A Strange Thing Happened...

✯

The following story is the recollection of an event that happened to me during a camping trip in 1986, when I was a student in college. A few of us Texas Tech Anthropology classmates would often take field trips to New Mexico to explore, camp, and learn more about history and Native culture in the Land of Enchantment.

It was late summer, the weekend after Labor Day. The fall semester had just begun and we decided to skip out on a Friday afternoon and make the 5 hour drive from Lubbock to Santa Fe. Our destination was a primitive campground named Iron Gate, located at the end of a dirt road northeast of Santa Fe in the Santa Fe National Forest, bordering on the Pecos Wilderness Area.

We arrived late in the afternoon and found we had the place to ourselves, so we set up camp and settled in around the campfire for the evening. The next morning was relaxed and we just hung around cooking and visiting. Later on, an afternoon thunderstorm rolled through, so we retreated to our tents until it passed and the sun came out again.

As everyone was sitting around visiting, I had the urge to get away and follow the trail out into the woods. I was hiking alone... completely sober, not stoned, not drinking. The trail leaving the campground meanders east, uphill through aspen, pine and spruce forests. There was a cool freshness to the air, and I was just walking along enjoying the scenery and the smells and sounds of the forest.

When I got about a half mile from camp, I noticed things began to become different. It suddenly got very quiet, the lighting seemed to change, the surroundings became a bit fuzzy, and the shadows became starker. There was an eery stillness, and I began to feel like I was being watched and lured farther down the trail... enchanted, or sort of like being in a trance.

In a moment, the hair on the back of my neck stood up, I felt a shiver, followed by a sense of urgency and a voice telling me to turn around immediately and go back. As I was walking back to the campsite, the breeze returned, I could hear birds again, and things returned to normal. I didn't think too much of the experience at the time. I just chalked it all up to the fact that maybe my head was playing tricks on me, and it was getting late in the afternoon so I needed to get back to the campground. I wasn't afraid. I had been on solo trips before and had gone through survival training in Wyoming a few years earlier, and I simply forgot about the whole thing, returned to my friends at camp and had a good time.

But now, years later as I think back, and after hearing and researching stories of missing people, Sasquatch, portals, and other unexplained wilderness phenomena, I believe I was walking into a trap of some sort. I've since discovered that others have disappeared in that same general area, in the wilderness outside Santa Fe.

Are there parallel dimensions and some actual truth to the old forest fairy tales we hear as children? I only know that I will probably never go hiking alone in the woods again.