Canyonlands Carnage: 7 (National Park Mystery Series) by Scott Graham

Author:Scott Graham [Graham, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Torrey House Press
Published: 2021-09-14T04:00:00+00:00

24

Twenty miles north of Hanksville, Janelle slowed and turned onto a graded gravel road heading east from the highway. She braked to a stop at a weathered signpost that listed the Orange Cliffs as forty miles distant and the Maze as sixty miles away. The washboarded dirt road extended in a straight line across a vast sagebrush flat.

She dropped her hands from the steering wheel. Everything she knew about backcountry travel, all of it learned in her years since trading city life in Albuquerque for mountain-town Durango, told her venturing into the Maze District of Canyonlands came with a certain amount of risk.

She’d learned while reading about the national park last night that the other two of Canyonlands’ three districts, separated by the Colorado and Green Rivers flowing through the heart of the park, were reached by paved roads. In contrast, the Maze District was accessible only by rafts floating through Cataract Canyon or by high-clearance vehicles via the dead-end dirt road stretching before her. The road into the Maze District was so rugged that only a handful of visitors ventured down it each week, and those who did were cautioned on the park website to come equipped with extensive tool kits and the ability to perform self-repairs as necessary.

Carmelita reached forward from the passenger seat and gave the dashboard a solid thwap. “We can do this, Mamá. The truck will get us there.”

Janelle hoisted her water bottle from the center console, took a swallow, and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “Bueno,” she said.

She took hold of the steering wheel with a double-fisted grip and let her foot off the brake. The truck rolled forward. The road was free of recent tracks; no other vehicles had driven down it for quite some time.

She accelerated. The highway receded in the rearview mirror. A cloud of dust rose behind the truck and was whipped away by the brisk afternoon wind.

She held the pickup at a steady thirty miles an hour, her teeth rattling as the wheels jounced over the washboards lining the road. An hour later, they passed Hans Flat Ranger Station, a small, single-story building beside the road just inside the park boundary. A white park-service pickup truck, caked with dust, was parked in front of the building.

Fifteen minutes after passing the ranger station, she pulled off the road at the scenic overlook atop the Orange Cliffs. The thousand-foot vertical escarpment of orange-red Kayenta Sandstone ran through the Maze District from north to south for dozens of miles. According to her research the previous night, this was where the road would get rough.

She and the girls climbed out of the truck. Heat rose from the sunbaked, gravel parking area, empty except for their vehicle. The wind swept over the top of the cliffs, whipping her loose hair. She gathered it in both hands and shoved it into the collar of her shirt.

A flat shelf of bare sandstone extended a hundred feet from the parking area to the unprotected edge of the escarpment.

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