scales, the largest nugget in the world held little more value than a decorative rock.
In the postwar era of Aspen’s history, 560 Spruce was reincarnated as a fly-tying shop that added the roll-up garage door to the west wall of the first floor and remodeled the assay office into a one-bedroom apartment. Later renovations and additions divided the two-story barn-style building into two apartments, one studio unit upstairs and a four-bedroom place downstairs. In the lower unit, the kitchen surrounded an afterthought of a bathroom, with two entrances into the shower, one from directly behind the kitchen sink. The garage/shop space became the living room, with the remnant roll-up door still in place. With a deck installed outside the garage door where the driveway had been, the warm weather of spring and summer brought the opportunity to roll up the wall of the living room and enjoy the sun and breeze in the house, or push one of the house’s beat-up couches onto the deck for an outdoor nap.
Friends started showing up on Monday evening, including Brad and Leah and Rachel Polver, and before the sun had set in a dazzling light show over Mount Sopris, the food from the grill-your-own potluck was gone. Rachel thought it was odd that I hadn’t shown up for a grubfest, given my seldom satisfied appetite, but Leona reassured her that I’d be back from Utah in time for the main party. As more friends and acquaintances gathered and the party rocked on into the night, music blared out the open wall, and my roommates shouted over the stereo regarding my nonappearance.
A cupful of beer in his hand, Elliott raised the question: “Hey Briguy, have you seen Aron yet? I thought he had to work tomorrow.”
“He’s probably still out on his trip. I haven’t seen him since Wednesday. Does he know about the party?” Brian asked Leona.
Leona repeated what she’d told Rachel earlier. “Yeah, when he left, he said he’d be back here for it. I told him I was leaving on Tuesday, and it’d probably be our last chance to hang out, and he said he’d be here. It’s my going- away party. He better not miss it. I’ll be pissed.”
“What time is it? If he’s real late coming back, he’s probably gonna be ready to walk in and crash.” Elliott was concerned that they’d have to tone down the party if I came home wanting to go to bed. “He’s gonna have a hard time getting to sleep with the party raging. Maybe he figured that and stopped to sleep someplace.”
“That’d be better than having to kick everybody out. It looks like this could go on a while.”
Brian was right-it did go on a while. Though he went to bed shortly before midnight, by the time Joe and Leona ushered the last partiers out to catch buses and walk home, it was well after two A.M.
However, come eight-fifteen Tuesday morning, I hadn’t shown up at the Ute Mountaineer for work. My manager, Brion After, called the house at Spruce. Leona had just woken up and was stumbling around in her room, groggy-eyed and hungover.
“Hey, Leona, it’s Brion. Is Aron there?” Brion sounded more hopeful than curious, and slightly anxious.
“What? No. Isn’t he there?” Leona was instantly awake with worry.
“No, he hasn’t come in or called. I was thinking he might be sleeping off his vacation. Is his truck there?” Leona roamed around the house with the cordless phone in her hand, peeking out through the kitchen window to see if my truck was in one of the parking spaces in front of the wood-slat fence. Knowing my habit of stuffing a vacation to the chockablocks, she thought I might have driven through the night and rolled straight to work that morning. She checked my room for any indication that I’d been there and left, but there was nothing. Something wasn’t right.
“Did he pull a Leona? Maybe he forgot his shift changed.”
Brion and Leona chuckled at her self-effacing joke. She had gained a reputation after she’d missed a shift she was supposed to cover, and then compounded the goof-up a week later when she came in to work and wasn’t even on the schedule.
“It’s possible, but he said ‘See you Tuesday’ on his way out the door. He knew today was his project day.”
“He must still be on his way home from Utah, then,” Leona said. “Maybe he’ll be there in an hour or so.”
“Maybe. I’m gonna go, but I’ll check back. When do you leave?”
“In an hour, once I get the car packed.”
“OK, call me if you see him.”
“I will. Bye.” Leona hung up and paced around with a heavy heart. She started packing her aunt Leslie’s Subaru with her belongings, readying for the drive down to Boulder, but the more full the car got, the more worried she became.
Aware that I had never been over fifteen minutes late in the past, Brion was also starting to get concerned. He went down to the sales floor around eight-thirty A.M. to talk the matter over with another employee and climber, Sam Upton. “Have you seen Aron come in yet?”
Sam looked up from organizing the trail-running shoes in the display room. “Uh, no-he’s supposed to be redoing the camping wall this morning, right?”
Ignoring Sam’s question, Brion pressed. “He hasn’t called or anything?”
Sam sensed the tension in his voice. “No. Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know. I just talked with Leona, and he wasn’t home. She said it didn’t look like he’d been there at all. It’s eight-thirty now. The only time Aron’s ever been more than a few minutes late was when he had that epic up on Pearl Pass.” Remembering the time a month earlier when I had spent the night bivouacking in a hand-dug snow pit at 12,000 feet, Brion had confidence that I would show up unless I was in serious trouble.
Understanding the implications, Sam asked, “Do you think he’s had an accident?”
“Aw, I don’t know. The only thing I know for sure is he’s not ditching work. It’s possible something bad might have happened.”
“He could be lost or hurt. But I doubt he’s lost-he’s always wearing his compass and altimeter watch, and he’s good with it,” Sam said.
“No, I know. Even if he were fifty miles out in the middle of nowhere, he could cover that in a day. It’s not a panic situation. I mean, he’s strong enough that if something happened, he’d get himself out. Anything short of a broken leg wouldn’t even slow him down. And if he broke his leg, he’d crawl back. It’d take him awhile, but he’d get out. We have to give him twenty-four hours,” Brian concluded, and Sam agreed.
Leona called in to the Ute once an hour, speaking with Brion and Paul Perley, the general manager. She recounted the last time she’d seen me, on Wednesday night almost a week before. “He had his boxes of climbing equipment out and his biking stuff. He said he was going to do some climbing, some canyoneering, and maybe some mountain biking. He was packing like ‘Oh, I should take this just in case I go biking,’ and ‘Oh, I should take this in case I want to do some climbing.’ He usually would have it all figured out ahead of time, but this time I don’t think he knew where he was going. He said he was going to Utah, to the Canyonlands area. The question is, did he make it to the desert?”
As the afternoon slipped away, Brion reiterated his decision with Paul. “We have to give him until nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Any mountaineer would want the chance to get himself out of trouble before the helicopters start flying. If he isn’t here at the start of his shift tomorrow, I’ll call his parents and get the ball rolling.”
Tuesday evening around six-thirty P.M., right after their shifts, my roommates Brian and Joe were sitting in the living room at Spruce Street, relaxing with the garage door rolled up, testing the quality of the beer left in the keg.
“Hey, what’s the story with Aron?” Joe inquired.
“He’s still gone,” Brian replied. “I think Leona called the Ute this morning. He didn’t go in to work.”
“What do you think we should do, call the cops or something?” Joe wasn’t sure that was the right thing to do, but it struck a chord with Brian.
“You know, we probably should,” he said after thinking about it for a long moment. He pulled the phone book out from under the coffee table at his feet and leafed through the pages for the number of the Aspen police department. He dialed the nonemergency number and spoke with the dispatcher after the first ring. “A friend of ours was due back from a trip last night, and he hasn’t come home, and it’s been a day. I just wanted to let you know we think he’s missing. It’s pretty low-key-we’re worried about him, but we’re not freaking out. What can we do about it?”
“We can file a missing person’s report. You said it’s been twenty-four hours?”
“Yeah, he was supposed to come back from Utah yesterday, and he missed work today.”
“What’s his name?”
Brian provided my name, age, approximate height, weight, and description to the dispatcher, who typed the
