Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“I’m sorry,” Maxine said, apologizing for the intrusion as she entered room 227c of the Magical Infirmities Ward.

The man looked up, his face red and careworn with tears streaming down his face. “Hi, Sorry,” he said. “My name’s Bertrand.”

Maxine looked at the ward attendant, confused.

“Oh, ah, yes,” the attendant said, consulting their paper. “Mr. Openham was given a rather nasty curse.”

“Curse? I don’t curse, I swear!” Bertrand Openham choked out, looking both miserable and as if he wanted to punch himself in the face.

“The only witness to the stabbing has been cursed so badly he can’t say anything about it,” Maxine muttered. “Brilliant.”

“A stabbing?” Bertrand said. “Let me help you get to the point.”

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The Nuclear Theory

According to the first responders on the scene of the hikers’ demise, several of the lighter-skinned bodies appeared to be “deeply tanned,” which seemed unlikely given the weather conditions and the last observations of the victims. A rescuer with a Geiger counter also supposedly noted radiation from several of the bodies, and Cassidy Daniels’ father, a shift supervisor at the Three Rivers Nuclear Power Plant, reportedly arrived to identify her body still wearing his dosimeter, which was logged as having been exposed to significant radiation when he returned.

The ostensible culprit in this case was the same as that forwarded by other theories, namely the Utah Test and Training Range and the Dugway Proving Ground 500 miles to the south. it is now known that Dugway engineers tested a variety of radiation weapons, from dirty bombs to simulated nuclear ‘fizzles,’ before tests were officially halted in the mid-1980s. The same suspicion falls on the US Army assistance to the search, implicating them in a cleanup or coverup.

In 2007, ten years after the deaths of the hikers, a routine audit found that 1.1 kg of enriched uranium was missing from the Dugway stockpile, having been earmarked for weapons testing but apparently never expended. FOIA requests have revealed that a Dugway-registered transport plane flew over the area two weeks before the Mercer party ascended, and base records show a number of excursions to the general area.

Rigorous research has established that the transport plane was carrying specialists to Alaska, however, rather than any sort of weapon or weapon parts. The base records of excursions are also entirely for hiking and other alpine sports by US Army teams. But the biggest problem with the radiation theory is its inception.

While widely reported, no one member of the search team has ever admitted taking the radiation readings. No Geiger counter was ever located, and one was not part of the standard search and rescue kit at the time (or even today). Furthermore, several members of the group were naturally dark-skinned, meaning that rescuers with preconceived notions might well has described the bodies as ‘unnaturally tan.’

For some time, conspiracy theorists supporting this version of events have sought to have radiological tests run on the remains of the hikers, but almost all of the bodies were cremated, and the remaining two families have refused tests.

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The Nerve Gas Theory

Sagebrush Mountain is rather remote, even by the standards of the western United States. As a result, during the initial search operations, helicopters and personnel from the Utah Test and Training Range and the Dugway Proving Ground to the south assisted the Idaho State Police and local law enforcement. This, naturally, has led some to suspect that this assistance was a smokescreen to cover up US Army involvement in the incident.

Utah Test and Training Range and the Dugway Proving Ground are unique among weapons testing facilities in the USA in that they test nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, ostensibly for defensive purposes. Weapons of mass destruction have escaped the bounds of the range and proving grounds before, as in 1968 when over 6,000 sheep in Skull Valley, Utah, were inadvertently exposed to nerve gas. Nerve gasses and other toxic organophosphates could also have been responsible for the thick “sticky” fog reported by the hikers.

In this version of events, Army engineers from Dugway were either conducting a test elsewhere that inadvertently exposed the Mercer party to nerve agents, or were testing on Sagebrush Mountain itself in violation of DOD policy. The leading candidate in this case is the same agent that killed the sheep at Skull Valley, VX nerve gas. VX is an oily, relatively non-volatile, liquid in its pure state, and it persists in environments once dispersed.

