The Cave

Guiding in a wilderness therapy setting is my favorite job I’ve ever had.

One week I was in the girls group working with four other staff, Rickell, Katie, Vileena and Jake. We were camped a little too close to a road about a mile and a half from where it ended at a major road that lead out of the field. Our site was about 12 miles south of Dugway in western Utah, a military base well known amongst conspiracy theorists and UFO enthusiasts.

The girls in the group at the time were all on solos and had been for the better part of a week. We had a couple of new students who required most of our attention so we spent most of our time teaching them fire making and primitive pack construction. They were not enthusiastic.

We woke up the day before staff exchange and decided that everyone in the group needed a change of scenery. As an end of the week activity we were going to take a short day-hike to a spot on the mountainside where there appeared to be a cave. In fact we had a bit of a debate about whether it was actually a cave or a large juniper tree casting a dark shadow on the face of the cliff behind it. Either way, cave or large tree, we were going to hike up there and check it out.

Getting ready to go however was no simple matter as there were all manner of camp duties to be done before we could set out. The new girls were slow at everything and by the time we left camp it was pushing 5 o’clock in the evening… still plenty of time for the 2 ½ mile hike to the cave/tree and the 2 ½ miles back. As staff, we felt certain that even if it were to get dark before we made it back to camp, all we would have to do is hike south to the road and then follow it down until we hit our camp. It was The end of August so we had about 4 ½ hours of sun and then maybe 45 minutes of twilight before it got really dark. We had plenty of time.

We set out cutting a trail more or less straight through the sage and juniper heading directly for the dark hole in the face of the mountain. Right away the hills rose up blocking our view of the cave until we would get much closer. Immediately upon leaving camp, one of the new girls began to fall behind. She didn’t complain as much as some of the others had when they were new, but the rest of them complained about the slowness of the pace as though they had always loved hiking quickly. We took several sitting breaks on our way there, and it was during one of those rests that I had my first premonitions that the cave was not a good idea.

I suddenly had the thought that if it were indeed a cave with any depth to it, it might be a bad place to take a group of accident-prone teenage girls.

As I was thinking that thought, Katie turned to me and voiced her concern that there might be a mountain lion living in the cave and that we might be better off just going up the mountain to watch the sunset. Jake chimed in and said that if there were a mountain lion living in that cave it would definitely clear out of the area as soon as we got close enough for it to smell us. I told them of my fear that the cave might be a deep one and that the girls might get lost in it or fall into a pit. We all kind of laughed nervously and agreed to be careful and talked each other into continuing our outing.

A little ways on, during another sitting break Rickell turned to me and voiced her concern that we would get lost in the dark if we kept taking so many breaks. I wasn’t worried about that. Though I had never specifically been to the cave before, I knew the surrounding terrain really well. Besides, I had the campsite locked into the GPS if it came to relying on that, which it never would. Still, I talked with the girls, and told them that we were not stopping again unless we absolutely had to.

Two hundred yards later as we sat listening to the new girl calling her name (everyone was expected to call his or her ow name when out of sight of the group to prevent runaways) and waiting for her to be finished pretending to go pee behind the brush, I looked down where I was sitting. Strangely there was a perfect circle of red dirt about 6 feet across in the middle of which was a small anthill. The rest of the desert surrounding the circle was the same hard packed gray-brown earth that stretched around us for miles. I wished, not for the last time that night that I had brought a camera with me.

As we waited I stood and went a little ways from the group and did our nightly call in to the backup man. I struggled to acquire a satellite signal but after a few minutes I was finally patched through. I reported that all was well and that we were day-hiking to the cave on the west side of the Sheep-rock mountains. As I was hanging up and placing the phone in the lockbox, Vileena approached me. “Dan, I don’t know how to say this, but I don’t have a good feeling about going to that cave.” I know.” I said “You are the third person to tell me that you don’t feel good about it, and I don’t even feel good about it, but I think we ought to go and at least check it out. No one has been there yet, and if it’s dangerous we won’t let the girls go in. Besides this way we will be able to warn the others to stay away from it.” She looked skeptical. “Don’t worry,” I assured her, “We will be Ok. If it is too deep or there is something living in it, we will stop the girls from going in and we’ll leave.” Vileena still didn’t seem entirely satisfied with my answer but she let it go, after all there wasn't really a better way to spend the last evening of our rotation on the trail.

The truth is, I wasn’t comfortable with my answer either. I couldn’t place the sensation but I was beginning to feel something between a nervous tension, and a cold dread as we slowly made our way closer to the cave. Something was not right, but we were going to go anyway.

