When the rescuers entered the crevice, no one was prepared for what they would see there.

An empty oval-shaped depression in the rock, as if made on purpose.

At the bottom were dozens of bones, small ones, and one fragment of a human hand without the forearm, just a finger.

It was later confirmed that it was Abby Mareno’s finger.

Everything else was gone.

But in those same mountains, they began to find something else.

Something that is not found in any reference book on the fauna of Colorado.

August 2011, Southern Colorado, San Miguel County, the San Juan Mountain Range.

This place is not the most popular among tourists.

The roots here are not commercial.

They are wild, rugged, with cold nights, even in the height of summer.

long ridges, rocky crests, cliffs where it is easy to lose cell phone signal.

 

21-year-old Abby Moreno came here alone.

A student at the University of Colorado, she studied geography and was preparing a course project on the microclimatic zones of mountain ranges.

She wrote on social media that she wanted to understand how silence affects the perception of space.

Judging by her correspondence with her friends, she planned to go on a solo 3-day hike to the foot of West Nidato’s Peak.

That’s about 40 mi southwest of the town of Northwoods.

She shared her coordinates, marked her parking spot on a map, and left a copy of her route with her adviser.

She disappeared on the second day.

The last recorded GPS signal from her tracker came at 10 p.m.

on August 5th.

The coordinates pointed to the northern slope of West Nidos at an altitude of approximately 6,500 ft.

A day later, when she had not made contact and had not returned to the campsite, a request was made to the county sheriff’s office.

The next day, a search party set out for the mountains.

First, there were four people, then 18, with the help of a helicopter and two dogs.

They found the camp quickly.

It was a mile and a half from the GPS signal on a flat area below the summit.

The tent was intact and her backpack was nearby.

Inside were a flashlight, bear spray, a water bottle, a journal, and a map.

Everything was in place.

Only the sleeping bag was torn along one side as if it had been ripped open.

Not on a rock, but torn sharply.

There were no signs of a struggle, no blood, no shoe prints around.

The dog’s tracks disappeared 40 m from the tent, no direction of departure, no trace of return.

The search continued for 4 days.

They combed an area with a radius of up to 8 miles.

The terrain was rugged, marked by rocks, ravines, and landslide areas.

But on the south side of the slope, about a mile and a half from the camp, at an altitude of about 7,000 ft, a volunteer saw a branch sticking out at an acute angle from a broken tree.

On it was a tuft of hair.

Light brown, tangled, but most importantly, it was wrapped around a knot and not caught, and not accidentally stuck, and but specifically wrapped several times, as if someone had carefully twisted it into a knot and left it there.

Nearby on the damp soil, they found prints.

Not footprints, not bootprints, but something like claw marks.

four arched indentations about 14 in long.

The width between the outer ones was almost 9 in.

The prints did not go up or down.

They were just there.

And then they disappeared.

The dogs were brought out again.

They didn’t react.

They didn’t pick up the scent.

One of them, an adult female Malininoa, lay down on the ground and refused to go any further.

2 days later, further down the slope, in a rocky crevice, the searchers found what they officially called an anatomical anomaly.

The crevice was narrow.

Only one of the rescuers could squeeze through.

Inside was an oval recess in the rock about 5 ft deep.

At the bottom were bone fragments.

Most were small in shape.

They resembled deer, small rodents, and a couple of birds.

Among them was a human finger from the right hand without a nail.

The San Miguel County Medical Examiner later confirmed that the failins matched Abby Moreno’s DNA.

No other human remains were found.

No traces of blood or tissue.

Everything was dry.

The nest, a word used in unofficial correspondence, looked arranged as if the bones had been laid out.

Not chaotically, but thoughtfully, with space in the middle, empty.

No known predator does that, and that would have been the end of it had it not been for a secondary examination of the slope.

One of the biologists examining the trees on the line above the crevice noticed marks on the bark.

They resembled claw marks, but not from an animal climbing up, but from something descending from above.

Some branches had marks resembling the pressure of a broad body with a texture similar to feathers.

There weren’t enough traces to draw a definite conclusion, but the report stated possibly a large bird of prey.

However, the estimated wingspan exceeds that of any known species, estimated at over 10 ft.

That was the official wording in private conversations between gamekeepers and rescuers.

Another word was used.

Harpy, a myth, a creature with wings and claws, or not a myth.

It’s just that no one wants to ask the question, “What could have carried a person away from a height of 7,000 ft and left not even a body behind?” The search was called off on the ninth day.

Aby’s tent was left untouched.

