Only I Know The Truth About How My Best Friend Died On Mount Shasta — Until Now

I thought the road was never going to end. Maybe it was the feet of snow that covered every inch of the ground and trees all around us which made me feel like we were driving in circles in a snow globe? Or maybe it was the altitude? Either way, I felt like I had slipped into a cold dream I couldn’t get out of and driving up a mountain road which would never lead us to anything.

“You sure this place is up here?” I asked Michael from the passenger seat. “We’ve been on this road for like 20 minutes without seeing anything.”

“Trust me, I’ve been up here like 50 times. It comes up about 10 minutes after you’ve thought you’ve gone too far,” Michael assured me from behind the wheel of his F-350.

Michael punctuated his assurance by rolling down his window halfway and spitting out the mouthful of chew which had been marinating in his gums for about 10 minutes.

I had to admit, I hadn’t been looking forward to my sledding trip with my “best friend since childhood” Michael. We used to love to go up into the mountains and go sledding when we were young, but as time went on and I grew older, I found it to simply be a cold and uncomfortable endeavor. I just couldn’t bring myself to inform Michael that. He was too excited and we never hung out anymore, so the guilt in my blood forced me to suck it up.

Michael picked me up at my parents’ house on the last Saturday morning of my winter break and the plan was to drive the two hours up to the mountains to do some sledding at this amazing snow bowl he knew of. Despite being best friends until I left for out-of-state college 2.5 years before, Michael and I hadn’t seen each other once during my break because he was working out-of-state himself. He made a special trip back to make sure we didn’t completely miss out on each other.

The past few years had been difficult with Michael. We grew up best friends, damn near inseparable from age five, in our small town in Northern California, but we started on completely different paths around the age of 17. I embarked on a year-long serious college application process which eventually landed me at the University of Washington and Michael doubled-down on working for his dad’s logging company which would keep him in our hometown. We never discussed it (though I was fairly sure) that our forked paths would affect our friendship.

My expectations were sadly fulfilled once I headed off to Seattle and Michael stayed in town. We hung out a lot on winter, spring, and summer breaks at first, but then things got a lot harder. I started coming home less. Michael started getting sent off to jobs in Alaska and Wyoming. I stopped drinking for the most part and sadly that was Michael’s favorite pastime and our partying together was actually was our strongest binder in high school.

I broke my usual abstinence from booze by accepting a couple pulls of Fireball which Michael offered me on the way up and thoroughly regretted it. All it made me do is feel like I wanted to puke for the past hour or so. Combined with the stiff coffee already in my system it made me need to evacuate my bowels and bladder.

I had been thinking about asking Michael to pull over for about 20 minutes so I could relieve myself but held back. However, the approaching image of a little wooden shack on the side of the road coaxed a suggestion out of me.

“That looks like it might be a bathroom. Can we stop and check it out?” I asked.

I heard Michael grumble.

Part of the growing disconnect between us was Michael’s rapid evolution into a rugged mountain man who somehow could drink nothing but whiskey and beer, barely sleep, chew copious amounts of Copenhagen, work 16 hours a day, only eat when he was drunk, and never complain. At the same time, my small-time charm and modesty was quickly being eroded by my urbane and academic environment up in Seattle. I was feeling less and less comfortable in places like our hometown of less than 5,000 people and guys like Michael.

I could tell it bothered Michael, but he slowly pulled the truck over to the thick snow on the side of the road next to the bathroom shack.

“Don’t wet your panties,” Michael snorted before I jumped out of his lifted truck and down into the thick snow.

I hated that kind of “too tough to piss” shit Michael flipped at me. It was one of the reasons I had to leave our town. It drove me crazy. Why did he feel like he had to act like he was too tough to be a human being? Why did he have to literally call me out about it? I fumed all the way to the little wooden shack on the side of the road with the frigid cold rapidly seeping through the oversized snow gear I had to borrow from my dad.