Crucially, the symptoms experienced by both the deceased hikers and Cassidy Daniels are textbook cases of nerve gas exposure, and illicit tests either before or during the hike might have explained the antenna structure Daniels described. In this version of events, Carrie Mercer was taken by government agents, who also hurriedly disassembled the site under the cover of participating in the search and rescue operation. FOIA requests have also shown that Dugway was conducting a series of tests up to the week of the hikers’ demise, though the exact nature of those tests remains classified.

However, Dugway and the UTTR are located in Utah on the opposite side of the Great Salt Lake from Salt Lake City. This is hours away even by plane from Sagebrush Mountain, and the prevailing winds on the week in question were from the north. Furthermore, several amateur expeditions to the area have conducted tests for VX or other organophosphates and have found nothing. While this would not rule out an illicit test of a new nerve agent that decayed rapidly in the environment, no such agent is known to exist, and no test of any kind was known to have been conducted within 500 miles of the site.

There is also no reason why the government would have taken Carrie Mercer and not Cassidy Daniels as part of a cover-up. And if Daniels really had walked through a cloud of VX gas and survived–unlikely in and of itself–she would have exposed Smithson and his rafting party as well. Items from the Smithson expedition have been repeatedly tested for organophosphates and no such substances have ever been recorded.

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The Infrasound Theory

On the Smithson tape, Cassidy Daniels mentions sheltering in a small hut or shack attached to an antenna with Carrie Mercer. This has, for some, opened the possibility that such a transmitter close to the site of the tragedy may have been wholly or partially responsible for it.

These theories rely on research suggesting that extremely low-frequency sounds, sometimes known as infrasounds, can cause feelings of paranoia or awe as well as other unusual behavior in human beings. Some researchers have suggested that such infrasound could also result in sleeplessness, irritability, panic attacks, or even physical sickness, nausea, or vomiting. Indeed, infrasound is often raised as a possibility in explaining the Dyatlov Pass Incident, a similar mystery in the former Soviet Union.

During the Cold War, several sites in the USA and USSR hosted extremely powerful over-the-horizon radar transmitters and receivers, which have been linked in several reports to infrasound and other sorts of harmful microwave radiations. Is it not possible, then, that one such site in Utah had that effect on the hikers, perhaps also explaining the hallucinations that led Carrie Mercer to wander away and presumably die in the wilderness?

As with all the Sagebrush Mountain Incident theories, this one has several problems. First, there were never any OTH radar transmitters or receivers in Idaho; they were all built in Alaska or Maine. Second, there is no record whatsoever of any antenna or antenna-like structure on or near Sagebrush Mountain in 1997. Adherents of the theory claim that it’s plausible such an array was top-secret and left off maps, possibly even dismantled in haste after the incident. But no such structure has appeared in any contemporary satellite photographs until cell phone towers were erected in the area starting in 1999. Those did often have an associated equipment that hut, but were clearly far too late to have any effect.

While infrasound can be generated naturally from phenomena such as a Kármán vortex street caused by high winds, this is exceedingly rare and even the miserable atmospheric conditions around the mountain in September 1997 do not seem to support it.

As such, this theory also falls apart, and it raises still further questions. Where, exactly, did Cassidy Daniels and Carrie Mercer find shelter during the time between the group’s deaths and Daniels’ rescue if no such antennas or no such shacks existed? And what, if anything, does Daniels’ report of shadowy figures bearing her friend away suggest about this shelter? The official report dismisses this as a hallucination on Daniels’ part, but John Smithson himself is of the opinion that, without a temporary shelter of some kind, Daniels could not have lived long enough to find help in the state that she was found.

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The Herbology Theory

Among the effects recovered from the deceased hiking group were several bundles of roots and herbs. They were primarily Rhodiola rosea, commonly known as rose root, golden root, roseroot, Aaron’s rod, Arctic root, king’s crown, lignum rhodium, or orphan rose. There is no mention of herb collecting in any eyewitness recollections of conversations with Mercer, nor are they mentioned on the Smithson tape.

However, Patricia Mercer was a well-known devotee of herbal medicine and was an active customer at several mail-order pharmacies. Investigators found several pharmacopoeias in her home, and a field guide was among her effects at the campsite. Roseroot was listed in both sources as a good treatment for altitude sickness, depression, and a variety of other maladies.