It still stands there on the ridge, a silent witness to the fact that someone once came out of the forest there and never returned.

The official report on the Abby Mareno case was closed 4 months after the last search party was conducted.

The wording presumed dead as a result of environmental factors.

Body not found.

On paper, it was a dry conclusion.

However, among the rescuers and Forest Service employees who participated in those events, the conversations continued for years, especially among those who saw with their own eyes the torn sleeping bag, the branch with hair, and the rock niche with the nest.

These findings did not fit the standard scenario of a tourist’s disappearance.

One of those people is Paul Deetsz, a former volunteer with the Montrose County Search and Rescue Team.

He is now retired.

I contacted him in 2022 while gathering material on unexplained disappearances in the San Juan area.

We talked in his garage where where he still keeps maps and photographs from that expedition.

Paul said that he was the first to see the branch with the hair on it.

What bothered him was not that the hair was there, but how it was arranged.

You see, if hair gets caught, it just hangs there.

These were wrapped around as if in a knot.

Not just tangled, but twisted and tightly, and the branch was broken unnaturally, as if someone had pressed something against it with their hand or claws.

Paul looked up at the branches above.

There, as he said, was a strange stripe, as if someone had slid down the crown from top to bottom.

Several branches were broken in a straight line and not broken off as if by the wind, but pressed down from the center to the edges.

He didn’t mention it in his report at the time.

He decided it would sound too fantastical, but he took photos.

In one of them, you can really see it.

The tree crown looks as if it has been crushed from above.

A few months after the case was closed, a second incident occurred in the same area.

Almost nothing was written about it.

In the spring of 2012, 20 mi southwest of the place where Abby disappeared, a group of hunters discovered another crevice with a similar pattern.

At the bottom were bones.

Most of them were the spines of small animals.

They were arranged in a circle.

The center was empty.

One of the hunters, Mike Sanders, later said that he immediately sensed that something was wrong.

It didn’t smell like Kerrion.

It smelled like a chicken coupe.

Dry, harsh, pungent.

We thought someone was keeping birds there.

But when we saw the bones, we realized it wasn’t a chicken.

No bird breaks its own beak or feet, and felanges were lying there, small but clearly from a predator, and everything was laid out as if someone had collected it on purpose.

They reported it to the local Department of Natural Resources.

A representative came, looked, and recorded the coordinates, but no case was opened.

Formally, there was nothing illegal.

But the strangest thing was that the nest was ventilated.

The upper part of the crevice had a hole in the rock that led upwards, resembling a mine.

Air could freely enter it, or not, just air.

Against this backdrop, old materials resurfaced.

In the archives of one of Colorado’s parks from the 1940s, a description of a series of livestock disappearances was found.

At the time it was attributed to mountain lions, but one of the shepherds indicated in his report the animal was carried away vertically.

The tracks lead to the gorge, and beyond that there is only crumpled grass and blood as if it had been pulled upward.

This report was never published in scientific circles.

But in the context of the Abby Mareno case, it became important.

If all this sounds implausible, it may be.

But then the question arises, where did Abby go? None of the versions, a bare attack, a fall into a ravine, hypothermia, explain what was found.

The sleeping bag was torn, but there was not a single drop of blood around it.

The branch with hair was wrapped by hand or by someone with similar motor skills.

The tracks were clawed, but too large to belong to any known species in the region.

There were no traces of blood, clothing, teeth, or hair.

None of those who participated in the search ever returned to that part of the ridge.

One of the gamekeepers later said, “When you walk along those slopes, you feel as if someone is above you, not behind you, not beside you, but above you.

It’s as if you look up and see trees and someone is looking through the trees.

” In 2013, two years later, tourists discovered another crevice on the opposite side of the mountain range.

In it was another bone nest.

And then, for the first time, people began discussing a pattern.

The two years after Abby Moreno’s disappearance seemed quiet.

No one stayed on that side of the San Juan range for more than a couple of days.

The rescuers did not return.

Her relatives went to the tent once a season and left without finding any new clues.

But in August 2013, almost to the day of Aby’s disappearance, on the opposite side of the mountain range near the Big Pine Pass, a second incident occurred.

It was not publicized.

A group of six students from Denver spent the night in an abandoned forest shelter.

one of those windowless cabins that have stood in the mountain forests since the 1960s.

The next morning, one of the group members, Joel Harris, 20, did not emerge from the tent.

Literally, he was gone.

The tent was zipped up from the inside.

His backpack, boots, and jacket were all lying at the entrance.

His clothes were neatly folded, and his sleeping bag was empty.

