find him.
Charlie stepped out onto the porch and stopped. It was night, and the sky was light and clear. The blizzard had worn itself out, leaving little flurries of snow swirling in the air. The main street of St. Elmo stretched ahead in the moonlight that flooded the snowy ground. Wooden sidewalks ran up and down the street in front of the buildings—houses and stores shouldering one another, painted blue, red, and yellow. She could see the black lettering painted on the front windows. There were boot tracks in the snow on the sidewalks. Snow drifted over the roofs and piled behind the second-story false fronts.
Amber lights glowed in the windows, and in a nearby house, she could see a woman seated at a dressing table brushing her hair. Outside a horse was hitched to a small sleigh. The music and laughter was coming from the building about halfway down the street, lights shining in the front window. The saloon, Charlie thought. Everything was just as Liam had described it, a little town in a snow globe, a little town beneath a Christmas tree.
Two men came out of a shop and hurried along the sidewalk. One called out to someone on the other side of the street. Charlie hadn’t noticed anyone else, but now she realized there were a lot of people walking along the sidewalks. Most were men, but there were a few women, and the women wore long dresses that swept over the snow.
Charlie swallowed hard. Her mouth had gone dry, and she could feel the cold working its way back inside her. There was a party going on, all right, a party that she and Liam had known nothing about when they had set off for St. Elmo. Some historical society must have scheduled a get together in the old ghost town and people had brought clothes from the 1880s. Somebody had even driven a horse and sleigh up the trail. There were societies like that, Liam had said, people who dressed up like mountain men and went to rendezvous, just like the mountain men in the 1800s, and people who dressed up like cavalry and Indians and staged mock battles on old battlegrounds. Liam would be furious, she thought, when he saw all the people here. He had wanted St. Elmo in winter just for the two of them.
Charlie stepped into her skis and started down Main Street. There were tracks everywhere made by hooves and wheels and sleigh runners. The gathering, whatever it was, had been going on for some time. She expected the tracks to be frozen, but the snow was soft, glinting like diamonds in the moonlight, and her skis glided through them. “Hello!” she called to several men wearing long black coats and brimmed hats. They stood in a little circle in front of a shop with a false front and black letters that spelled TOBACCO painted on the window. “Can you help me?” But they ignored her and kept on talking, one of them puffing on a cigar, another throwing back his head and laughing into the night sky, as if no one saw her, as if she didn’t exist.
“Hello! Hello there!” Charlie called out to a couple walking arm in arm along the sidewalk, but they kept walking. “Hello!” she called to two men heading into the shop with letters that spelled HARDWARE on the window. The door shut behind them, and she skied toward two other men farther down the street, standing on the sidewalk, heads dipped in conversation. Still no response, as if she weren’t there. It was as if the people attending the gathering had decided to ignore anything—or anyone—from the present.
The music was louder. A tinny sounding piano pounded out a ragtime piece that burst out of the saloon and floated down Main Street every time someone opened the door. Above the door, St. Elmo Saloon was painted in red letters across the false, second-story front. Charlie took a diagonal route across the street. She left her skis propped against the hitching log at the edge of the sidewalk. Farther up the street a black horse was tied to another log. She walked over to the front window of the saloon. It was crowded inside, women in brightly colored, shiny dresses that sloped off their shoulders, with ruffles at their ankles that showed off their high-heeled shoes; men in dark suits with white shirts and black string ties, some with cowboy hats pushed back on their heads.
Across the room, a line of men stood shoulder to shoulder in front of the bar, but Charlie watched the line break up and the men turn around as a tall woman in a blue dress, with blond hair stacked on top of her head, walked over. There were a half dozen round tables set about where men were laying down cards on the green baize tabletops. A shiny-dressed woman perched on the lap of one of the card players.
It was then that she spotted Liam. The black-haired man with the mustache—he’d always wanted to grow a mustache—and the red-headed woman in a green dress leaning over his shoulder, brushing her face against his. Several cards lay face down in front of him. Deftly he lifted the corner of one card, then tossed some gold coins toward the coins stacked in the middle of the table. The dealer dealt out a round of cards, and then it seemed to be over. Liam reached out both hands, circled the stacks of coins, and pulled them toward him. He handed some coins to the woman. Grasping his chin with one hand, she turned his face toward her. She kissed him on the lips.
