Spooky Halloween Stories: Murderers in Rifle
This article originally appeared on Climbing
These days, Rifle Mountain Park might feel downright civilized to the modern climber. The canyon teems with Sprinter vans, nearby Glenwood Springs has a fancy Natural Grocers, and in the town of Rifle there are not one but two Starbucks, plus local coffee shops, for rest-day work and festering opportunities.
However, back in the early 1990s, when climbers from the Front Range began developing the first major wave of routes, the canyon had more of a Wild West feel. (Rumor Has It [5.11b], the area's first completed sport climb--courtesy of Mark Tarrant, who'd grown up in Rifle, and Richard Wright--went up in 1989; concentrated crags like the Wasteland and Ruckman Cave were developed starting in 1991.) In fact, at times, Rifle could feel downright scary.
In 1992, two grim, horrific incidents in and around the area not only put climbers on edge but also inspired two of the park's more morbid route names: Dumpster BBQ and Kill for a Thrill.
A grisly double homicide was fodder for the Crystal Cave route Dumpster BBQ. It was a crime that crossed state lines and involved the town's otherwise bucolic rest area down by the Colorado River, next to I-70. In a horrific series of events seemingly out of a Rob Zombie flick, a man abducted an elderly couple in their motorhome in Las Vegas, Nevada, killed them for their vehicle, then began driving east, across Utah and into Colorado. Once he tired of their mute, grisly company, he pulled off at the Rifle rest area, tossed the corpses in the dumpster, and lit them on fire before driving away. The perpetrator--no criminal mastermind--was later caught in Denver in the stolen RV.
While these murders took place away from the canyon, it was a homicide in the canyon itself that inspired the Winchester Cave route Kill for a Thrill--also the name of a song by the industrial-metal band Ministry. That summer, two young Front Range climbers--the landscaper Curt Fry and the routesetter and hold shaper Mike Pont--found themselves witness, at least aurally, to a killing next to the Skull Cave. Though this gloomy, seepy grotto is now home to Rifle's hardest route, Kinder Cakes (5.15a), the locals once called it Old Maid's Kitchen for the "old maid" who set up shop under its protected eaves, cooking for the ranchers and miners passing through "Box Canyon."
Pont, a Colorado transplant from New Hampshire, had posted up full-time in the canyon (he established many of the area's first sport climbs, including the Bauhaus Wall testpiece De Stjil, a 5.13+), and was living up in the "Ghetto Meadow" group campsite. One night, however, a big thunderstorm raged through and shredded his flimsy tent, so Pont dossed on the floor of a friend's van, with plans to open-bivy somewhere in the canyon the following evening. When Fry, a strong boulderer originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, showed up that next night with no tent of his own, the two climbers headed into the canyon after hanging out by the communal campfire to find somewhere protected to sleep. They drove to the roadside Wasteland crag, with its loamy staging area and capping roof.
"We grabbed our bags and sleeping pads and walked over the debris hump below the wall to hunker down for the night," recalls Pont. "We weren't asleep or anything when all of a sudden we saw headlights coming from down-canyon." The car they'd spotted pulled in right next to Pont's Subaru wagon--a mere 50 feet away across the debris hump and the dirt road--and the driver got out, flashlight in hand.
Says Pont, "He was hurriedly going in circles around my car. We watched it all while trying to stay hidden. We were concerned--like, Is this guy going to steal my shit?"
Suddenly, the man got back into his car and sped away, leaving Pont and Fry bewildered as to his intentions. As the climbers lay back down, they heard the car skid to a stop a few hundred yards up the road, at the pullout for the Skull Cave.
What the fuck? they wondered.
"I'm not sure how much time passed, but the next thing we heard was four or five gunshots," says Pont. "In that canyon in the middle of the night when no one else is there, there's only the sound of the creek belching and burping over rocks." But now, there was loud gunfire--close by. Then an eerie silence. And then just the creek again.
"We're lying there petrified,' says Pont. "When you hear gunshots by someone who's just been peering into your car with a flashlight, your mind creates worst-case scenarios." For the next 20 minutes, every sound the two climbers heard--each snapping twig and burbling exhalation of the brook--was, Oh my god, he's coming through the woods! And, He saw our footprints in the road and he's coming this way right now! Unarmed themselves, they sheltered in place, unsure of what to do.
Recalls Fry of those endless, terrible minutes, "Talk about adrenaline! We were cornered--crazy stuff!"
Finally, Pont and Fry heard a high-pitched whining: The man's car was stuck in the ditch beside the road, and he was revving his engine to get it out. The man eventually freed his car and then tore back down-canyon in a blaze of dust and headlights, leaving Pont and Fry to endure one of the most fitful, terrified, jumpy nights of non-sleep of their lives, there in the dark depths of the narrow defile. That next morning, they asked the denizens of the Ghetto Meadow if they'd heard anything, but of course the climbers camped there--a mile or so up from the Skull Cave--had not.
Fry headed back to work the next day, leaving Pont in Rifle, but returned a week later with a wild tale he'd seen on the TV news. Says Pont, Fry ran up to him saying, "Dude, you aren't going to believe this! Remember those gunshots last week? This guy killed his girlfriend!!!" Apparently, the man had imprisoned the unfortunate woman in the trunk of his car, and then shot her twice in the Skull Cave pullout before firing a few "glory rounds" into the air. As Pont recalls, when the murderer later parked his car somewhere, the bullet holes he'd blown through both his girlfriend and his car's aluminum body alerted either passers by or the police to something fishy: After blood started pooling on the pavement, the grisly contents of the trunk were revealed and the man was arrested. (Fry recalls seeing on the news that the man had turned himself in. Perhaps both versions are true: Maybe the murderer, sick with guilt like the narrator in Poe's classic story "The Tell-Tale Heart," gave himself up after seeing the blood dripping from his car.)
The next year, 1993, Fry freed a bouldery project he'd bolted on the blue rock of the Winchester Cave, naming it Kill for a Thrill. The climb is vicious for 5.13a, if not downright violent. Meanwhile, for Pont, the horror of that long night has echoed across the decades: "What I most remember was the creek making sounds to keep tricking us that the guy was scouring the hillside and woods looking for us," he says. "When the adrenaline is flowing like that, you lose your rational mind."
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