Help Number Unknown
October 18, 2021 – Leadville, Colorado, USA
Business was slow in the little breakfast room at the Dream Inn and Hostel. Margarite, the owner, was up early making the usual pile of eggs, sausage, and pancakes. So far, only two guests had appeared. They piled food on their plates and sat in a corner by a window. Margarite wandered over to make conversation.
“What are a couple of good looking fellas like you doing in Leadville on a Monday morning?” she asked.
Garrett and Sanjiv looked up from their pancakes like they were not used to being approached by strangers. Garrett gave his friend a nervous glance before answering, “We’re here to hike Mount Elbert.”
“I figured it must be something like that,” said Margarite. “You two from Denver?”
“Nah, California,” replied Sanjiv. “The Bay Area. We flew into Denver yesterday and drove over.”
“Ah, California boys. We get most of our visitors during the summer months. It’s a little late in the season to go climbing around the mountain. But I suppose the weather’s still good.”
“That’s why we’re here,” replied Sanjiv.
“What about work? You don’t have to work on an October Monday?”
Garrett flinched like he was a little annoyed at the personal question, but Margarite sounded so friendly, it was hard not to answer her. “We both work at Facebook. Technically, we’re working from home, but we kind of set our own hours and no one checks up on us. So if we want to hike a mountain on a Monday, we hike a mountain on a Monday.”
“That sounds real nice,” said Margarite. “I was going to check my Facebook after I finish with the pancakes. Maybe you two could help me post something everybody will like.”
“I don’t think you want our help. We’re no good with that stuff,” said Sanjiv.
“Well, let me ask you about your hike. I get nervous when I see out-of-towners head off to the trail. You planning to get to the top?”
“We’ll see. We thought we’d figure it out once we got there,” replied Garrett.
Margarite returned a worried look. “You better leave me your names and phone number in case something happens.”
Garrett chuckled like he thought she was joking.
“I’m serious,” replied Margarite. She put a paper napkin and pen down on the table. “Write everything down, including when you expect to be back.”
Garrett rolled his eyes as if his mom was giving him a lecture, but he wrote the information on the napkin and passed it back to Margarite.
“You two better hurry. You don’t have a lot of daylight. No use talking to me,” said Margarite. “I’ll look to see you back here tonight.”
Garrett and Sanjiv shoveled down the rest of their breakfast and then hurried to their small room.
“I think she likes you,” Sanjiv said in a teasing voice. “Now she’s got your number.”
“Ha ha. You must not have seen that I wrote down your number.”
“Yeah, sure you did,” replied Sanjiv sarcastically. “Are you gonna fill up your Camelback bladder with ice?”
“That’ll take too long. Let’s grab our stuff as quick as possible and get out of here.”
The two friends rushed to shove beef jerky and trail mix into their packs. Then they filled up their water containers and pulled their coats from the carry-on bags they had taken on the plane. They kept bumping into each other in the process.
“When we read on TripAdvisor that these rooms were small, that was an understatement,” said Sanjiv.
“You can’t have actual adventure and luxury rooms at the same time,” said Garrett with a laugh. “All trips worth remembering start in a small room.”
Sanjiv and Garrett had started at Facebook around the same time and been put on the same project. When they shifted from working in an office to working from home, they continued to hang out on weekends. Very quickly, they forgot what it was like to interact in person with their other coworkers. All the screen time at work gave them the urge to get of their apartments. They began by exploring nearby places and then drove farther and farther out, taking full advantage of their flexible schedules.
Garrett had been to Yosemite National Park as a kid, but he did not appreciate it until he and Sanjiv started hiking some of its trails. They worked themselves up to all-day hikes, like the one to Upper Yosemite Falls.
“This was still pretty tame,” Garrett said to Sanjiv when the hike was finished. “I want to climb up a real mountain. Like one of the Rocky Mountains.”
“You ever hear of the Fourteeners?” asked Sanjiv.
“What are the Fourteeners?”
“Mountains that are over 14,000 feet. Those are the big ones in the Rockies.”
“Then that’s what we need to do. A Fourteener.”
