Desolation Ghosts

A troubled veteran hikes to Desolation Peak in North Cascades National Park to kill herself while park rangers clash over whether to look for her like they would any other overdue or injured hiker or give her the right to die. Chapter 1: Not again, thinks Wilderness District Ranger Jayne Christopherson, as the 9-1-1 dispatcher notifies her of a person reported missing and possibly suicidal in her jurisdiction at North Cascades National Park (NOCA). NOCA already has three bodies missing somewhere in the park, including a man likely suffering from schizophrenia. He disappeared into the woods in a delusional, suicidal state just two months ago during an unseasonal August wind and lightning storm that toppled trees and eventually sent search teams scurrying for shelter. He was last seen painting a picture, barefoot, on the side of the highway. He left his easel and canvas behind. The painting itself – violent, abstract slashes of black, blood red, brown, and dark green – looked nothing like the turquoise lake against a backdrop of glacier-topped mountains he’d been facing. His art reminded her of one of her family’s bad times 25 years ago, when she was ten. She’d watched her grim-faced, younger sister, Sophie, scribble lines with a crayon, pressing harder and harder, using the crayon up, until it finally broke from the pressure. Then Sophie grabbed another crayon and another and ground them into the page to create a shiny, waxy collage of rage. Christopherson hadn’t known how to help. Last fall, an inexperienced hiker got lost in snow in the mountains, and they haven’t found her yet. Christopherson periodically sends rangers with a camera and high-powered monocular to take photos near the trail where she most likely wandered off. A local, private helicopter pilot emails pictures he snaps of the cliffs from the air. Christopherson and her team of rangers examine enlarged, minute details of the photographs on their computer screens, looking for unusual colors or textures that give potential clues to where they should search next. A month before the hiker got lost, a retired Marine prepper in bad physical health left his Jeep with the car keys on the roof in a campground parking lot and disappeared with about 30 guns. They should have found signs of him by now if he was in the park because he couldn’t have gotten far at his age and weight, not to mention with that gun cache, but they haven’t. Best case scenario, he got picked up by someone and is now ROW, an acronym for Rest of World. Christopherson learned it from last summer’s seasonal wilderness ranger, a retired Army military police officer and Iraq War vet. A missing person in ROW status could be anywhere, not necessarily dead, he had explained, listing off possibilities with his fingers: woods, lake, Canada, Mexico, friend’s house, kidnapper’s house, cult, terrorist cell, flying saucer, rest of world … Christopherson feels like they’ve scoured the whole park for him. She even hiked to Fourth of July Pass on her day off, following an instinct that he’d have patriotically chosen that spot to die. But the wilderness areas in the park and surrounding forests are huge and rugged, with a million remote, hidden spots where a body could decompose undisturbed. —- ISBN: 9798854637589