Above the Snowline — Fexingo Horror

Luna tells the story of a solo winter ascent on Deadman Spur, a remote peak in the Alaska Range, where she found a length of climbing rope that didn't belong to her. The rope led her to a series of eerie discoveries—a smashed altimeter, a single glove, and a cave that held something she still can't explain. Set in deep December, with the sun barely grazing the horizon, this episode is about the si...

On a still August night in 1993, Luna was camped alone in the Bitterroot Valley, listening to a neighbor's story by a dying fire. The woman had lived her whole life on Burnt Fork Road, and she knew every creak and whisper of the house her grandfather built. But the sound she waited for each night came from the far field, beyond the fence line—a low hum that pulled at her sleep like a lullaby. She...

A solo winter ascent of a remote Colorado peak. A boot half buried in the snow at twelve thousand feet. A name stitched inside. A story of a climber who went up but never came down. Luna pieces together what happened to a man she never met, alone on the mountain, drawn by a pull she cannot explain. A quiet, unsettling encounter with an absence that still lingers. #DeadhorsePeak #Colorado #winteras...

Luna recounts a story from a winter climbing trip in the San Juans, Colorado, in February 2018. After a whiteout forces her to bivouac on a frozen creek, she finds a woman's ice axe planted in the snow with a single blue mitten tied to the shaft. The mitten leads her to a body preserved in the ice — not a climber, but someone who was never supposed to be there. The woman's notebook reveals she was...

Luna recounts a story from a sleepless night in a small Montana town called Silverton, where a plume of smoke rising from a ridge at dusk led her to an encounter with a woman who had been waiting for a message she was never meant to receive. The smoke was not a fire. It came from a chimney that should not have existed, in a cabin that appeared and disappeared with the wind. Luna sat with this woma...

In the summer of 2018, Luna hiked into the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness with a woman named Tess, a backcountry guide who knew the trails better than anyone. They planned a simple three-day loop. But on the second afternoon, Tess stopped at a barbed-wire fence that wasn't on any map. It ran straight up a ridge and disappeared into a stand of lodgepole pines. She said she had to follow it. She said...

November 2022. Deadman Road, a dirt track that switchbacks into the Sangre de Cristo foothills outside the town of Blanca, Colorado. Luna parks her truck at the last pullout before the Forest Service gate and hikes the final mile to an old aspen grove where a woman named Lila has been living in a wall tent since October. Lila is a fire lookout who lost her tower to a lightning strike the previous...

In the summer of 2019, Luna spent a week at the Wolf Creek Pass summit house, cataloging high-altitude plant species for a university project. The pass was quiet that August — fewer tourists, thinner air, a strange absence of birds. On the third night, she started hearing a bell from somewhere down the eastern switchbacks. Not a car bell or a cowbell — an old handbell, one clear ring every hour on...

Luna recounts a night in late October 2022, when she took a solo snowshoe up Lost Creek Trail near Breckenridge, Colorado. She was following a set of boot prints that seemed to lead nowhere — and then kept going. By the time she caught up to the figure ahead, the snow had stopped falling and the silence was absolute. What she found at the end of the tracks was not a person, but something that had...

Near the old mining town of Anaconda, Montana, at the end of a dead-end county road, there's a ranger station that doesn't appear on any official map. I met a woman there last October. She had been cataloguing missing-person reports from the adjacent wilderness for twenty-seven years. Her name was Eleanor. She showed me the wall of her office—photographs, dates, last known locations, all connected...

April 2008. A woman named Margit checks into the Broken Wheel Motel in Twin Lakes, Colorado, alone. She tells the owner she's scouting a winter ascent of Mount Elbert. But she carries no map, no ice axe, no rope. And every night she walks out onto the frozen surface of Lost Man Creek. I met her on my third night in the adjacent room. She knocked on my door at two in the morning. Her boots were wet...

Luna recounts the story of a woman who took a solo winter camping trip to Deadman Flat, a remote alpine basin in the Sierra Nevada. On a moonless March night, she began to see small blue lights flickering across the snowfield. At first she thought they were other campers. Then she realized they were coming from the direction of an old avalanche path that had killed a group of climbers forty years...

