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 Foundation that brought him to the valley this week.
Chuck knew his ability to create and run his own business derived from his isolated upbringing in Durango as the only child of an entirely absent father and mostly absent mother. It was as a direct result of that lonely upbringing, in fact, that he’d so appreciated the camaraderie of the tight circle of fellow climbers with whom he’d based out of Camp 4 and climbed the cliffs around the valley each summer as a young man.
Chuck stopped in the path with Janelle, the girls, and Clarence when brakes squealed on Northside Drive outside Camp 4. A large truck pulling a flatbed trailer stopped on the shoulder of the road adjacent to the campground. Three dozen tourists in broad-brimmed hats and long-sleeved sunblock shirts sat in rows of bench seats bolted the length of the trailer. A tour guide in walnut slacks, beige shirt, and a billed cap faced her charges from her perch in a tall chair affixed to the trailer bed behind the truck’s cab.
The guide addressed the tourists through a microphone hooked over her ear and running from the side of her head to her mouth. Her voice issued from speakers mounted on the cab’s roof as the tourists peered through the trees at the campsites.
“Before you is Camp 4,” the guide announced, her amplified voice reaching her tourist charges as well as every camper in the campground. “For decades, the best rock climbers in the world have made names for themselves climbing demanding routes around Yosemite Valley while based out of this camping area. Camp 4 is considered the birthplace of big-wall rock climbing, and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003.”
The tour guide adjusted the arm of her microphone at her cheek. “Today, Camp 4 is more than just a climber hangout. Climbing teams still use the campground as their temporary living quarters between ascents. But they face stiff competition for campsites from non-climbing park visitors and seasonal employees in the valley. To secure first-come, first-served sites in the campground, would-be campers begin lining up as early as three o’clock in the morning—about the time the infamous, hard-partying Camp 4 climbers of old would have been going to sleep.”
Her spiel complete, the guide tapped the cab of the truck behind her. The tour vehicle jerked into gear and rumbled on down the road.
“You’re famous,” Janelle told Chuck as they resumed their walk.
“I think she said ‘infamous.’ I like that better.”
Rosie hopped from foot to foot when they reached their campsite. “I have to go, go, go,” she said, her voice strained and her face turning purple.
“I’ll take her,” Carmelita offered.
“Gracias,” Janelle said.
Rosie and Carmelita set off for the bathroom at a jog.
Clarence sat sideways in a hammock he’d tied between the trunks of two trees next to his tent. He dug his toe into the dirt to swing himself back and forth, using the woven-mesh sling as a chair. “I’m impressed,” he said to Janelle. He rested the back of his head against the side of the hammock as he swung. “You’re letting Carm climb tomorrow.”
“She just . . . she looked so good up there. Like she was lighter than air.”
Clarence patted his round belly. “Lucky for her, she takes after you, not me.”
“Ahoy,” a tall, lanky man Chuck’s age called out as he approached on the gravel path from the front of the campground. He pushed one of Camp 4’s shiny aluminum wheelbarrows loaded with duffle bags. “Where is everybody?” he asked Chuck, stopping in front of the reunion campsite next door.
“Hello to you, too, Ponch,” Chuck said. He walked over and offered his hand. “Been a long time.”
Ponch Stilwell settled the legs of the wheelbarrow in the dirt at the edge of the site and took Chuck’s hand. “Twenty-some years,” he agreed.
Ponch’s high forehead gave way to thin tendrils of blond hair combed from the front of his head to the back. His black jeans, polo shirt, and loafers were far removed from the beaded leather vest, woven headband, and silk drawstring pants he’d sported in Camp 4 twenty years ago. Back then, as the group’s hippy wannabe, he’d given himself over to mystical dances, transcendent chants, and spooky fortune tellings, his Buddhist thumb cymbals, dried-gourd maracas, and deck of tarot cards always close at hand.
Chuck briefed Ponch on Jimmy’s accident, concluding, “He’s on the way by ambulance to the hospital in Merced.”
“Geez. What a way to start the reunion.” Ponch rested his palm on the handle of his gear-filled wheelbarrow. “Did Thorpe go with him?”
“Bernard went. I’ve got his cell number to check in with him when they get there.”
Ponch turned to the reunion campsite and surveyed the two tents. “Where is he, then?”
“Thorpe? I haven’t seen him yet. Jimmy and Bernard were the only ones here when I showed up with my family last night. You’re the first to get here this morning.”
“He should be here by now.”
“The way I understand it, everybody’s trickling in throughout