They did some internet searching and found that one of the most accessible Fourteeners in Colorado was also the highest – Mount Elbert. The trailhead for the hike was only around six miles from the summit. It sounded very doable, except that their Fourteener fascination showed up a little late in the season. It was already October and Mount Elbert was usually a summer hike. But then the weather forecast for Colorado turned unseasonably warm. Almost on a whim, they booked a cheap, last-minute flight into Denver and found the room in Leadville.
While the budding adventurers had intended to get an early start on their hike, it was already past 8 am when they finally threw their packs and coats into the rental car. Garrett pulled up a map to the trailhead on his phone and then coaxed the Nissan Versa up the steep winding road.
“Take it slow,” said Sanjiv, looking over the edge of the road to a steep drop-off.
Garrett’s phone rang and he glanced down to answer it.
“Would you be willing to answer a brief survey about your rental car experience?” said a voice on the phone.
“No, I wouldn’t,” said Garrett, ending the call.
“I can’t believe they’re already bugging you,” said Sanjiv.
“You can’t get away from these spam calls. It’s crazy. I don’t know why I answered it. I’m not making that mistake again.”
The drive to the trailhead was only twenty miles, but because of the snaking road, the pair did not arrive until 9 am. Only two other cars sat in the gravel parking lot.
“We’ve almost got it all to ourselves!” called Garrett. “This is going to be so cool.”
Although the temperatures were unusually warm, they were still at 10,000 feet and they felt the chill. They quickly added layers of sweatshirts and jackets and slung their packs over their backs. They stopped to take a long look at the trail map posted on a wooden display board and then eagerly stepped out onto the path that cut right through a thick grove of pine trees.
After only a few hundred feet, the trail went from flat to steep. Garrett and Sanjiv had to lean forward to keep their balance. In some spots, they relied on their hands to grab tree branches and rocks to pull themselves forward. Ten minutes in and they were both breathing heavily.
“I guess I knew we would be up at altitude, but I didn’t think I would already be feeling it,” Garrett said while panting.
“Six miles of this is not going to be easy,” said Sanjiv. “We should have brought some oxygen.”
The pair kept waiting for the trail to ease up and level off, but it remained punishingly steep. Their rest breaks grew more and more frequent.
“My legs are burning,” Garrett complained, as he sat on an overturned log near the trail.
“Mine too. But it’s not a race. We can go as slow as we want.”
Garrett took a long drink of water and then put a handful of trail mix in his mouth. “If we’re stuck at this pace, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
“Are you saying we should quit?”
“I don’t know. It’s already noon and the summit looks as far away as when we started.”
“We came all this way. I don’t want to turn back just yet.”
They set off again and slowly the trees thinned out. They were visibly closer to the bare summit and its surrounding patches of snow. The air was still, but they could easily imagine how much colder they would feel in the wind.
The trail they were on crossed several intersecting paths, and to avoid confusion, the two hikers kept checking with the wooden route markers. Any conversations were short to conserve breath. Neither Garrett or Sanjiv did much looking around. They kept their eyes on their feet and the ground. The climb had primarily become a physical struggle.
By mid-afternoon, the peak of the mountain loomed over them. Garrett slumped onto a large boulder near the trail for what would prove to be a long break.
“We should turn around. No way we’re making it to the top,” said Garrett with disappointed finality.
“Agreed. I’m worried about the dark,” Sanjiv quickly replied. “It’s going to be even tougher if we can’t see anything and we’re using our phones for flashlights.”
“But we’ll be going down. We can let gravity do most of the work.”
The two friends ate some beef jerky and then sat in silence as their bodies slipped into an exhausted semi-consciousness. Sanjiv finally snapped them out of it when he realized how far the sun had moved.
“It already feels darker. We should go.”
Garrett looked at the dimming sky on the horizon. “Yeah, we definitely should.”
The sun dropped behind a distant ridge as they trudged down the path, careful not to slip on loose dirt and rocks.
“How long can your phone last if we have to use it as a flashlight?” asked Garrett.
“Maybe two hours.”
“If we end up using them, we should be careful to save as much of the batteries as possible.
