Because suddenly, being stranded on a mountain wasn’t the most dangerous thing that had happened to me today.
2
RIDGE
She shouldn’t have been on that ridge.
Nobody should have been on that ridge. It wasn’t a trail. It wasn’t even a route. The stretch she’d been crossing when she fell was exposed rock I’d flagged as hazardous two years ago, back when Evan and Dash and I were still scouting the upper elevations together. We’d marked it on our internal maps with a red X and a short, clear note.
Unstable scree. No go.
And then I watched a woman in borrowed hiking boots with a half-full water bottle try to cross it alone.
I’d been checking the tree line along the upper ridge when I heard the slide. Loose rock cascading. A sharp, brittle sound that sliced through the quiet. Then nothing. No scream. No cry for help. Just the settling silence that follows a fall.
That silence is always worse.
I found her wedged against a downed hemlock, sitting upright, conscious. Her ankle was already swelling inside a boot that didn’t fit her right. She looked up at me with an expression that was equal parts pain and defiance—like she was daring the mountain to try again.
Something shifted in me.
I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three weeks. Not my business partners, Evan and Dash. Not the cashier at the gas station where I filled up my truck on supply runs. No one. I’d been living inside the quiet of my cabin, splitting wood, checking trails nobody used, eating meals I couldn’t taste, and convincing myself that numbness was the same thing as peace.
Seven months ago, I’d been guiding a sunset hike on the Thornberry ridgeline. Small group. Easy terrain. A woman in her fifties stepped twenty feet off the marked path to photograph a view.
The ground gave way.
She fell nearly forty feet down a rock face. Shattered pelvis. Wrist. Three ribs. I got to her in under a minute, stabilized her, called for rescue. She survived. She recovered.
But the sound she made when she fell—that sharp, startled cry that cut off the moment she hit—I hear it every day.
In the shower.
While splitting wood.
In the silence between one thought and the next.
I hear it. I see her face. I feel the ground give way under my own boots all over again, because I was the one who chose that trail. I was the one who said the conditions were safe.
I was wrong.
After that, I pulled back. Told Evan and Dash I needed time. Stopped coming to town. Stopped running tours. Moved higher up the mountain to the property I owned—the cabin I’d built over two summers, back when I still believed that building something solid was enough to make a life.
They let me go.
Evan tried twice to bring me back. Dash left a six-pack on my porch with a note that read,Whenever you’re ready.
I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t sure I ever would be.
And now there was a woman on my couch with an ice pack strapped to her ankle and that same stubborn set to her jaw. She was using my landline—because there’s no cell signal worth a damn up here—and I stood in the kitchen doorway pretending I wasn’t watching her.
Her name was Brooklyn. She was in town with friends for the Wildflower Festival. She’d been chasing a rare orchid along a ridgeline that should’ve been blocked off. She fell because the scree field I’d flagged two years ago still hadn’t been marked.
I should’ve been angry.
At Bobbi, for sending inexperienced hikers into terrain they weren’t equipped for.
At the festival, for turning the mountain into a scavenger hunt.