The Last Moonset

His girlfriend stood next to me wearing a tight camouflage T-shirt that read “Pornstar” in glitter paint across her chest.

After Meat’s ancestral proclamation she punched my arm and yelled into my face, “He really is, you know. You better respect it.”

“Respect what?” I asked.

Pornstar rolled her eyes. “Athabascan. You know, we’re all descendants of Athabascan. Even Jesus was.”

Fern, whom I hadn’t seen since she invited us into the party, walked up with a plastic bag and pulled out a dead trout the length of my arm, saying, “Larry caught it for me.”

“I’d love to catch one of those,” I said.

“Larry!” she screamed. “Take this boy fishing!”

Larry was the son of a famous Alaskan bush pilot, but he turned out to be a bit more peculiar than his charismatic father, with a flat, medicated affect and an odd facial tick that rang of instability. Larry sped over from the other side of the fire on his ATV, clinching a basset-hound puppy by the neck as he rounded the giant log. He grabbed my arm, pulled me aboard and sped down the riverbank to his fishing hole. We didn’t catch any fish, but his dog, Hershey Bar, fell in the icy river twice.

Around 3 a.m. the town’s kindergarten teacher jumped on a log and yelled, “It’s happening!” Everyone by the fire cheered and ran down by the river. We followed. The gang stopped in a clearing and stared into the southwestern sky. The moon was enormous, a rich amber hue, hung up in the trees south of town. Everyone stood in silence, even Meat, as the moon sunk below the horizon for the last time this spring. It wouldn’t rise again until autumn.

We stayed by the river until sunrise. As the outline of the Alaska Range emerged on the horizon I stared at Mount Foraker. It was Sue and Karen’s third day on the Infinite Spur. My eyes shifted to Denali. A lenticular cloud was building over its summit. In the days to come, a storm packed with hurricane-force winds would envelop both peaks.

A week later I was back at work.

My wife, Carolyn, called my cell phone.

“Brian, did you hear about Sue Nott and her partner? They’re missing on a mountain in Alaska. Didn’t you just see them up there?”

I scrambled to contact friends from Denali’s National Park Service patrol, guides and local climbers, trying to find out what happened. I read about findings—boot tracks high on Foraker, the recovery of a pack from the base of the route—and the belief that the women surmounted the technical section of their route but were hit just below the summit by winds estimated to be in excess of 100 mph. (The loss of the pack and the women’s disappearance appear to have occurred separately.) Over the next week I followed the ongoing search very closely. The more I dug for new information or promising findings, the more I realized that although there were theories, the incident may always remain a tragic mystery.

Sitting at my tiny desk, I drifted between idyllic memories of my expedition and images of Sue’s pink jacket. Occasionally I’d stumble onto a website that had a photo of Sue, grinning widely, wearing it, or an aerial photo that showed the jacket atop an avalanche-debris pile at the base of the Infinite Spur. Every time I saw a photo of that jacket I felt a lump in my throat. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.

I remember telling Sue, that night in her giant tent, that my wife would be jealous of her pink jacket.

I vividly recall the bounding metronome of my pulse in my temples as we plodded up the glacier. The sensation of swinging into Denali’s cold, brittle ice. The deafening roar and bitter aerosolized snow-filled wind gusts of Hunter’s avalanches that poured up and over Radio Control Tower. And the charm of Sue Nott’s giggle over a Kool-Aid cocktail as she relaxed against a bright orange tent wall while the sun slipped behind the ridgeline and the coldness of the mountains rose from the valley.

Brian Irwin is a family physician from North Conway, New Hampshire. This was his first trip to Alaska.