Sunset turned into twilight. The friends passed some intersecting trails and kept shuffling or tumbling forward. Then the terrain flattened out. After walking for another fifteen minutes, it felt like they were back on a slight incline.
“I don’t think this is right. It feels like we’re going up instead of down,” said Sanjiv. “We must have taken a wrong turn.”
“How could we make a wrong turn?” replied Garrett, who had been in front of Sanjiv.
“Maybe when we passed those other trails, we were supposed to turn.”
“I don’t think so.”
They kept walking, but eventually Garrett had to admit they were going up instead of down. They started to backtrack. It was dark enough that they could only see a few feet in front of them.
“If we’re lost, we could try and call someone,” said Sanjiv.
“We’re not lost. We just have to keep moving down. If we missed a turn, we’ll find it. I’m not going to be one of those people who has to be rescued. They always send hundreds of people and make you look like an idiot.”
Garrett began turning his phone flashlight on and off to help them find their footing. Then his phone rang. He looked down and did not recognize the number.
“Who is it?” asked Sanjiv.
“I don’t know. It’s a 719 area code. It’s probably that rental car place again. Or a million other people trying to sell me something.” Garrett refused the call.
When they reached an intersection of trails, they disagreed on the way to go. Garrett acted more sure of himself, so eventually Sanjiv gave in and followed him. They were definitely moving down again. And then the trail leveled out. It was past 10 pm.
“This is wrong again. We should call someone,” said Sanjiv.
“No way I’m calling anyone. We’ll figure it out. We just have to keep moving down.”
They backtracked again and found a different intersection. Garrett was not so sure about the direction and let Sanjiv decide which way to go. Sanjiv took the lead and used his flashlight for a few seconds at a time so they could see where to step.
Garrett got another call. “Another 719 number. I can’t believe they would call this late. Now it’s probably a robocall.” He ignored the call again.
“Maybe we should stop and wait for it to get light,” said Sanjiv.
“Better to keep moving,” said Garrett. “If we stop, we’ll fall asleep and something like a bear might find us. We’ll be okay if we keep going down. We’ll find the car.”
They trudged on like zombies, barely thinking about where they were going. It felt like walking in place. Sanjiv’s phone battery reached less than 10%. Garrett got more calls but he did not even look to see where they were from. He grumbled about giving away his phone number.
They were out of food and water by the time the first unmistakable sunrise streaks appeared. As the world got brighter, they recognized that they were on a completely different ridge than the one they were supposed to be descending. They changed directions and were soon confident they were on the right trail.
By 7:30 am, Garrett and Sanjiv caught glimpses of the paved road leading to the trailhead. Then they spotted the parking lot. It was filled with cars.
“That’s weird. Where did all the people come from?” asked Garrett in a delirious voice.
As he and Sanjiv stumbled into view of their car, they realized that it was surrounded by government vehicles, some with lights on the top. A crowd of people yelled and ran toward them.
“Are you Garrett and Sanjiv?” asked the first person to reach the hikers.
“Uh, yeah,” replied Garrett sheepishly.
“Are we glad to see you two! We’re from Lake County Search and Rescue. We’ve been looking for you all night.”
“You have?” asked Garrett, dropping his backpack.
“We got a call from Margarite at the Dream Inn. She said you fellas never made it home. We sent a couple of people up here and they found your car.”
“Oh. Yeah, we were still hiking. Took longer than we thought.”
“Did you have your phone with you?”
“Yeah.”
“Was it working?”
“Yeah.”
“Then why didn’t you answer it? We tried calling all night long.”
By that point, Garrett and Sanjiv were surrounded by twenty rescuers who had been preparing to start a new morning search. “I didn’t recognize the number,” said Garrett in an embarrassed voice.
One of the rescuers called out, “Why didn’t you call for help?”
“We didn’t want to bother anyone. And, you know, we figured things out eventually.”
The person who appeared to be in charge of the rescue operation shook his head and pulled out his phone. “Yeah, we found them,” he said to someone who answered his call. “They showed up at the parking lot. Cancel the helicopter. No, they look fine. They just don’t know how to answer a phone.”
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