The FDA, in the years since, has issued warnings to several manufacturers of herbal medicines for claiming health benefits for roseroot while offering the herb in dangerously high doses. This has led some to believe that Mercer had given roseroot to the group in an attempt to alleviate altitude sickness or other concerns.

Side effects of roseroot overdose or toxicity include irritability, agitation, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, increased blood pressure, and chest pain. These match fairly well with the maladies described on the Smithson tape, and increased blood pressure may lead to fatal arrhythmia or cardiac bleeding in some cases.

But this theory falls apart just as quickly as it comes together. The quantities of raw roseroot in the group’s possession were insufficient to cause any such toxicity, and no unusual polyphenols were detected in the postmortems. Furthermore, the root is very bitter when raw and needs to be prepared to make it palatable–there is no indication that this was done at any of the group’s campsites.

In fact, the presence of roseroot adds another strange wrinkle to the case–where did it come from? Roseroot is relatively rare in Idaho, which is at the southernmost extent of its range, and while it is not unheard of, the quantities found in the group’s possession far exceed any known concentration of plants in the state. A detailed examination of Patricia Mercer’s credit card records also reveals no major roseroot purchases, and the raw plant is relatively hard to find in stores even today.

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The Official Explanation

Authorities were initially at a loss to explain the deaths of so many seemingly healthy people, albeit in harsh weather conditions, and a deputy’s offhand remark that they had been killed by an “unidentified sinister force” did much to spread the story in paranormal circles. However, after autopsies and interviews, the Idaho State Police released their official explanation in late 1998 at a press conference.

According to the investigators, the trip had been delayed repeatedly from May 1997 by a variety of circumstances, causing Patricia Mercer to become frustrated. The further work she put in to get students excused from class and work for the trip led to a “sunk cost” feeling that led her to continue the hike even as conditions deteriorated. The group also initially planned to link up with another hiking group near the Trout River, one led by Patricia Mercer’s long-distance boyfriend that she had not seen in nearly a year. This, investigators believe, led her to not only continue the hike but to push her hikers harder than they were able to safely move.

Conditions had been worsening for some time, and it is believed that the final deaths took place in an unseasonably early snow flurry with below-freezing temperatures. The campsite remains suggest that it had only been partially erected when it was abandoned. Though each hiker had plentiful food, stomach content analysis indicated that they had eaten relatively little before death. Authorities believe that this was the result of Mercer keeping a stiff pace with her hikers despite the weather.

William Reznik was believed to have had a previously undiagnosed heart defect, variously called an arrhythmia or a murmur in the press, which likely led to his sudden death in the official report. Fatigued, stressed, and borderline malnourished after days of struggling in the elements, his heart simply gave out. This led the others to enter a “fugue state” of “mass hysteria,” the culmination of several days of stress and malnutrition, which led them to variously attack each other, self-mutilate, or freeze to death in a catatonic state.

As for the initial survival of Cassidy Daniels and Carrie Mercer, it is speculated that they were better-fed than the others, as Carrie was Patricia’s daughter and Cassidy was her close friend. But after escaping the scene with no food and no other supplies, authorities contend that Ms. Mercer succumbed to the elements some time later. They also blame this malnutrition and exposure for Ms. Daniels’ later death from multiple organ failure.

Criticisms of this theory abound. Patricia Mercer was known to be extremely understanding and supportive of her current and former students, far from the harsh taskmaster suggested in the official version of events. Multiple reports suggest that Mercer was actually harder in her own daughter than the others, and that Cassidy and Carrie were not particularly good friends. In fact, some accounts insist they were often seen to be rivals, with Cassidy taking on a “surrogate daughter” role that made Carrie intensely jealous.

Furthermore, the hike planned by Arthur O’Neill, Patricia Mercer’s boyfriend, had been canceled due to adverse weather the day before Mercer’s group set out. There are conflicting accounts as to weather a telephone message O’Neill left for Mercer was ever received, but those who knew her said she was fastidious in that respect.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly in the eyes of the skeptics, the weather did not turn until the hike was past its point of no return according to some available weather data. It may have been cool and foggy–the “greasy fog”mentioned by Daniels—but the weather may not have been dangerous until it was too late to turn back. The lack of good meteorological data and in-person observations on Sagebrush Mountain during the crucial period (the Trout River rafters were at a far lower altitude and shielded by trees) makes this a point of contention as well.