The building was indeed a bathroom and I couldn’t have been more relieved to discover it was unlocked. Having lived in Seattle for the bulk of the past few years, discovering an unlocked bathroom felt like winning the lottery and an unlocked bathroom that wasn’t smeared with shit and strewn with used needles and used condoms was like winning the Mega Millions.

My whole body burned with unfiltered cold when I pulled down my snow pants, long underwear and regular underwear and sat down on the open hole, outhouse style toilet. This was definitely the most uncomfortable and vulnerable I had been in quite some time. The bathroom door didn’t lock and I dreaded Michael bursting in to throw a snowball at me or take a picture with his phone.

I figured I would distract myself with my phone. I doubted I would have service halfway up Mount Shasta, but could just skim through my pictures or old texts from girls or something and go over our interactions for the millionth time trying to figure out where I went wrong.

I gave a hard blink when I woke up my phone to see an unfamiliar image serving as the backdrop to my apps. Instead of the Seattle skyline beaming on a sunny day, my apps were flanked by a dead deer and a rifle. I must have accidently grabbed Michael’s phone instead of mine. They were both sitting in the cupholders and were an identical iPhone 6s.

My initial reaction was to tuck the phone back into my pocket and just ride out the outhouse storm with my own imagination and patience. My secondary reaction was to entertain myself by skimming through Michael’s photos and texts. I had a morbid curiosity to see if he was talking shit about me and a morbid interest in seeing the kind of things he might take pictures of.

I caught the phone before it went back to sleep and would have asked for a password. I was in as long as I could keep the phone awake and judging on my body flow and my perception of Michael’s patience. I probably had between five and 10 minutes to do my investigation.

The texts were my first target. I really wanted to know what Michael may have thought or had been saying about me, particularly with his girlfriend Darcy.

The about first three feet of texts were worthless. Just general banter, planning and meme sharing. They were so dull, I almost thought about giving up on the whole thing.

I just started quick skimming until I saw a name or word flash on the screen which was of interest.

I stopped after a few scrolls up when I saw my name, Aaron, pop up on the screen.

Darcy: Okay with Aaron?

The message seemed innocent enough, but still forced me to hold my breath as I read Michael’s answer.

Michael: What do you think?

Mysterious answer to a mysterious question. Great. Michael was not prone to sarcasm or wit. He was one of those simply serious people who were fast becoming a dying breed in America.

Darcy: Don’t play around on this

My pulse started to rise. The seriousness of their conversation was off. This did not seem like a conversation about going sledding.

Michael: I’m not playing

Darcy: That’s what I’m scared of

The conversation about me ended. I scanned back as far as I could, but couldn’t find anything more about myself. A few minutes into the skimming, I realized I needed to make my next move, because my time was running out and there was no lock on the bathroom door. Michael could burst through the door at any moment.

I flicked through some more text message contacts, but none of them seemed like they would be of much interest. I figured I would switch to photos.

I felt the sand in the hourglass in my head running out. I had to move fast. I flew through endless thumbnails of dead animals, construction sites and blurry photos from country concerts and Raiders games. No use to me.

An intriguing thumbnail made me stop my sifting though. I had flicked through some pictures which looked to contain gore, but they were all pretty clearly of deer from hunting trips. This picture was similar, yet different at the same time. I clicked on it.

The picture made me want to vomit. The grainy image looked to be a mess of a bludgeoned face beaten beyond recognition connected to a neck bathed in blood, it reminded me of the images of Nicole Brown Simpson’s body you can find on the Internet.

I couldn’t breathe. I was out of time before I was sure Michael would come to the door, but I was also staring at what looked to be a candid shot of a dead body directly after reading some ominous texts between Michael and the woman who had the power to blow up all of our lives.

At this point I need to admit something that might make me look like a questionable person.

I am not a completely innocent person in this troubling situation and I had good reason to be hesitant to accept Michael’s invitation to go sledding in the mountains. I had a history with Michael’s girlfriend, Darcy, and the relationship between us was complicated.

Darcy and I went way back. Michael didn’t know that, but we did. We met when I was 15 and camping with my parents near Lake Tahoe. The two of us were bored out of our minds while being forced to take part in a ranger-led tour of a trail with our parents and a few other dorky families.

