The Other Backpacker


People asked sometimes whether he felt safe when he was out by himself, miles from the nearest people. He usually replied that this only made him feel safer. It wasn’t as if dangerous characters were likely to hike for miles to mug someone in the middle of the night. And there were no dangerous animals in these mountains except for snakes and bears. Snakes were no problem if you just made sure not to step on them. Bears would not bother you if you hung your food bag out away from your camp at night and kept your cool in the unlikely event you ever saw one.

No, he felt perfectly safe at this camp site, eight miles’ hike from an isolated trail head where his had been the only vehicle parked. He had his trail tarp nearby for shelter, a sleeping bag for warmth, the fire where he now sat for light. A guy needed to get out of the usual cocoon of life once in a while, out in the open with just the ground beneath and the stars above.

One of the things he liked most about sitting out here was the silence. Or rather, the lack of noise. There were no cars, no TV sets, no radios. The sounds he did hear were pleasant sounds. In front of him the fire cracked and popped. From some yards behind came the soft gurgle of Watson’s Creek. Now and then he heard the wind blowing through the treetops. He had also caught the hoot of an owl a couple of times this evening. They were good sounds.

It was not a sound that made him look up from the depths of the fire. There was no particular reason. He had been staring into the fire in that dreamy, dozy way one sometimes gazes into flames. One moment they had his full attention. The next his eyes had risen to look across them, at the dark woods beyond. On the edge of the fire’s light stood a woman.

The woman looked like another backpacker. She had the pack and the boots and the light jacket a hiker would wear this time of spring. The stranger did not say or do anything. She stood and stared across the fire. It was definitely a woman’s face. He could see just a hint of a feminine shape beneath the jacket.

“Hi!” What did you say when someone suddenly showed up at your camp in the middle of the night? “You kind of startled me there.”

He blinked. And the woman was gone.

She had not moved. She had just stopped being there.

A quick search around the clearing with a flashlight discovered no sign of the woman. As he searched, he felt a growing unease. And then a chill. He sat back down by the fire and huddled close, trying to burn away the chill. Surely he had just been seeing things! He had started to doze off and had had one of those experience he had read about, where one is sort of half asleep and starts dreaming. That was how perfectly sane and ordinary people saw things that weren’t there once in a while.
He yawned. It was time to turn in, his watch told him. All he needed was a good night’s sleep. He hoped he could get it after that experience….


Sleep had taken a while to arrive, but it had come. He awoke to mounting breezes and an overcast sky. The air felt like rain. Hardly had he finished breakfast when it did indeed start raining. He collected his gear and huddled under the tarp as the downpour began.

At first he felt worried. The wind blew the rain against the tarp pretty hard, shaking and rattling it inches from his head. He did not have very much protection from the elements there. His tarp-tying had never been put to the test like this before! After a bit the wind died down and he realized that the shelter was going to hold. He had done a good job of siting and tying his shelter. Apart from spray that blew in and a newly-formed rivulet that grazed one corner of the shelter, he was managing to stay dry.

Now he felt annoyed. This rain was costing him good hiking time! He had come to ramble, not to hole up under a sheet of plastic. After gazing morosely at the rain for a bit he sighed and took out that paperback he had not expected to have much chance to read.

Soon he resigned himself to the situation. It wasn’t such a bad place to be. He was mostly dry. The sleeping bag kept him warm. Now and then he could look up and appreciate the beauty of the rain dripping from the trees, and the puddles and runnels that exposed the minute contours of the clearing. The weather was part of the outdoor experience. You just had to go with it. At least the rain had not struck while he was on the trail with no shelter at all!

During one of those periodic breaks from reading he saw her again. That other packer stood on the edge of the clearing among the damp-darkened trees, as motionless as before. He saw her a bit more clearly in the rainy daylight. He could see her blue toboggan cap, and the shoulder-length brown hair protruding from under it. Her jacket looked blue as well. So were her eyes. They had that deep blue that some people’s eyes had, that jumps out from the face at you.

He did not say anything. He just looked at her for a few moments. She looked back. He could not read anything on her face. It was hard to tell whether she even noticed him.
Then he blinked, and she disappeared again.


The rain lasted four hours. By the time it finally ended it was too late to do the hiking he had planned for the day. He and some of his gear had gotten rather damp and uncomfortable. Well, there was nothing to do but try to hang the gear out to dry. He could dry himself by hiking around the immediate area.

The rain had raised the stream quite a bit, but he could still manage the trail without a load. He walked a good mile down the trail, poking around the rocks, looking into the depths of what would make fine swimming holes in another couple of months, and taking photos. Here and there he came across rock formations. The strata layers showed that Watson’s Creek had taken a lot of years to cut its way down to its present level. At one point a section of rock strata had come loose and fallen into the creek at an angle. The rocks here were dark and wet. They looked like nothing so much as huge slabs of chocolate sticking out of the creek.