The last mile of the hike was the hardest. The hills were steep and sandy, and the trees clawed at us and fought us every step of the way. Surprisingly the new girl seemed to be in a much better mood. We got closer to our goal, and suddenly we could see it again looming much larger directly up the hill from us. It was definitely a cave. As we came closer we saw that we couldn’t approach the it from where we were because a sheer cliff of about 40 feet, invisible from our campsite, but quite real up close, dropped down from the cave into a sort of sandy depression where we stood. There was a way up however to the right along a steep incline that curved, bowl shaped around to the level where the cave floor stood. I stared up at the tree that blocked much of the opening from sight. It was huge, three, maybe four times the size of any other juniper tree I had ever seen. The cave was no small opening either. It was round like an amphitheater, and about 30 feet across and at least that high. I couldn’t see anything wrong from where I was standing but I suddenly had the urge to run and not look back. The girls however were already climbing, so I followed.

We had made it. It was almost eight o’clock. That had been, and remains to this day, the slowest day hike of my time on the trail. We were just about to walk up the final embankment and into the mouth of the cave when we heard it; very loud and very close to where we stood three long mournful calls meant, I can only guess to sound like those of a dying bird. But this was patently not a bird. It was a person imitating a bird very close to where we were standing but hidden in the brush somewhere on the hillside.

We looked at each other as staff and then over at the girls and we were surprised to see that it was almost as though they didn’t even hear the cries. Then from the distance out on the valley floor, three long bird cries answered. My breath caught in my throat, someone else was out there. Behind us.

The girls were at the mouth of the cave now and we silently sped to catch up with them but when we did something strange happened, they all kind of looked at the opening and then dispersed. Not one of them set foot into the cave.

They followed the hillside around and out and most of them sat down above the cliff to watch the sun set behind the mountains on the other side of the valley. We staff unfortunately were not as disinterested, or perhaps nothing that follows would have happened that night.

The cave it turned out was not particularly deep, only 50 or 60 feet, but it stayed pretty wide and open all the way to the back wall where it finally narrowed down to a little crack in the mountain. Near the opening were the weathered remains of what had once been a dwelling of some forgotten desert culture.

I had been first into the cave and was all the way at the back where the light was low. Vileena and Jake were with me and we were looking at a scattered assortment of clean white bones. These were the bones of medium to large animals and my first thought was, “So a mountain lion does live here after all. He has been after the rancher’s sheep.” But as my eyes adjusted I became less satisfied with that explanation. I stooped down and had a closer look.

These bones had not been gnawed or broken, in fact they weren’t even scattered as it had first appeared, these bones were cut… with a saw... and stacked carefully in neat little piles.

I stood up so fast I hit my head on an outcropping of rock. I stumbled backwards into the more open area of the cave feeling sick just in time to hear Rickell say in a low panicked voice, “We have to get out of here! Right now!” I looked at her and the others; they were all white and staring at something behind me. I turned around and saw there carved into a wall, a low narrow shelf. On the shelf was the deep unmistakable color of freshly dried blood. I backed up quickly and just as quickly wished I hadn’t because the light and the view was better.

Plastered to the wall with a paste of what looked to be blood and feces were knotted matts of long dirty human hair. Where there was no hair, there were faces painted in white ash. Horrible staring faces with empty black eyes and wide toothless mouths. Around the faces were vaguely drawn symbols, also done on some sort of dark fluid. We all backed up together into the mouth of the cave, our eyes had adjusted now and we took in the whole horrible scene.

The ceiling of the cave had once been charred black doubtlessly from countless primitive fires, but now it was shiny with some kind of spray on sealant. There was a fair amount of random looking spray paint as well but the overall effect when you looked up was disorienting and ugly. The faces and symbols were up there too, not ash but paint, and not as distinct, more shadowy but still leering and unnerving. We kept backing out and had a quick meeting to discuss what needed to be done.

Here was what we surmised. We had blundered into some sort of active occult sacrificial lair. To make matters worse there were people we couldn’t see guarding it, communicating with one another through bird calls. The sun was going down, we were stuck on the mountain with a group of snotty uncooperative teenaged girls 50 miles from the nearest town. We had no vehicle until the next day, and we were all in real danger of panicking. We decided that the smartest thing to do was to leave the site immediately and then talk. We gathered the girls none of whom had seen any of this and told them in vague terms that it would behoove us to leave as quickly as possible. They picked upon the electricity in the air and for once didn’t argue. We ran.

There was no trail. When we left we went straight across the mountainside instead of going down first. I almost wish we hadn’t because this route afforded us a perfect view of the cave for the first half mile of our jog. After a minute, Rickell stopped me and Jake and pointed back. “Look at the sides of the cave!” I looked.