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The incident report from the Idaho State Police was released, heavily redacted, when the case was declared closed in summer 1999. Its official findings as to the disposition of each hiker are summarized below.

Patricia Mercer, 44
High school teacher and local mentor volunteer. Found face-up near remains of tent. Eyes and tongue missing, with other signs of scavenger predation. No obvious trauma.

Carrie Mercer, 17
Daughter of Patricia Mercer and high school senior. Remains never located. Presumed to have died from exposure after wandering away from Cassidy Daniels in the aftermath of the incident.

Cassidy Daniels, 19
Community college student who had arranged time off from class. Rescued. Died in Boise approximately one month later. Remains were disturbed several times by conspiracy theorists, and was therefore cremated in early 1999 with ashes scattered in Trout River.

Thomas Aaron, 21
One of two former Boy Scouts, a veteran of Philmont Scout Ranch hikes, and a part-time salesman at his father’s car dealership. Found some distance from the others with traumatic injuries to the face and head believed to be self-inflicted.

Jose Ramirez Jr., 22
The other former Boy Scout, and experienced Grand Canyon hiker. Unemployed at time of death, living off of a legacy from maternal grandfather. Found near the body of Shawna Blois, with blunt force trauma that seemed to indicate she had beaten him to death with a rock.

Shawna Blois, 16
The youngest hiker, a high school sophomore and amateur ballet dancer and gymnast. Found near the body of Jose Ramirez Jr. and believed to have killed him but had no visible external injuries. Eyes and tongue were missing, presumably taken by scavengers.

Marcus Washington, 20
A former football player who had dropped out of college after a career-ending injury his freshman year, working part-time as an assistant coach for the local high school. Body found in small stream near the site, face-down. Some indication of trauma to the face and hands, but the poor condition of the body made analysis difficult. Missing eyes and tongue, indicating the body had perhaps fallen into the stream after death.

William Reznik, 19
High school “super-senior” who was repeating his senior year in an attempt to graduate. In a romantic relationship with Maria Cruz, the only such relationship known among the hikers. Body was found near the tent, with no outward signs of injury. Missing eyes and tongue, presumably from scavengers. Cassidy Daniels indicated that he was the first to die and that Patricia Mercer attempted CPR.

Maria Cruz, 18
High school senior who had already been accepted as a scholarship student to Boise State University. She was found near Reznik’s body, with severe bruising on areas of her body suggestive of an intense struggle or epileptic fit. Missing eyes and tongue, presumably from scavengers.

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The Smithson Tape, recorded by whitewater rafter John Smithson in the hours following his group’s rescue of Cassidy Daniels, represents the only eyewitness account to the events of the Sagebrush Mountain Incident. Smithson recorded over several of his personal rock-and-roll tapes in an attempt to preserve Ms. Daniels’ statements, and bootleg recordings remain popular on the internet to this day.

Daniels is only semi-lucid throughout, veering between repeated requests for Smithson not to tell her mother about what had happened to detailed answers to questions about the remainder of her group. Both of these are focal points of later conspiracy theories, as Daniels’ mother, Sheila, had been dead for 10 years by 1997 and Smithson should not have known about the Sagebrush Mountain hiking group, which was not affiliated with his whitewater tour. For his part, Smithson maintains that Daniels volunteered the information unbidden.

According to Daniels’ account of events, the group led by gym and shop teacher Patricia Mercer and including her daughter Carrie Mercer, had encountered extreme weather within hours of beginning the hike. She described high winds, intermittent snow, low temperatures, and a “greasy” fog which clung to the skin of the hikers. Nevertheless, Mercer insisted they push on, albeit allowing for a slower pace with more stops.

Near the relatively low peak of Sagebrush Mountain, the group made their final camp. It was shortly after that the youngest member of the group complained of chest pains before abruptly dying, according to Daniels. This, along with frenzied attempts at CPR by Mercer, seemed to set off a chain of events that led to the deaths of most of the other hikers.

