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A True Mystery |
Was there a death here? That was what I wondered as I poked around the campsite. There was the food still hanging in the tree, in a plastic grocery bag. Six cans of V-8 spicy hot vegetable juice, several cans of tuna, cans of fruit and numerous boxes of things like Rice-a-Ronie and Tuna Helper. The Safeway grocery bag was fading from the sun, and I guessed that it had been there for at least a few months.
Below, on the ground, was a large table cloth. It looked like it had either been used as a ground cloth or perhaps as a shelter. Up the gully a bit was a pair of slacks laid out on a large boulder. I checked the pockets and found nothing. A shirt was on another boulder twenty feet further up the gully, and a suit jacket on the ground near that.
The site was only a hundred yards or so off the road, and the clothes didn't look like those of a hiker or backpacker. I wondered what the story was. Why would someone abandon their campsite in such a hurry that they didn't even take their clothes or $15 worth of groceries they had probably just purchased? It was a true mystery.
Then I saw the bottle of cough medicine - empty. Another one was nearby, further yet up the steepening gully. They were eight-ounce bottles. He was "robo-tripping" I realized. The term comes from the most common brand, Robotussin, and it involves drinking four or more ounces of any cough medicine that contains dextromethorphan to get high. I knew someone who had done this a number of times, and he had told me that Hallucinations are common, as is vomiting and an inability to sleep for many hours. The experience is similar to taking LSD he said.
That would explain why someone might leave things behind, but where did he go? Did he drive away? Did a storm chase him back to town? Or did he wander off up towards the same beautiful rock formations that caused me to stop and explore this place? My wife Ana caught up to me and I showed her what I had found. We speculated about some scenarios, but kept coming back to the idea that the man may have wandered off up into the wilderness and died, or fallen from one of the cliffs above.
We were twenty miles up Phantom Canyon, on a dirt road in Colorado mining country, near where we live in Canon City. The small town of Victor was only another six or seven miles up the road, so we decided that we would notify the police there. I hung a plastic grocery bag on a tree branch next to the road to mark the spot, and we drove on.
In Victor we found the police station, and an officer was just pulling into the parking lot. I told him what we had found, and his response was, "Yeah, people sometimes go out there to get high and end up dying in the woods." I asked him if he had any reports of missing people in the last few months and he said no. I explained that I had left a bag on a tree to mark the spot, but he made it clear that he wasn't interested.
He had no intention of going to check it out. We drove on to Cripple Creek, and that was the end of it.
But it wasn't the end of the mystery. Almost two years later I told a friend about the incident, and he wanted to go check it out. We decide that we would go look around up in the rock formations above the site. Maybe there was a body still there, or the remains of more clothing. In any case, the first time I was there I never did hike up the mountain as I had hoped too. It was a beautiful area.
This true mystery continues here:
The Abandoned Mine