A little past the formation he spotted a side stream trickling down into the creek, across the water from where he stood. It was a steep wash coming down from the ridge that hemmed in the creek to the north. By the wash stood a woman.

He froze when he saw her. Was it…yes, it was. He had seen her three times now. And she was looking back at him. Those deep blue eyes were definitely focused on him. He could not read anything else in her expression, other than that he was sure she knew he was there. And then she vanished once again.

He forded the creek to the place where she had stood. He had forded the chilly stream several times during this little jaunt. He could hardly feel anything below the knees now. His chilled feet were in no shape for climbing. Yet he felt somehow that he had to follow that wash.

He scrambled up over the rocks that made the wash, splashing through the rainwater that still trickled down. This was not a good idea. Some of those wet rocks were very slippery right now. He could easily fall and hurt himself. Why was he doing this, anyway?

He needed to, that was why. Or anyway, somebody needed him to.

A few yards up from where he had started he saw something black lying beside the wash. It was the tattered remains of a hiking boot. At first he felt annoyed, as he always did when encountering litter in the back country.

Surely this wasn’t ordinary litter, though. Who would discard a boot way up here on a wash away from the main trail? He had to look some more.

Almost immediately he found some tattered and moldy cloth. Then he spotted another patch of cloth. No, this was not ordinary litter.

Then he found a piece of bone. It was dark and weathered. It looked like part of a rib. Something told him it was human.


A few days later he sat in the office of a national forest district manager. “We found bits and pieces of stuff all up and down that wash,” the district manager told him. “There were some more fragments of bone. Not too much more. The weather and critters had taken pretty good care of the rest, I imagine.”

“Do you…do you have any idea who it was?”

“Yes sir, we know exactly who it was. We found what was left of a wallet with a drivers’ license. Her name was Tricia Raymond.

“She disappeared about two years ago. Almost exactly two years, in fact. She was a college student at UCA who did a lot of backpacking. She and a friend were supposed to hike the Cat Mountain loop during their spring break. You know one way to get on that loop is from the same trail head as the one for the Watson’s Creek trail head.

“Her friend couldn’t go for some reason. So she decided to go by herself. She disappeared. Her car was found at the trail head. We concentrated our search efforts on the Cat Mountain loop and just made a cursory search of the Watson’s Creek area. Nobody ever thought to look up that wash. We never found a trace of her, and never saw any sign of foul play. Had us completely stumped”

“I wonder what she was doing up that wash?”

“We think we’ve figured that out. I don’t know if you know it, but the Deer Mountain trail runs along that ridge on the northern side of the valley.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard of that trail. There’s a place where it connects with the one I was on.”

“Right. The head for that trail is only about a mile further up the road from where we found her car. We think she must have changed her mind about where she would go hiking and didn’t tell anyone. Maybe she just did it on the spur of the moment. She decided she’d make a loop out of the Deer Mountain and Watson’s Creek trails.

“At that time the Deer Mountain trail had gotten pretty badly overgrown. It’s been cleared and re-blazed since then. It was in such bad shape that a person could easily have gotten lost on it. We think she got up there and got lost on top of the mountain. She knew the creek and its trail were down at the foot of the ridge. If she just climbed down, she couldn’t miss it. So she tried to climb down that wash. It was a steep climb. But it was clear of the brush that covered so much of the rest of the mountain.

“It rained the week she disappeared. The rain probably caught her while she was trying to get down that wash. It might have been getting dark around that time too. We don’t have any way of knowing exactly when it was. But at some point she must have tripped or slipped and fallen. She might have hit or head or broke her neck. We found a lot of debris in one spot about three hundred feet above the creek. That must have been where it happened. All the rest of the…remains were below there. I’m guessing the rains and the animals gradually washed things down to where you found them.”

“I guess you’ve notified her family.”

“Yes, we did.”

He sighed. “I sure hate having to be the one to be responsible for that news.”

“They…they had pretty well resigned themselves to never seeing her again. They were glad to hear it definitely wasn’t foul play. I guess this kind of gives them what you call closure.”

He leaned back and stared at the ceiling—at nothing, really. “Yeah. I think she would have wanted it that way.”

I like it (even though I'm about as different from the protagonist as possible). Great job with the setting and detail, and a well-drawn picture of the lead (both physically and his personality).

The one section that could use a little work is when he's fording the stream and slipping on the rocks. Rather than having the narration state that the rocks are slippery and that he's in danger, you could have him slipping on the rocks, having trouble keeping his footing, reacting physically (heart beating, short of breath) etc.

Thanks, Monk!

IIRC I didn't have much detail about the slippery rocks because I was trying to keep this short enough to post. But it shouldn't be too hard to go back and put some more in some time. I've got very vivid memories of slippery rocks in my backpacking journeys. It can feel like trying to walk in ice!