Daniels claimed that, after Mercer gave up her attempt to resuscitate the fallen student, the teacher seemed to suffer a sort of fit, foaming at the mouth and writhing uncontrollably. This was followed shortly by five of the others reaching in similarly violent ways, thrashing about, screaming, pounding their heads against nearby rocks, and even attacking one another.

In Daniels’ account, seven of the hikers were dead within a few minutes. There was no warning, and no explanation; she and Carrie Mercer survived only by fleeing into the wilderness. Daniels and the younger Mercer attempted to make for the Trout River, which they knew was relatively nearby, only to face further extreme weather conditions. They sheltered for a time in a “shack near a big radio antenna” but were constantly dogged by “dark shapes” that they could not see clearly. Mercer disappeared with these shapes, declaring that she was “going up.”

Only when the weather cleared was Daniels able to make it to the Trout River, and she lay on the bank for up to a day before rescue arrived.

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The facts of the so-called Sagebrush Mountain Incident are easy enough to establish. On September 15, 1997, a group of nine hikers set out on a trip through central Idaho, near the town of Findlay. Their route was not a marked trail, but one well-known to other groups and noted on maps and in guidebooks as a medium-difficulty ascent.

Led by a high school physical education and wood shop teacher, whose daughter was one of the hikers, the remainder of the group was all under the age of 21 and were either current or former students at Glen Creek High School, in nearby Westmont. Two of the hikers were former Boy Scouts, a third was a former Girl Scout, and all but one had extensive hiking experience in areas of similar elevation.

The group was declared overdue on September 21, a day after they should have checked in at the fire watch station near Sagebrush Mountain, and a search was launched that eventually included locals, police, forest rangers, and the Idaho Air National Guard. The area was scoured on foot and by air for two days before any trace of the hikers were found. Conditions on the ground, which included wind and snow as well as fog and rain, were described as the worst in 30 years and an unseasonably early start to winter by local standards.

Rather than being located by a search party, the sole survivor of the group, 19-year-old Cassidy Daniels, was located by a whitewater rafting group on the upper reaches of the Trout River, far off any route that the group was likely to have taken. The rafters brought Ms. Daniels to the nearest settlement they could find, and awaited a medical evacuation helicopter. During this time, the leader of the rafting party, John Smithson, used his Sony Walkman to record Daniels’ responses to questions and her rambling account of what had happened.

By the time rescue arrived, Ms. Daniels was unconscious and she never regained consciousness, dying in a Boise hospital three weeks later, officially from multiple organ failure. Based on her comments, however, rescuers were able to locate most of the remainder of the group, recovering seven bodies between October 1 and October 7–hindered by the same early and severe winter conditions that had hampered the search.

The recovered bodies were all disturbed by wild animals to some extent, which made determining the time and cause of death difficult. At inquest, the coroner recorded the causes of death as a combination of hypothermia, malnutrition, and blunt-force trauma from falls.

Those are the facts. But it is the great grey spaces between them that have raised the most questions and kept the Sagebrush Mountain Incident in the public imagination for more than twenty years afterwards.

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The great T’Sugote declared that, as the first and proudest of its creations, that they would enjoy a favored status among the peoples of creation. Thus, when the first wars broke out among the sapient peoples, the elves came and petitioned T’Sugote for aid.

A dilemma was thus presented: by giving the elves too much power, T’Sugote would give them dominion and rule over the others, which it did not wish to do. But if it did nothing, its favorite and first creations would be slaughtered.

Thus did T’Sugote decree that the elves would be the hardiest survivors of the lands, the best suited to every environment, such that they would be unable to rule outside their kingdoms but be powerful within them.

This is how the forest elves, soft and fleshy because they were surrounded by life and the living, gave rise to the stone elves, with hard skin and mineral oil coursing the rough their veins. The brine elves arose also, moving through seawater as others move through air. Wherever elves settled, they would adapt within a few generations to their new home.

One exception was cities. T’Sugote withdrew from its creations in sorrow long before the first great cities arose, so they alone had no effect on elves–only the natural world would lead to adaptations.

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