olesma wrote:The freakiest thing that happend to me personally was getting lost on top of a mesa that is no more than 1/4 mile accross and 1/3 mile in length - only 3 trails over the top, one straight across, the other intersecting at a T. That happened more than once - I hiked the darned thing probably 12 times, been lost on top 4 of those times. Freakiest thing ever.
I know a couple of individuals who had even wilder things happen up there, and one of them vowed he would never go within 100yds of the top of the mesa. He generally stayed away from it if he at all could as a rule anyway.
The mesa in question is called Uraca mesa. It is a rather tall mesa, but not terribly large in size with a really beautiful rim around the top - one side has a cliff that is around 200 ft. high. It is located in an area called Philmont in NE New Mexico. That is where I was a ranger for a summer.
The mesa is steeped in supernatural and haunted lore. There are quite literally hundreds of stories about strange experiences on top of that thing. A few of them are used to scare the crap out of the young campers that hike into the camp for a night. They have a great campfire ritual/story that can really scare the beejeebies out of some of the young men - and occasionally the grown men too. I normally discount stories like that - I'm not a believer in "haunted" things - they're fun, but not terribly believable in my mind. For me, however, having experienced some freaky things up there personally - I tend to grant a little more credence to the stories.
My friend who swore he would never return? Well, I don't know what his story was. I was never able to get it out of him. But you could see the color drain from his face whenever you mentioned you were going to go across the top of it. I was with him once as we approached the top. There are two ways to get from where we were to the camp on the other side - over the top (a trip of just over 1/3 of a mile) or around the side (adding almost 3 miles to our rout). We tried to convince him that it was cool and we were all together, but he just about freaked out on us and insisted - with real panic in his eyes and in every movement of his body - that we go around the base of the mesa. He wouldn't stay at the camp one minute longer than necessary either. He was waking us up at first light of day, already packed and antsy to move out.
The whole area on top has a very surreal look and feel to it as well. I was there once when I was 14, we were hiking across the top to get to the camp, and I had to obey the call of the wild. Our group stopped, and I went off trail about 10 yards to the nearest tree. I did my business, turned around - and couldn't find my group. I walked back (remember that I didn't leave far enough to have them out of my sight) and I couldn't even find the trail! I walked a bit further - looking around for them - then stopped. I turned back around, sure that I hadn't walked that far off the trail to begin with, and thre they were, right where I remembered them - but back the other direction from which I had just walked. I came back to the group - they all asked how I got on that side of the trail. I told them not to bother with it and let's just get the hell off this damned mesa.
I never enjoyed going across the top of the mesa after that - sometimes it felt wierd, sometimes it didn't. I was always careful and wary, and I was never sure if I would make it off the top without incident. I have several friends who had similar (or very different) experiences, and I also have some friends who have never had anything happen to them on top.
The most common experience was getting lost on top - which as I said, looking at a map, and if you ever saw it, seems almost impossible to do.
Go figure.
