Hello all:
During a recent family conversation a subject was brought up that I wanted to share with you . . . a story . . . well, an experience my family had some years ago. Despite everything that has happened to us as a family which could be labeled 'paranormal,' no experience has been as flat-out, Twilight Zone creepy/scary as this. Even during this most recent discussion, my hubby, the girls and I were still scratching our heads and giving a little shudder over the experience, wondering just what the hell happened that one afternoon while we were four-wheeling?
We were camping at Alamo Lake in Arizona for the weekend, which is located in Southwestern Arizona. The lake is surrounded by gently rolling hills which are covered in low profile desert vegetation. These multitude of hills are crisscrossed with dirt roads from years of mining exploration and off-road exploring, or four-wheeling as Arizonans call it. Having gotten our fill of fishing for the day, we struck out in our Suzuki Samari late that afternoon to go explore the area. We were fairly avid rock hounds with a long history of four-wheeling the Arizona back roads, and though the girls weren't overly excited about bouncing up and down on dirt roads in the Samari (very similar to a jeep with the stiffest of shock absorbers,) they were even less excited about the prospect of more fishing, so off we went.
We found our first dirt road easy enough and followed it several miles to the crest of a long hill, and there it dead-ended. We turned the Samari around and took a long appreciative look at the panorama of the lake below us in the far distance. The dirt road had a soft, almost sand-like composition and the tracks made by our SUV cut deep and clean in the dirt. Our tracks should've been easy to follow back . . . except that when hubby made the u-turn and headed back down the same road following our tracks, about three miles down the road they abruptly disappeared, and a few hundred feet further the road dead-ended . . . again. Okay, this was weird, but at this point we were only shaking our heads, confused. We took a look at our position in respect to the lake. Yes, no doubt this was the road we'd come in on, so why didn't it go back to the main highway? We u-turned a second time and . . . a few hundred feet back once again there were no tracks, on the same road we'd been on all this time. And our u-turns were very tight, we weren't meandering around in long loops.
We all exclaimed in unison, "What happened to our tire tracks? Where'd they go?" as we progressed along the road. We finally got up to the same crest of the hill, still with no tracks before us, and this time the road kept going out into the desert wilderness. Now what had happened to the dead-end? By this time it was getting a little too close to sundown and we were all getting a little too nervous.
"There's the damn lake right there- we can see it," my hubby gestured at our front window as once again we turned around along the crest of the hill. We weren't venturing a foot further into Alamo's eerie Bermuda Triangle. "So help me, if I have to I'm heading straight out through this desert towards the lake! I'll get us to that main highway! To hell with these bizarre roads!" I asked him to please not do that, not yet, because there were too many moguls and bushes which made it unsafe in my opinion to just strike out through the desert. Without a dirt road we wouldn't be able to tell what kind of drop-off might be over the next ridge. I could tell my hubby wasn't giving deference to my request for long, especially when he snapped back with, "I'm not gettin' us stuck out here in the dark in this Twilight Zone!" The girls had started whining from the back seat, obviously I was getting more out-voted with each passing minute.
Halfway back down this same main dirt road, which, by the way, did show our prior tire tracks this time, there was a suddenly a road branching off where there had been no other side road before. Hubby took that road . . . and there were our tire tracks! Aarrrgh! Now our family unit was getting seriously creeped out. We took that road off in a direction paralleling the crest of the hill and . . . it dead-ended! We u-turned around again, following our tracks to the main road and turned right, back towards the lake. Several hundred yards further and we found another off-shoot road that also hadn't been there before, so we took it next . . . all the way to where it dead-ended. By now our whole family had a case of the jitters as we watched the sun slide behind the mountain and the landscape grow sinister with creeping shadows. I stole a sideways glance at hubby's expression and I knew we were going four-wheeling for real. We turned around in a u-turn one more time and followed our tracks back to what should have been the junction with the main dirt road, but there was no junction. No junction! This time this small secondary road went all the way back to the main highway! WTF????????
My hubby let out a string of expletives which my girls are still fond of using to this day! We have no explanation for what happened out there in that desert; what kind of phenomena we bumped into. Some kind of energy vortex? It felt like a parallel universe. Your guess is as good as ours. There were no other tracks besides ours on those roads to have misled us. There wasn't one second of this hour-long tour de farce where we weren't absolutely sure of our location and the road we were on. We could see the lake and our position to it at all times, for Pete's sake, which is what made the experience so frustrating. And scary. Our tire tracks just kept doing a frightening slight of hand- now you see 'em, now you don't. Roads kept changing under our tires, appearing and disappearing seemingly at will.
So, my friends, if you ever decide to venture out anywhere near Alamo Lake, take a compass, water, and a video camera! You'll want to document your experience if you happen upon Arizona's Bermuda Triangle! And tell someone where you're going . . . so they can send out a rescue party if you disappear! Later, friends.
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