Darcy and I made eyes throughout the presentation, both snickering about the absurdity of a grown man showing our grown parents pine cones and pine needles as if they were the most-interesting thing in the world. We started chatting over the dry turkey sandwiches the tour provided and exchanged camping site information.

I told Darcy to swing by my family’s campsite that night thinking it would never happen, but she showed. We snuck off into the night and eventually ended up stealing beer from her parents’ cooler, going to the lake, swimming in the moonlight, telling each other about our lives and realizing we had a ton in common. We snuck off to meet each other the next couple of nights while both of our families were still camping and eventually made our way into her tent to lose our virginity together on our last night together while her parents were away at a movie at the ranger station.

It was magical. I remember Darcy kept telling me the whole thing was a little like The Notebook. She already texted all her friends about our fling as soon as it happened and she said they were infinitely jealous.

Even as a jaded 15-year-old guy from the country, I was pretty lovestruck and heartbroken when we had to split and she headed back to the suburbs of Reno, more than three hours from our hometown, almost a calendar year before either of us would get a driver’s license or car. I even stereotypically shed some tears as we drove away in my parents’ van to head back home.

We exchanged numbers and texted back and forth for a long time, talked on the phone sometimes, made plans to meet up in Tahoe as soon as one of us had a license and a car, but it eventually fizzled out. Both of us started high school. Started relationships where we saw our partner every day and eventually kind of forgot about each other. I had lost her number by the time I got my license and first car.

Other than a couple of times on nights when I came home alone drunk and my nostalgic curiosity sent me on Facebook wild goose chases where I searched for her profile only to find nothing (fuck private profiles by the way), I never really thought about her. I assumed she never thought about me as well.

Then utter insanity broke out.

I had one drunk dial conversation with Michael throughout my entire first Fall semester this year and on it, he mentioned a new girlfriend he had moved in with from Nevada, but I thought nothing of it. He didn’t even mention a name. I was mostly just shocked he mentioned the girlfriend. Guys like Michael will get engaged to a girl and not even tell their best friends about it until they have to invite them to the wedding.

I showed up at a party back home on the drunken yearly reunion that is the night before Thanksgiving on my first year of college, excited to meet Michael’s new girlfriend and was dumbfounded to lay my eyes on Darcy. A few years older, more filled out, more mature. We locked eyes, both speechless for a few seconds, before we could even shake hands.

Luckily Michael eventually became distracted by a drinking game and Darcy and I were able to catch up and get the scoop on each other. It turned out she had moved to our area to attend Shasta College so she could try and later get into a university in the state of California. She’d met Michael at the local gym which was about 25 minutes from our actual hometown (Michael went there because the “talent” was better). She and Michael hit it off immediately and had been dating for a few months. She moved out of the dorms and into Michael’s rental house the week before Thanksgiving. She had about the same high school story as me, had a serious boyfriend pretty much the whole time, thought about me from time to time, but not too much until she saw me. She didn’t even think anything of it whenever Michael mentioned a friend named “Aaron.”

But there we were, Darcy and I, sipping cheap beer at a hometown high school/college party in the place where I was born and raised, watching my first love periodically make out with my best friend while acting like the two of us had never met before. I tried to fight it, but there was a dull, aching pain in my heart that entire night, the whole Thanksgiving break and for weeks once I got back to Seattle for the rest of Fall quarter.

That dull ache didn’t go away. I couldn’t stop thinking about Darcy. I would stay awake at night thinking about her sharing her life with Michael. Sleeping together every night. Waking up in the morning naked together in his bed. Going to the grocery store together. Her riding in the middle seat of his truck. That stuff was enough to make me sick without even thinking about the sex. That was too much. Fuck.

Darcy became a hangnail on my heart that just wouldn’t heal. I spent months losing sleep, growing more and more scornful of Michael and more and more lustful of Darcy.