Charlie pressed her face against the freezing window and tried to blink back the tears that had made the saloon seem watery and unreal. At first the tears felt warm on her cheeks, but then they turned to ice. Still she couldn’t take her eyes away from the black-haired man with the mustache, staring at the new round of cards that had been dealt, pushing a small stack of coins into the center of the table. It was Liam, and yet it was not Liam. The truth hit her like a sledge hammer: the Liam that she knew and loved was dead.
The saloon door opened and two men spilled outside and walked past. Charlie made herself move away from the window. She walked over to the edge of the sidewalk where the men stood looking up and down Main Street, as if they were expecting someone. She reached out and tried to take hold of one of the men’s arm’s, but the sleeve of his jacket dissolved in her grasp. There was nothing but air. She could hear the rumble of a train, the shrill sound of the whistle, and the swooshing noise of steam coming closer. They had pulled up the tracks in 1926, Liam had said.
Later, Charlie barely remembered stepping into her skis and heading back down Main Street, past the lights in the windows and the people walking about. Barely remembered the freezing cold and the blizzard starting up again and the snow driving against her face as she skied up the incline past the little cabin and started downhill toward the fork in the trail. She remembered only skiing as fast as she could, the music and laughter receding into the night behind her and the words pounding in her head: Get away from here. Get away from here.
“Can you hear me?”
A man’s voice cut through the blackness, and Charlie tried to fight her way upward into consciousness. She blinked into the bright spotlight shining somewhere above her. The face of a man with a knitted ski cap pulled low on his head was coming closer, and she struggled to bring him into focus. Snow was everywhere: snow on her jacket and gloves, snow piled over her legs. She was buried in snow. She tried to sit up, aware of the strength in the hands pressing on her shoulders.
“Better lie still until we make sure you don’t have any broken bones,” the man said. Then he shouted: “Over here! We found the woman off the trail.”
Other men were stomping through the snow, and a woman too, and then all of them were hovering over her, brushing the snow from her jacket and pants. She could barely feel the hands moving over her arms and legs. It was as if they were moving over stone.
“Can you tell us what happened?” The man’s voice again. “Did you fall?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It was snowing. I was so cold.”
“Maybe she just lay down,” the woman said.
“What about your friend, Liam Hollings?” The man’s face came into focus now: a prominent nose and flushed cheeks. Light eyes peering at her from beneath the cliff of his forehead.
“Liam,” Charlie said, feeling the softness of his name on her lips.
“Any idea where he might be? When did you last see him? Did he fall off the trail?”
Charlie closed her eyes. She and Liam were skiing up the trail together, the old railroad bed. We’ll have to watch ourselves. The old narrow gauge trains didn’t need much room. She could feel the tears starting again as she looked at the man. “He got ahead of me. Somewhere around the fork. I couldn’t see him.”
“Trail gets real narrow in that area,” the man said. “Not much room for mistakes.” He dropped his head into the hush that moved over them. Charlie could hear the soft thud of snow falling off a branch and the quiet sound of her own weeping. Then the man said, “We’re going to move you onto the snowmobile. An ambulance is waiting in Mount Princeton to take you to the hospital in Salida.”
Already the strong hands were sliding her out of the snow.
“You’re lucky you didn’t get any farther off the trail.” The woman’s voice came from somewhere behind. “Another foot and you would have rolled into the canyon. We never would have found you.”
The Salida Journal:
The search for missing skier Liam Hollings has been called off after two weeks, according to a spokesman at the Chaffee County Sheriff’s Department. Hollings, 29, and Charlie Lambert, 26, graduate students in physics at the University of Colorado, had set out the morning of January 6 on a cross-country skiing trip along the abandoned railroad bed in Chalk Creek Canyon. When they didn’t return that evening to Mount Princeton, where they had rented a cabin, the manager notified the sheriff. The county search and rescue team located Lambert around 10 P.M. about a mile from the abandoned town of St. Elmo, but the team has been unable to find any sign of Hollings.
“The extreme winter weather, with deep snows and freezing temperatures, makes it highly unlikely that Hollings can be found alive,” the spokesman said. “The skiers were on a very steep and narrow expert trail. The rescue team believes that Hollings became disoriented in a blizzard and may have skied off the trail into the canyon.”
Lambert was evacuated to Salida Community Hospital where she was treated for hypothermia, frostbite, and exhaustion before being released last week. She could not be located for comment.