On either side of the cave facing inward and down were two enormous faces painted in red and black. We couldn’t see them from the way we had come and they were really only visible now because the sun was setting and the orange fiery glow caught the paint in such a way that it reflected a dull sheen into our eyes. It was a mesmerizing scene until we were snapped out of it by the shadowy figure moving among the bushes above the faces on the rocks. We turned and ran. I looked back and the figure was running too.

When we finally turned and started down the mountainside the going was much easier. We told the girls that we were running so that we would make it back to camp before dark, but they could see the tension among the staff members and started to ask questions. “What was in the cave anyway? One of them asked as we jogged. I had been about to say, "Nothing," when we heard it, the loud suweeeee pig call we used to locate each other from a distance in the dense underbrush.

It was coming from straight ahead, about 100 yards by the sound of it. “It must be another group or one of the field directors looking for us”, I thought. We were saved! Instantly the other four staff and several of the girls answered “SUWEEEEE!”…. Silence. We called again… nothing, then from behind us and to our right we heard a loud crashing in the bushes coming towards us fast.

I yelled at the girls, “ come this way quickly!” We bolted at a right angle directly perpendicular to the line between where we had heard the call and where we had heard the crashing. Whoever was crashing through the brush however wasn’t trying to meet up with the caller, they were tracking us and they turned where we did. Katie and I moved to the back of the group and told the girls and the other three staff to keep running. I wanted to see who was following us.

We stopped and the girls moved off. We waited there for half a minute and then we saw him, or it or whatever it was. It was dressed all in dark buckskin and it was running bent over at the waist leaping over the smaller bushes and barely trying to dodge the larger ones. It looked more like it was sniffing the ground than it was looking at it.

From my perspective I only glimpsed the figure and then it stopped behind a large juniper tree. Clearly it wasn’t going to move until we did. So we decided to give the girls some time and we turned and walked down the trail they had made. That figure was the person we saw most clearly that night, but things kept getting weirder and more frightening.

It turns out the group hadn’t gone far at all. It was twilight by then, and as we caught up I figured they had stopped because they didn’t know where they were going. That isn’t why they had stopped. We had come again by chance to that red circle of sand with the anthill in the middle of it. The girls were standing in a close circle staring at something sitting on the anthill. I pressed my way to the middle and looked down. It was a pile of camping gear.

More specifically it was a pile of our camping gear. Things from our campsite were stacked neatly in a pyramid the way one would mark a trail with rocks for others to follow. Among the items piled there were things that were clearly meant to send a message. There were the unused garbage bags from inside my pack, spare parts for one of the camp-stoves from Katie’s pack. The sheath of a knife out of Vileena’s day bag and beads from Rickell’s craft kit. A spearhead Jake had been working on all week lay broken on top of the pile. They had been to our camp. They had been through our things. They knew who the leaders were and where we slept, and they knew who had actually been in the cave and seen it.

The girls were clearly freaked out and they started asking a million questions. Katie quickly silenced them. “Girls! We don’t have time for this! It is getting dark, someone is following us, we don’t know why, but what we have to do is get back to camp as quickly as possible and see what else is missing.” We quickly “staffed up” and decided to try the Satellite phone. I gave the GPS to one of the others and told them to head straight to camp. I would go at the back and try the phone. Our students weren’t allowed to use the phone that we kept in a locked box. So I went several yards behind the rest of the group. We started running again, this time the girls really moved. I had no luck with the phone, which was not a surprise, the Globalstar system had begun to lose satellites and was essentially bankrupt so finding the right five minute window to make a call during the day was like finding, well a pile of your own camping gear in the middle of a trackless desert… unlikely.

We hit the road after it was fully dark about a half a mile too high on the mountain. There was no moon. We jogged the last ½ mile down the road and stopped just outside our camp. What if someone was still in there? We kept the girls in a tight group and three of us went in and checked it out. Everything appeared normal so we brought everyone in. We rounded up the girl’s sleeping gear and told them they were all sleeping by the staff tonight. For the first and last time in my experience on the trail no one argued or complained about it.

Once the girls were all in bed, the staff walked towards the road about 20 yards and we started to talk. We all related our own experiences on the hike back. Vileena and I told the others about the bones stacked at the back of the cave, and they filled me in on something I guess I missed. It seems that whoever had placed our camping gear on the anthill had been there only seconds before the girls found it. A large cloud of dust was hanging in the air as they arrived at the red dirt and that was actually the reason they had stopped. It was only after they stopped that someone spotted the gear.