My grades started to slip because I think I directed so much of my focus to Darcy. I couldn’t wait for summer to come so I could go home and just be around her. My relationship with Michael had fractured just based on our splintered lifestyles, but I was going to pick the pieces back together for the sick, selfish reason of getting closer to his girlfriend.

I was able to piece my friendship with Michael back together pretty easily. He was 19 with his own house in our hometown. All I really had to do was show up with an 18-pack of Coors Light every Friday and then spend every weekend over there.

I eased into broaching our past with Darcy whenever Michael wasn’t around. I would wait until Michael was distracted by an A’s game on TV, telling fishing stories with one of this newfound redneck buddies whom we wouldn’t have hung out with in high school, or distracted with being passed out because of too many drinks.

It was around the Fourth of July when I finally was able to dig into everything with Darcy. We were both drunk enough off a pink vodka drink scooped from a watermelon and Michael was passed out before the sun went down. We ended up sitting around the fire pit, getting nostalgic and inching closer and closer to each other as the night burned on.

I breathed easier once Darcy confirmed Michael had no idea about our past, but my breath became hurried when Darcy confirmed she thought about that fling all the time and had been wondering if she should tell Michael about it or break it off with him. She felt selfish about the entire situation and not being forthcoming with the man she thought might ask her to get married in the next year or so.

Darcy didn’t appreciate it when I laughed about her thoughts of marriage to my 19-year-old friend who could barely manage a C average in high school who was “training to become an MMA fighter.” She also didn’t seem to appreciate it when I made her swear up and down that she would NOT tell Michael a single thing about us.

Darcy promised that night by the fire, but I never 100 percent believed her. She seemed weak. Especially when drunk. I was sure she would spill the beans at some point. I kind of just hoped they would break up before it happened.

Of course, Darcy and Michael didn’t break up. They only seemed to get closer and I only seemed to get more jealous in my online enclave up in Seattle. I started to come undone. I got drunk one night and found Darcy’s school email online. I pulled up an email and spilled my guts. I sent the thing at four in the morning like a fucking idiot. I put the noose around my own neck and stood on a stool I hoped Michael wouldn’t eventually kick out from under me.

Months went by and nothing. Maybe Darcy never checked her school email? Maybe it ended up in her spam folder? Maybe she saw it and deleted it so Michael would never find it? Maybe she read it, shared it with Michael and they laughed at me together in bed every night as they read through my heart-spilling manifesto – each time picking out their favorite parts and reading them aloud in between fits of laughter.

Whatever, it didn’t matter. I needed to deal with the matter at hand. I finished up my business on the toilet and scanned more pictures in Michael’s phone.

I was a few scans deeper back into his photo history when I saw what I thought was a screenshot of my infamous email. I went to press into it when I heard an authoritarian knock on the door.

“Dude, you shitting out The Incredible Hulk or something in there bro?” Michael’s manly voice boomed through the door and brought me back to the current, cold situation. “I think you have my phone.”

I threw the phone into my pocket as fast as I could and pulled up my pants.

“Nah, I’m done man. Just too much coffee, ya know?”

I got up off my seat and walked over to the door just as Michael started to open it up. We locked eyes as I winced against the sunlight which seemed to be amplified by our snowy world.

“Good man. I was worried you were yardin on it in there,” Michael punctuated his joke with a hard slap on my back.

“Here’s your phone,” I muttered when I handed Michael his phone back and he chuckled stupidly all the way back to the truck.

Back in the truck, I mostly became just upset with myself for putting myself in the situation I was in. I wanted to just ask Michael about the picture, ask about my situation with Darcy, the email I sent her, but alas, I was a pussy. I clammed up and let Michael start into some inane, general male banter as we roared up the rest of the mountain.

“You aren’t becoming a Seahawks fan up there, are you?” Michael answered his own question with a laugh and then went on. “I swear, if the Raiders move to Vegas, it’s just another reason for Darc and me to move there. Been thinking about it.”

I gave a slight courtesy laugh and stared blankly out at the endless snow in front of us. I watched a couple dark objects in the snow start to take shape by the side of the road just about 10 yards ahead of us.