Luna descends into a canyon near the ghost town of Granite, Oregon, following a dried-up creek bed where a friend's dog discovered a human hand. What she finds is not a body, but a collection — arranged with terrible care in a stone-lined pit. The bones are polished. The skulls are stacked. And someone has been watching from the rim. A slow-burn encounter with an alpine collector who has been at w...

On a clear November morning at Deadman Pass in the Gila National Forest, Luna meets a woman who has been waiting for a man who never came down. The woman knows the mountains the way most people know their own living rooms. She points to a ridge where the trees grow wrong, where the shadows fall at angles that shouldn't exist at that latitude. She tells Luna about the agreement she made with the mo...

January 1989. A record snow year in the Cascades. Luna's friend Nina took a winter caretaker job at a derelict ranger station on Snoqualmie Pass, forty feet from the highway but completely isolated when the plows stopped running. The station had a wood stove, a shortwave radio that only worked at night, and a previous caretaker who had left behind a logbook with the last entry circled in pencil: '...

In the summer of 2019, Luna spent a week alone at a high-altitude research station on Independence Pass, Colorado, monitoring snowmelt for a hydrology study. At 12,000 feet, the nights are long and silent, and she started seeing a light moving across the slope well after midnight. Not a headlamp. Not a vehicle. A single point of luminance that traced impossible lines through the talus fields. When...

Luna recalls a story from the winter of '07, high on the shoulder of Storm King Mountain in Colorado. A solo climber named Marlene checked into the same trailhead register three times in one week—each time with a different name, a different story, a different look in her eyes. Luna found her tent pitched in the same col, night after night, and learned that some people aren't running toward the sum...

Luna recounts a solo hike along California's Lost Coast Trail, where the tide schedule dictated everything. She met a woman named Elise who was hiking the same stretch but seemed to be moving on a different rhythm—stopping at odd hours, never sleeping, always watching the horizon. At first Luna thought she was just eccentric. But by the third night, she noticed Elise never left footprints in the w...

Alone on the Red Cone Ridge south of Silverton, Luna discovers a tattered topo map weighted by stones at a false summit. The map shows trails that don't exist, markings in a language she almost recognizes, and a single circled X labeled 'Campbell.' She follows the map down a drainage not on any USGS chart, through a forest of twisted bristlecone pines, to a cabin that appears in photographs but no...

In the Sierra Nevada, east of the main crest, there is a pass that doesn't appear on every map—Kearsarge Pass. In October of 2018, a woman named Nora set out alone in a late-season storm and met a man who was not lost. He had been there for forty years. The creaking of the ice, the sound of a rope tightening in the wind—I couldn't stop thinking about what she told me. This is the story of Nora and...

In the winter of 2019, a solo hiker named Elise took shelter in an abandoned Forest Service cabin on Lost Trail Pass, Montana. She thought she was alone for the night. But the cabin had other occupants — presences that watched from the dark of the loft, that whispered her name in her own voice, that knew the exact shape of her loneliness. This is the story of what happened between midnight and thr...

November 2022, a solo winter ascent of Nokhu Crags above Cameron Pass. Luna meets a woman in a yellow tent who knows too much about the storm moving in. They share tea, share silence, share the dark. By morning the tent is empty, the gear is gone, and the snow outside shows only one set of footprints — Luna's own. A quiet, slow-burn encounter about the things we find in the alpine that don't want...

January 2023. A solo winter ascent of Powder Mountain, Utah, turns strange when Luna finds a man already at the summit ridge, tending a fire in a stone ring that shouldn't exist above the treeline. He offers her coffee from a tin pot, speaks of a woman who comes to him in the whiteout, and tells her the mountain remembers everyone who has ever burned on it. By the time Luna descends, the fire is g...

In January of 2022, a solo traveler named Cassie pulled off Interstate 90 near the small town of Winton, Montana, after her Subaru's check-engine light came on. She expected a quick stop at a gas station, maybe a mechanic in the morning. What she found was a stretch of road that didn't match any map, a gas station attendant who warned her not to listen for the horn, and a sound that turned her cer...

After a whiteout on Broken Top, Luna takes refuge in a stone shelter built for emergencies. Inside, another climber is already there — a man with no gear, no pack, no memory of how he got in. He talks about the voices in the wind, about the people he left behind on the mountain, about a partner who never came down. When morning comes, the door is frozen open from the outside, and the man is gone....