THEY SAY THAT coming down a mountain is even tougher than climbing it. You expend so much energy on the climb that when it’s time for the return trip you’re running on fumes. You’ve already reached your goal, too, so now you just want to get back down to base camp, have a hot meal, climb in your tent. Celebrate.
You get tired. You get careless. You spent too much time on the come up, and now it’s getting late and the weather’s starting to turn. And just the technical act of descending is often tougher than the climb was in the first place. So people screw up. They lose focus. They get injured and die.
And that’s in the best circumstances. Throw a wrench in the gears—like, I dunno, your only competent counselor falling, probably to her death—and it’s bound to mess you up even more. The Bear Pack is in a hurry to get down the mountain to camp. Even Brandon and Evan, who don’t give a shit about Amber, look like they’re damn eager to get back to their tents.
But getting down isn’t simple, even after they’ve covered the last hundred feet up to the summit. They’ll take the standard route down, the route they should have come up, but it’s not exactly a Sunday stroll.
It’s basically a long drop down a sharp, narrow gully. There’s a little bit of snow, but it’s mostly loose, slippery rock and bare mountain underneath. Nothing to hold on to. Nothing to break your fall if you trip.
They take it as fast as they dare. Alex is in the lead, Brandon and Evan right behind him. Dawn barely notices who’s ahead of her. She’s mid-Pack with Lucas, trying to keep up, trying not to slide on her ass off the side of the mountain.
She can see the tarn where they camped last night. It still looks a long way down.
They drop through the gully, one after another, kicking pebbles and occasionally big rocks down toward the Pack members below them. Every now and then, somebody shouts, “ROCK!” and everyone has to duck as far off the trail as possible as a freaking boulder comes hurtling from on high, threatening to knock out or decapitate anyone in its path.
Miraculously, nobody gets hurt.
At the bottom of the gully, the mountain widens out to a broad, flatter shoulder, on which Dawn sees some lichen and a couple of cairns. This is obviously the way they should have gone: no chimneys, no ledges, no batshit traverses. They’re still a long way from the bottom, but the really scary part is over.
The Pack hurries across the shoulder to the top of another gully. This one has a dry streambed cutting through the middle of it, all the way down to the tarn. It’s not as steep as the gully above, and there are plants and the odd stunted tree. Still, it’s easy to get careless, as Dawn discovers. She falls on a loose patch of earth and nearly takes out Lucas’s legs ahead of her, probably almost killing them both. But Lucas stays upright and somehow arrests her slide. Looks back at her and grins, wearily, like Ain’t this some shit.
And Dawn can’t do much but shake her head in return.
This is hell.
“Come on,” Lucas tells Dawn. “We gotta get down there before the weather turns.”
He’s not lying. It’s probably about four in the afternoon at this point, which means it shouldn’t be dark for another three hours, but already the skies are getting gloomier. To the west, Dawn can see storm clouds forming, rolling in over the distant peaks, getting closer. There’s bad weather coming, and it’s going to fuck up their day.
And if it storms too bad, Dawn thinks, they might not even be able to bring in a helicopter.
Dawn remembers what Amber said about the last weather report. We might see some rain, but we’ll be down off the summit by then.
It doesn’t feel like rain, though, the way the wind’s biting, chilling Dawn through her jacket and numbing her face. Not at this time of year. Not this high in the mountains.
The wind feels like winter, from what Dawn can tell. And it’s coming on pretty damn fast.
Alex gets back down to the campsite first. Brandon and Evan are hot on his trail. By the time Dawn comes out from the gully, she can see the three guys closing in on Christian’s tent.
Behind her, the slope looks almost vertical from here. The peak of the Raven’s Claw looks a mile high. Dawn can’t even make out the summit; the whole side of the mountain just looks like sheer rock.
What she can see, though, is that the blue sky and warm sunshine the Pack was enjoying on their climb is now disappearing, replaced by ominous, swirling gray clouds.
The boys are almost at Christian’s tent, and that makes Dawn hurry up, even though her knees are killing her by this point and she has blisters on her feet and her back hurts and she’s tired as hell. Also, she’s now walking through a boulder field, where the smallest rock underfoot is like the size of a soccer ball, and most are, like, fridge-sized, or even Volkswagen-sized. It’s dangerous ground, lots of chasms to slip into and uneven ground to trip over. But somewhere, Dawn finds some last reserve of energy, some adrenaline she hasn’t already wasted. She’s struggling into the circle of tents just as Alex emerges from Christian’s tent, holding the orange emergency beacon aloft.
She’s almost caught up to Alex when Brandon and Evan tackle him to the ground.