“I knew it was right up here,” Michael announced our arrival to a bluff which looked over a steep hill of smoothed snow which now sat to our right.

Michael had been telling the truth. A sizable, but empty snow bowl which was perfect for sledding rested next to us. The two dark objects I spotted earlier seemed to serve as markers for the course.

Michael slowed the car to a stop in front of the dark objects and killed the engine.

“We’re here,” Michael announced before he jumped out of the driver’s side door.

I took a deep breath and looked over at the ignition. Michael had taken the keys out. Besides, I couldn’t drive a stick anyways. I took another deep breath and looked out the windshield.

The image of Michael holding a rifle appeared before my eyes. I flinched, blinked hard and then focused again to take it all in. I watched Michael pull the rifle up to his shoulder, steady himself and then fire out at the valley below. One of the items sticking out of the snow and waiting for us must have been a loaded shotgun, I thought to myself.

It was all happening. Michael brought me up there to kill me. He had left the gun and whatever else had been waiting for us up in the snow like some kind of “kill kit,” I had read about some Alaskan serial killer guy who had done something similar. He knew about Darcy and I in the past and my email. I was fucked.

I watched Michael laugh, stare out at the valley for a few moments and then reach into his jacket pocket and take out his phone.

Oh shit. He was going to see I was looking at his photos. I grabbed hold of the door handle and timidly opened it up, let the freezing cold in.

I dropped down out of the truck and faced a smiling Michael.

“Look Michael. I know what you are going to do. I’m sorry. I saw the photo of the person on your phone.”

Michael’s enthusiastic smile melted away into utter confusion.

“What picture?” Michael fired back with the rifle still gripped in his right hand, the weapon dangling off to his side.

“The bloody, MURDERED, face,” I screamed hysterically.

Michael’s serious face cracked into a hanging-jaw look of disbelief.

“Darcy’s fucking Halloween costume. She was O.J.’s ex-wife because we were obsessed with the shitty FX show.”

I put my arms out in a kind of half surrender and started in again…

“Michael, I…

My frenzied mind didn’t let me buy it. I felt this was instead my brief window to save my life. I surely had a few minutes to plead my case with Michael before he officially went after me. We were best friends since age five, after all.

Michael slowly tilted the rifle in my direction. I froze up.

“NO!”

I ran at Michael. Figured getting to him before he shot was my only hope.

It didn’t work. The gun went off, but the shot went over my head, blowing out my ears just before I reached my old friend.

“What the fuck?” Michael screamed out as I tackled him into the snow. “Aaron…

Michael and I fell to the slick ground and started wrestling over the rifle. The element of surprise gave me a shot in the fight as Michael couldn’t get his bearings and fell underneath me. Once underneath me, Michael became a human sled as we started to slide down the sledding hill.

“We were fifteen,” I yelled down at Michael as we slid further down the hill, my hand clenched around the trigger section of the rifle. “Nothing happened since then. You shot at me.”

“I shot at a deer behind you,” Michael squirted the sentence out just before we reached the bottom of the slope.

“What?” I asked as we came to a stop.

“And I know about Darcy. I don’t care man. I was gonna tell you.”

My world was spinning. Maybe it was the mix of the booze, fatigue and altitude? I kept my grip on the rifle tight, its barrel pointed right at the black stubble on Michael’s neck.

“But there was a picture of a dead face on your phone?” I yelled.

“Darcy’s Halloween costume dude?”

Things started to add up in my head, but not my body. My hands stayed tensed on the rifle.

“Calm the fuck…

Michael tried to move out from under me as he spoke, but the strength of his shift pulled back my hand, pinned my finger between his forearm and the trigger of the rifle.

“It’s okay,” were the last two words I heard come out of Michael’s mouth before the rifle went off.

I jumped up in shock. I stood above Michael with my eyes stuck to his. Our horrifying staredown in the snow was interrupted by what sounded like a trickling stream running at my feet.

I looked at my boots and saw a horrifying creek of blood pouring out from Michael’s neck and onto the snow next to him. Even I could tell it was a mortal wound and he may have already lost his grip on the world. The life appeared to be gone from his face.

