Yosemite Fall. Scott Graham

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Yosemite Fall - Scott Graham National Park Mystery Series

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that,” Chuck confirmed.

      Janelle asked Carmelita, “You’re not scared?”

      Carmelita shook her head. Then she nodded. “Sorta. But that’s why I want to do it.”

      Clarence wrapped one of his beefy arms around Carmelita’s narrow shoulders, drawing her to his side. “Esa es mi sobrina valiente,” he said. “That’s my brave niece.”

      Janelle’s fingers tightened around Chuck’s arm. “Bastante bien,” she said, acceding to Carmelita with a sigh. “As long as Chuck says it’s okay.”

      Carmelita leaned around Clarence and grinned at Chuck, but Rosie said to her sister, “I’m telling you, Carm, you’re craaaaazy.” She swung her boot at another stone, sending it flying into a neighboring campsite.

      “Careful,” Chuck warned her. “It wasn’t easy for me to reserve one of the researcher sites here. We don’t want to get thrown out our very first day.”

      They continued along the path. In campsites on either side of them, campers prepared breakfast and arranged gear. Some organized overnight camping supplies. They packed duffle bags, tied guy lines to tent poles, and tossed sleeping bags over their tents to air the bags in the sun. Others, obviously climbers, sorted through their climbing kits. They counted out carabiners, coiled ropes on tarps, and arranged cams and bolts and quickdraws on picnic tables, grouping the pieces of milled-alloy climbing hardware by size and type. Still other Camp 4 campers were Latino families, middle-aged men and women with children who occupied sites ringed with inexpensive hoop tents. The adults’ worn jeans, denim shirts, long skirts, and cafeteria-worker blouses and slacks marked them not as park visitors but park concession employees.

      Block-shaped Columbia Boulder, the size of a two-story house, sat just beyond the north boundary of the campground, where it had come to rest on the valley floor after tumbling eons ago from the cliffs above. For decades, the short, demanding climbing routes up the boulder’s vertical sides had provided a rope-free proving ground for Camp 4 climbers. These days, in an attempt to improve the often frayed relations between Camp 4’s free-spirited climbing community and Yosemite’s staid ranger staff, the park service provided free coffee and donuts to all comers every Sunday morning at the base of the boulder, where the two groups mingled and hashed out any outstanding grievances.

      After so many years away, Chuck gazed around him with a sense of nostalgia. No campground in the national park system was more famous than Camp 4. From its position on the north side of Yosemite Valley, the campground had served since the 1960s as the base of climbing operations for hypercompetitive climbers bent on putting up ever more difficult routes on the valley’s surrounding faces. In those early years, the original occupants of the campground included pioneering rock climbers like Yvon Chouinard, Doug Tompkins, Royal Robbins, Ron Kauk, and—among only a handful of accomplished female climbers at the time—Lynn Hill. The early Camp 4 denizens assumed mythic status as climbing grew to become a global sport. During Chuck’s summers at Camp 4 decades later, the campground had remained home to an ever-changing cast of big-wall climbers, still predominantly male, all competing for the unofficial title of Best Rock Climber on Earth.

      Chuck looked from side to side as he walked along the central corridor through the campground with his family. Camp 4 was a different place now than when he’d spent so much time here twenty years ago. The campground’s sites were occupied by a roughly equal number of males and females, and by a far more diverse crowd as well. Rather than almost exclusively white, Camp 4’s current climber occupants embodied a healthy mix of the multiethnic stewpot representative of modern-day America and the world, with Anglo as well as Asian, African American, and Latino climbers sorting piles of gear. Signaling the biggest change of all, in addition to the walk-in campsites occupied by climbers preparing for ascents and the numerous sites taken by tourists organizing camping supplies, a third of the campground’s sites were occupied by park workers and their families.

      As Chuck, Janelle, Clarence, and the girls passed one of the worker-occupied sites, a middle-aged Latina woman looked up from a camp stove positioned at the end of a picnic table in front of her. The smell of frying bacon wafted from a skillet on the stove. The woman looked through the steam rising from the pan, taking in Janelle, Clarence, and the girls.

      “Hola, amigos,” she greeted them. Her deep, gravelly voice reminded Chuck of the rough, sandpapery tone shared by Rosie and Rosie’s grandfather, Janelle’s Mexican-immigrant father.

      “Hola,” Janelle responded.

      The Latina woman went back to flipping strips of bacon in the pan with her spatula.

      Janelle winked at Chuck. “You said you were bringing us to Yosemite Valley, not the South Valley. It’s nice to see the diversity in the park.”

      In the years after their arrival in New Mexico from Juarez as newlyweds, Janelle’s parents raised her and Clarence in Albuquerque’s South Valley, the only neighborhood they could afford with their meager, blue-collar incomes. In her teen years, Janelle fell in with a rough set of friends, dropped out of high school, and bore Carmelita and Rosie with a local drug dealer, now deceased.

      Clarence sidestepped the violent culture of the South Valley, completing high school and attending the University of New Mexico School of Anthropology. He joined Chuck’s firm, Bender Archaeological, as a temporary employee after graduation. Chuck appreciated Clarence’s boisterous ways, which contrasted with his own taciturn manner, and named Clarence his right-hand man on contract after contract.

      When Chuck met Janelle through Clarence, their courtship led to a quick marriage and Janelle’s move with the girls to Chuck’s hometown, just north of the New Mexico border in Colorado’s rugged San Juan Mountains.

      “Looks like they’re here to work instead of play, doesn’t it?” Chuck said of the Latino campers. “Then again, so are we.”

      The site he’d reserved, one of a handful of Camp 4 sites set aside for teams conducting research in the valley, abutted the far west end of the campground. Next to the site was the campsite reserved by Jimmy, using his many personal connections in the park, for himself and the other men attending the reunion. Besides the two solo pup tents already erected by Jimmy and Bernard, the reunion site was empty.

      The YOSAR team’s steepled white tents ringed a small meadow outside the campground to the west, beyond the Bender Archaeological and reunion campsites. Cruiser bikes rested against wooden platforms on which the search-and-rescue team’s wall tents stood, and an array of lawn chairs faced each other in a circle in the center of the meadow.

      Of the former Yosemite Valley climbers who had accepted Jimmy’s emailed invitation to attend the reunion, Chuck considered himself the furthest outlier. In the years after his graduation from the Fort Lewis College School of Archaeology in Durango, he’d focused on building Bender Archaeological into a viable archaeological services contractor. Only during breaks between projects had he driven to the valley to climb with the others, freeing himself for a week or two from the ongoing stress of winning and working his contracts.

      Bender Archaeological started out as, and largely remained, a one-man operation. Chuck was the only full-time employee of his firm. He hired part-timers like Clarence to complete specific projects as necessary, and maintained only superficial contacts with other archaeologists, a fact that had served him well professionally. By working his contracts on his own, fame within the archaeological community for the many discoveries he’d unearthed over the years accrued directly to him. That fame led to the stream of work that had flowed his way month in and month out over the years—straight through to the intriguing contract from the Indigenous Tribespeople

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