As we were talking, something didn’t sit right with Rickell. She suddenly said, “None of this makes sense!” We all looked at her. “We stumbled onto someone’s ritual site. Fine. We saw blood and bones. Fine. We saw faces painted on the walls and human hair matted into the images. But we didn’t take any pictures, and we have no evidence that anything we saw is actually up there. My guess is that everything is cleaned up and gone by now.” We all kept looking at her. “ So why did they chase us? And why are they still out there just beyond those trees?” She pointed up the road a little ways and indeed there was the shadowy sort of movement that you see when on a dark night something just slightly darker moves through your field of vision.

Vileena sucked in her breath. “I know why,” she said quietly. And out of her bag she pulled three clean white bones sawed off on both ends. My mouth went dry. One thing about living on the trail is that you learn to make things from every material, so the fact that she had picked up and kept bones was perfectly natural… just not those bones. Those belonged to someone else.

As a group we decided that the best thing to do was to give them back. Two of us went back to be with the girls while three of us walked back up the road. Where the dark figures had been behind the trees moments before we placed the bones on the ground. I said loudly into the night, (actually in a very shaky voice)“Here are your bones. Take them and leave, we have nothing else that belongs to you.” Then we turned and went back to camp.

Miraculously the girls were already asleep when we got there. We could hear whispering in the trees. We came together as staff again and decided it would be a good idea to pray. Afterwards I tried the phone again and got nothing. It was just after midnight and I knew it was not likely to work again until morning anyway so I gave up. Above us in the trees an owl hooted mournfully. Vileena chose that occasion to tell us that according to Navajo tradition if you hear an owl close by in the night it means someone is going to die. “Well if I’m going to die,” I thought, “at least it will be with my eyes wide open.” I was not going to sleep that night.

Around 1am a faint drumming sound could be heard coming from somewhere close by in the night. The clouds started to roll in and it began to get darker and darker. As it grew blacker the people around our camp grew louder. We could hear hushed conversations just beyond the range where we would be able to make out actual words. Everywhere around us it seemed bushes shook and twigs snapped.

We were clearly being watched, and the owl would not stop squawking. Blessedly it started to rain around 3 a.m. The sound of it drowned out any other noise, which on the one hand was a huge relief and on the other only made matters that much worse.

Now it was impossible to tell where the people stalking us might be. At least the owl seemed to have left to find a drier tree. A couple of us got up and set up a quick shelter over the girls to keep them dry. The rain stopped as the first faint lines of gray appeared in the sky. The people, if not gone, were quiet now.

I got up to pee in what can only be described as a classic horror movie blunder, and I walked towards the road. I couldn’t hear anything and I began to feel like maybe everyone had left. I was mid stride when I felt a dramatic shift in the energy around me. I had come to the place where we left the bones just hours before and my foot was hovering in the air just outside of the perimeter past where the bones had been. They were gone now. I pulled it back quickly and stood right there to pee. I don’t know what would have happened had I kept walking but I feel certain that had I crossed that boundary I would have been taking my life into my own hands.

There was a line there in the darkness, on our side of it was the goodness and light that we strove to instill in our group. On the other side there was something much larger and darker than the night. I walked back to camp and went to sleep. Where we slept we were safe.

In the morning we found that the ground was flattened and worn in almost a perfect circle around where we slept. The footprints were an odd combination, half of them had shoes and the other half wore moccasins or were barefoot. They were everywhere. It was like they tried to come and get us but couldn’t approach past a certain point. My footprints where I went pee were inches from another set of footprints where someone stood almost in my face and watched me.

We were finally able to get a phone call out on the satellite phone And we relayed everything that had happened to us to Shayne our field director. He was out at our group with our replacement staff in record time. Even though it was staff exchange day, the girls were so creeped out that they packed all of their gear without being asked, and as soon as the new staff arrived, they set out hiking away from the area.

As we drove back to the office, we went over the details of the last 24 hours with Shayne, and filled out incident reports. When we got back to town, we filed a police report, and that weekend, the sheriff’s deputy drove out to the field and hiked up to the cave with Rickell. The bones were gone, the walls scrubbed clean of blood and hair and feces. The altar in the wall had been chipped away. Everywhere the faces had been was coated with gold and purple spray-paint or wax. There was no evidence whatsoever that anything we had seen had ever existed, though it was clear that someone had done a lot of work to clean up the cave recently.

At the time we thought it might be good news and that they had moved out of our area. This proved not to be the case. This was in fact just the beginning of our interactions with this group of people. Apparently we pissed them off, and they would follow us and harass us for months afterwards though the next time I would actually see them would be several months later.