Michael would never be able to further explain our grave misunderstanding. I stood there numbly staring down at my dead friend until a heavy snow began to fall and started to cover up his face.

What came next is what I need to get off my chest.

The sledding slopes around Mount Shasta were a death trap. Everyone knew that. Not a winter ever went by when there wasn’t a mention of some dumb kid who went up to the mountains and fell or drove off a cliff and died.

I decided Michael would be one of those dumb kids this year. There was no way I could explain what actually happened and go on living my promising life. I would likely face serious jail time, or at least serious public scorn if I fessed up about the accidental shooting.

I quickly planned it out. The daredevil that was Michael decided he wanted to take on Hangman’s Slide, an incredibly dangerous sledding and snowboarding path on the eastern slope of the mountain which was responsible for about half of the deaths which took place on Shasta. Michael had gone too far and slid off the side of the mountain.

The morbid and most-convenient aspect of my excuse was the mountainside below Hangman’s Slide was so treacherous, rescue teams rarely even tried to go there to retrieve bodies, unless there was some kind of serious investigation. With my impeccable police record and history as Michael’s best friend, I was certain they would never go through with that, and if they did, it wouldn’t be until Summer.

The physical execution wasn’t too hard. I drove Michael’s truck up to Hangman’s Slide, put his body in his sled and pushed him away. Without living movement to maneuver the path’s first curve, Michael went straight and right off the edge.

I kept only one thing with me from Michael when I went back to the truck. A note had fallen out of the pocket of his jacket when I carried him up the hill from the valley where I shot him.

The emotions of the ordeal and loss were already stirring within me when I sat down behind the wheel of Michael’s truck and started reading the note. The tears started pouring out of me once I dove in.

Aaron,

I’m not good with words like you, but I need to tell you something. First, look, I know all about you and Darcy when you two were 15 and I don’t care. I love the girl and I am glad her first time was with someone nice, not some douchebag. I also heard about your email to her and we are okay on that. I get it and you were drunk. I can understand with how things happened when you two were 15 how you still might feel that way at least a little bit. I’m not mad.

The thing is though, you’re my best fucking friend since we were five. I know we haven’t been close, but I miss you and we need to change that. I bought a ticket to come up to Seattle for Super Bowl weekend and a few days the week after. We WILL be best friends again. I’m sorry we slipped away.

I just want to get it all out there and let you know that I love you man! Just like the old beer commercials!

My heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I wanted to vomit. Fought back the urge.

I went up into the snow and mountains terrified of Michael. Nervous, uneased and shaky about the violent capabilities of the large, testosterone-gorged, rural and rugged, alpha, American male, but it was me who was the one to be afraid of. The neurotic, nervous, mouse of a beta boy had allowed his fear and nerves to turn him into the actual bad guy. It was the gut check of all gut checks for me.

I fought mightily to keep my emotions in check as I drove down the mountain until I reached civilization, and cell phone service.

I slipped up a couple of times and had to pull over and weep, but quickly realized that I should actually save some of that for when I made the dreaded 911 call to report the “accident.” I had to be on point.

The tears came when I made the fateful 911 call. They came again when I told the police in-person. Again when I told my parents and again when I told the first handful of friends I discussed it with.

No one ever seemed to doubt my story. They almost always just returned it with a story of their own about Michael doing something crazy that should have killed him. Even his family. It has been almost a year and I haven’t fielded a single remotely scrutinizing question. Not even from Darcy.

I considered telling someone the truth a few times. I thought about explaining the accident. Maybe I would tell a close family member who would never tell, just so I could get the weight off of my chest.

But no. I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t do that because of Darcy.

It happened slowly. Darcy and I spent a lot of time together in the events that followed Michael’s death – the memorials, the parties, the funeral, the grave visits. We couldn’t help it. We fell into a relationship over the course of the past year.

It truly wasn’t my intention. I swear. I even fought it off at first, but had to give in.

Sorry Michael.