The Long Way Down

Part One · Above the Trees

Priya had been begging for this hike since she was eight years old. Her cousin Dev finally promised her the summit of Mount Shelby. Now the two of them stood above timberline, higher than she had ever been in her life. Below them, the forest ended in a hard dark line, like the edge of a rug. Above that line there was nothing but wind, gray rock, and sky.

Dev had one rule, and he repeated it at every switchback on the way up. Off the ridge by noon, he said. Storms build over these peaks in the afternoon, and there is nowhere at all to hide. Priya nodded politely each time. She was not really listening. She was busy naming the boulders after her teachers. The big grumpy one was Mr. Pruitt.

They reached the summit a little before eleven, and it was everything she had hoped for. They ate cheese sandwiches on a flat boulder while a marmot watched them like a tiny, furry tax collector. Priya asked for ten more minutes. Dev gave them to her. Then she asked for ten more. When they finally started back down, his watch said twelve forty.

The first cloud did not look like much, only a small white pile above the far ridge. But it kept growing while they watched, the way bread dough grows in a bowl. The wind turned cold against her neck. Dev stopped telling jokes and started moving quickly, and Priya had to trot to keep up with him on the loose rock.

The sound arrived before the storm did, a low knock of thunder that she felt in her teeth. Then the hail started, small white balls that stung her arms and bounced off the trail like popcorn. The sky turned the color of a bruise. Timberline was still a mile below them, and the ridge they stood on was the highest thing for miles.

Dev pointed at a gully just off the trail and shouted at her to get down inside it. He went first. Three steps in, a wet rock rolled under his boot, and he landed hard on his side. When he pushed himself up, his face had gone gray, and he was holding his ankle with both hands. His voice was not steady.

Priya had never once seen Dev frightened, and that scared her more than the hail did. He could not stand. The walls of the gully were only waist high, but they cut the worst of the wind. "Throw the poles away from us," he told her. "They are metal. Then get low, but do not lie flat on the ground."

She threw both trekking poles behind a boulder twenty feet down the slope. Then she crouched on the balls of her feet with her heels touching, exactly the way he had shown her in the parking lot. Lightning cracked over the summit. She counted the seconds until the thunder, the way her grandmother had taught her. Four seconds. Three. Two.

The flash and the bang came together. A white fork hit the ridge not fifty yards away, and the boulder she had named Mr. Pruitt split with a crack like a giant knuckle. Pieces of rock rained down the slope. Her hair stood straight up under her hat. The air smelled like burnt matches. Priya decided that she would never be rude to a boulder again.

Part Two · The Long Way Down

Then she remembered the emergency shelter folded in the bottom of her pack, a square of orange plastic she had never unwrapped. The wind tried to rip it away from her twice before she got it over both of them. It was noisy and cold, and it smelled like a new shower curtain, but it kept the hail off their heads.

They sat under the shelter for twenty minutes while the storm walked over the ridge and away to the east. The hail softened into rain, and then into nothing. When Priya lifted the plastic, the rocks around them were white and steaming in the sun. The clouds were already two valleys away. Dev's ankle had swollen up over the top of his boot.

He could not carry his pack. She took the things that mattered and left the rest under a boulder, with his jacket tied on as a marker. They had four hours of daylight. Timberline was one mile and eight hundred feet below them, straight down a slope of broken rock. One mile, Priya thought. I walk a mile to school every single day.

It took them a whole hour to travel a quarter of that distance. Dev leaned on her shoulder and hopped across the flat sections. On the steep parts he sat down and scooted backward like a crab. "Crabs," he said through his teeth, "are very underrated." Priya laughed so hard she nearly dropped him. Her legs were shaking, but she kept her voice steady anyway.

The second cloud rose behind the summit a little after four. Priya felt her stomach drop. Dev saw it too. He did not say one word about it, which frightened her more than a warning would have. She chose a line down a long gully of broken rock instead of the switchback trail, because the gully ran straight toward the trees.

The first tree was a twisted little pine no taller than she was, growing sideways out of a crack in the rock. Priya could have hugged it. Ten minutes later they were under real trees at last, with the wind shut out and the ground soft with old needles. Dev sat down against a trunk and laughed once, which turned into a cough.

She left him there with the shelter, the water bottles, and both jackets, and she hiked the last two miles alone, counting switchbacks out loud. At the trailhead, a ranger with a radio was already asking hikers about two people who had not come out. Dev had left their hiking plan at the ranger station that morning, just as he always did.

Two rangers went up the gully with a litter and had Dev out before dark. He collected a cast, a pair of crutches, and a very long lecture. Priya collected a story she will be telling for the rest of her life. Dev gave her the trekking poles that fall. She still says the same thing at every switchback. Off the ridge by noon.