The sleeping bag wasn’t torn like Aby’s, but it appeared to have been pulled upward.

Its bottom was pulled upward in an arc as if it had been abruptly lifted from the inside.

There were no traces around it.

No signs of departure, no signs of struggle.

The night was dry.

The ground was hard.

The students called for help.

Two days later, rescuers reached the camp.

They combed the area.

Nothing.

But a mile and a half to the southwest, they found another nest.

A crevice between slabs, sloping downward at an angle.

Inside, it was the same as before, a bone bed lay out in a circle.

This time, there were no human remains, only a scrap of fabric, light blue synthetic.

In the corner was a tag from a pair of Columbia shorts.

According to the documents, Joel wore that exact model.

The report stated undetermined cause of disappearance.

The parents were told verbally possibly accidental disorientation followed by a fall.

However, with each such case, the unofficial statistics continued to grow.

In early 2014, one of the private research groups investigating disappearances in the natural environment, which asked not to be named, conducted a field analysis.

They made no loud statements.

They compared the dots.

The disappearance of Abby Moreno.

The nest found by hunters.

The disappearance of Joel Harris.

Two more recorded cases of lone tourists disappearing in the same area.

And they plotted them on a topographic map.

All the points are along the same line.

Not in terms of elevation, but in terms of geological structure.

a strip of sedimentary rock with limestone outcrops where carsted cavities most often form.

In theory, a cave system under the ridge, perhaps a network of cavities inaccessible from the surface.

In practice, one of the areas with the highest percentage of disappearances and low tourist traffic.

In the spring of 2015, a team of speliologists arrived in the area ostensibly to map underground structures.

Their report has never been made public, but one of the participants later anonymously shared the details.

We surveyed six vertical crevices.

Two of them went down more than 20 ft.

Further down, there were rock plugs.

The third had a side branch.

We sent a camera down there.

There was a nest, the same thing only bigger, more bones, and the center was empty as if it were waiting.

They did not go any further.

The equipment began to malfunction at depth.

The batteries were draining in minutes.

The cameras shut down.

They left.

No one ever returned there.

If you look for an explanation, a rational one is not enough.

Bears don’t build nests.

Owls don’t carry human body parts.

Cougars don’t leave neatly collected bones and hollows.

Even the largest birds of prey don’t lift humans off the ground, let alone strip them and lay them out around felanges.

But if we assume that these forests are home to something capable of flying, grabbing, and hiding, then everything starts to fall into place.

A large predator, periodic activity, preference for single targets, no bodies, and no nests.

In 2016, a term appeared in Forest Service reports.

Isolated fragments of unidentified activity within the boundaries of the sedimentary zone of the eastern slope of San Juan.

That’s all that remains of dozens of pages of observations, descriptions, and private reports on the Colorado map.

This area is still marked as accessible for hiking, but there are almost no tourists there because those who have been there do not always return.

In the fall of 2017, a forest ranger who wished to remain anonymous reported that in the Silver Pass area about 8 miles from Abby Marino’s camp, he noticed an empty clearing with no birds or small animal tracks.

This in itself is not sensational.

But something else was interesting.

At the edge of this clearing stood a tree, an old tree with a broken crown.

On one of the branches, there was a similar scene, a tuft of hair tightly wrapped around a knot.

Only the hair was not human.

In structure, it was more like wool.

And yet, someone had wrapped it around the knot.

Under the tree, there were three deep dents in the ground as if from landing or from takeoff.

Within a radius of 20 meters, there were no traces, no feathers, no droppings, no bones, only silence.

He took photographs.

He sent them to the department archives.

The case was marked.

Natural damage and remains of wool from an unknown animal.

Since then, at least four more disappearances have been recorded in the area.

Two tourists, a biologist, and a telephone company employee walk along a line of poles.

All within the same geological line.

No bodies have been found.

The nests are no longer touched.

They are bypassed.

Some were covered with earth.

According to the documents, this was due to the danger of collapse.

But hunters and guides living at the foot of the mountains still avoid the area from the Big Pine Ridge to the eastern slope of West Neidos without explanation.

They don’t go there.

Abby Mareno’s body was never found.

No one touched her tent.

It stands in the same place below the summit of West Nidos.

Over the past decade, the fabric has faded and the poles have sagged, but the structure remains intact.

Every season, her mother goes up there silently, without the press, without words.

She leaves a new note.

She places a stone on top of the old one.

She sits down nearby.

She looks up and she waits.

Because in her words, if she’s out there somewhere, she knows