The trail had been closed for repairs, technically, but the tape across the trailhead was old and sun-bleached and half torn down already, and she figured a warning that faded was a warning that didn’t count anymore. She’d hiked this range a dozen times. She knew the switchbacks, the place where the water ran clear enough to drink without treating it, the ridge where the wind always picked up around three in the afternoon like clockwork.
This time the switchbacks didn’t feel right. She counted six turns where there should have been five, and told herself she’d miscounted, that counting switchbacks while climbing was never as reliable as people liked to think. The water at the usual spot ran cloudy, a faint grit in it like ground stone, and she passed it by without drinking, telling herself she’d catch the next stream instead. The wind came early, an hour off schedule, cold in a way that felt less like weather and more like being looked at.
By the time she reached the ridge the light was wrong for the hour, thin and gray when it should have been gold, and the peak ahead looked farther away than the map said it should be, as if the whole mountain had taken a slow step back the moment she’d started climbing in earnest. She kept going anyway, because turning around felt like admitting something she didn’t have words for yet, and the ground under her boots had started to feel less like rock and more like something merely shaped like rock, patient and paying close attention.
She never told anyone the details of getting back down, only that she had, eventually, and that she’d taken a different trailhead than the one she’d started from despite never leaving the main path. She hasn’t gone back to that range since. When people ask why, she says she prefers flatter country now, and leaves it there, and they let her.
©2013 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys
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