Twenty-five. That is the number of people who have gone missing at the park since the beginning of the year, with nothing being done or said about it. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ll lose my job when they find this posting, but, I have other things to be scared of at this point, and this needs to get out.

I’m a wilderness ranger at Mt. Rainier. My job is to walk the hundreds of miles of trail and wilderness in the park looking for problems and helping lost and injured hikers. In the old days, any lost hiker would mean all of us going out together, putting together a search plan, and doing our best to get them home safely. Things are different today, ever since the start of 2022.

Whenever a person gets reported as missing the family is assured we are on it and will do our best to find them, and promised that they will dispatch us to look. As soon as the family is gone our bosses tell us that they’ll have a search and rescue company take over, and if we know what’s best for our jobs we should just focus on checking trail conditions and doing the rest of our jobs.

And so it’s gone on since 2022. At first, there were just a few people missing here and there all over the park. It didn’t seem that unusual other than our rangers not being involved in the search, but we figured it was some new policy and shrugged it off. More people started disappearing as the year went on, making all of us wonder what was going on, and why it had been made clear to us we should keep our mouths shut.

Personally, I figured it was just a combination of bad trail conditions from a rough winter, an influx of inexperienced hikers, and the park service trying to avoid looking bad when we needed more funding.

Until last Thursday.

It was an overcast day and I was walking along the trail up to Ipsut Pass in the Carbon River area, humming quietly to myself to pass the time and wondering how far up I would go before I had to put on crampons, when I saw it. Off to the side of the trail, maybe 50 ft into the forest, there was an odd light on the forest floor.

At first, I thought the light was just a reflection off of water or some trash someone had left, but as I moved closer, the light didn’t fade or change, it just stayed steady. Maybe it was a lost flashlight? I had walked this trail dozens of times, and never noticed it before.

I knelt down, taking my pack off, and saw that the light seemed to be coming from just under the dirt. For some reason I felt uneasy. I looked around to see if anyone else was nearby on the trail, and saw no one. Shrugging, I reached into the dirt to poke at the light and see what it was.

Poking around, I found the corner of a slightly open trap door that was at most only a foot wide on each side. It was camouflaged nearly perfectly. If it had not been left just barely ajar with the light exposed, there is no way anyone would have seen it from the trail.

I kept opening it, feeling uneasy, but hoping it was some sort of buried seismometer, or at worst maybe some hiker’s idea of a good place to cache food and water for a long trek. Instead, I found the opening to what appeared to be a small burrow of sorts with an electric camping torch at the corner. I shoved my head down to look inside

The space was small, with enough room for one person if they didn’t mind contorting themselves. On the walls of the burrow were dozens of polaroid photos of people hiking. All of the photos seemed to have been taken very low to the ground. The photos were from all over the park, many dozens or more miles apart. Most of the photos I didn’t recognize, but among them I saw a few that I knew for a fact were hikers that had gone missing over the last year.

Then my heart stopped. I saw a photo of me hiking along the Ipsut Pass trail, around a half hour ago.

CRACK

I heard a twig snap somewhere around me. I took my head out of the burrow, and started running down the trail the way I came. I didn’t look back or stop until I got to the wilderness cabin near Ipsut Campground. I locked and barricaded the door, and waited until another ranger showed up the next morning, not sleeping a wink. I asked him to walk back along the Ipsut Pass trail with me. He was annoyed that I wouldn’t say why but agreed. We spent an hour looking, but couldn’t find any sign of the burrow.

I asked for some time off right afterwards, and my manager seemed very suspicious and demanded to know why. I made up some excuse about my family, and didn’t tell him or anyone else what I saw. For some reason, I knew that telling them would at best end with me losing my job.

I don’t know who or what made that burrow, but I think it’s taking people at Rainier, and for some reason the government is covering it up.

I wish that was the end of the story. But it’s not.

This afternoon, I saw something glinting from within the air vent on the floor of my kitchen. I thought maybe my cat had stuck another toy in it. I took the grating off the vent to take the toy out. Instead of a cat toy, I found a polaroid photo, taken low to the ground, of me making breakfast this morning.