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Climbers spend lots of time outside at strange and scary places with names like Devil’s Lake, Devil’s Den, Ghost River Valley, Witch’s Canyon, and Spook Canyon. Some live up to their name with odd events randomly occurring. Of course, climbers die out there on mountains and cliffs and a tortured few probably haunt the site of their demise, their spirits bound to the earth with climbing rope, chains of slings, and clanking nuts.
I’ve had a few bizarre encounters at climbing areas—devil winds in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, a UFO sighting near Hueco Tanks, a spirit watcher at a remote rock art site in the northwest sector of Grand Canyon National Park, and an eerie encounter in Penitente Canyon in southern Colorado.
Camping alone in early November in 1992 at Penitente, I waited to meet up with a couple of friends to climb the next day. I was the only person at the primitive campground, which was then located at the canyon mouth.
That evening after sunset, I walked up the canyon trail to a painting of the Virgin Mary forty feet above the ground and scrambled onto a high sloping boulder below it. I sat for a long time watching the painting in the faint glint of light from a crescent moon hanging above the western canyon rim. After the moon set, I began to climb down the boulder but stopped when I heard a distant shrill cry, like a wounded animal. Immediately the hair on the nape of my neck stood on end and gooseflesh shivered my arm. Thickets of scrub oak up canyon began shaking, like a large animal was pushing through them. I stood still and unmoving, senses full alert in the inky darkness. The movement stopped and the world was still and silent again.
Suddenly a gusty wind rushed down the canyon and what felt like a cold hand grasped my shoulder. I twisted and jumped from the boulder and fled down the trail. Not stopping. Not looking back. At the campsite, I opened my truck, climbed inside, and locked the door. The wind shook the truck, lecherously rocking it back and forth. An hour later the gale briefly subsided, so I slowly crept from the truck to grab my sleeping bag in the tent. I locked myself back in the cab and slept fitfully until daybreak.
Penitente Canyon, a popular sport climbing area on the western edge of the broad San Luis Valley, an intermontane basin the size of Connecticut, was the home for millennia of early paleo-hunters. These early Native Americans lived along the edge of what was once a huge lake, hunting plentiful game and catching fish. Evidence of their passage remains in projectile points and buried charcoal from ancient campfires. They undoubtedly considered the canyon, with its strange rock shapes, to be a sacred place.
In the nineteenth century a group of Los Hermanos de Penitente, a Catholic sect that does self-flagellation, or whipping and a mock crucifixion of a member every Easter, established a morada, or meeting house, in the canyon. On one clean cliff a brother, suspended in a car tire, painted the Madonna of the canyon, the Virgin of Guadalupe. The San Luis Valley itself is renowned as one of Colorado’s most haunted places, with glimpses of ghostly cowboys seen on sagebrush plains, bizarre and unexplained cattle mutilations, and regular UFO and Bigfoot sightings.