In late August 1977, a backcountry ranger named Halvar Rens was called to investigate a missing camper in the Cabinet Mountains of northwestern Montana. The missing man was Marsden Pel, a 31-year-old wildlife photographer from Missoula. Pel had entered the Sourwood Basin alone on August 12, planning to exit by August 22. When he failed to return, his sister contacted authorities.
Rens, a 39-year-old veteran of the Forest Service, knew the terrain well. He had patrolled the Cabinet Mountain Wilderness alone for years. The case was assigned to him by senior ranger Otis Halberstam, who drove to Rens’s cabin before dawn to deliver the news.
Pel’s truck was found parked at the Engle Lake trailhead. His camera bag was locked inside the cab, a detail that troubled investigators. A wildlife photographer would not leave his equipment behind intentionally. The trail register showed Pel had signed in on August 12, headed for Sourwood Basin via Heron Pass.
Rens set out alone. He crossed Heron Pass by midday and looked down into Sourwood Basin. He noted in his field book that he could hear no birds, an unusual absence for late August in that country.
He found Pel’s camp by late afternoon. The tent was standing, the camp stove was on a flat stone, and a notebook sat on a stump. Nothing was disturbed. It looked as though Pel had stepped away moments earlier.
The notebook contained Pel’s working journal. The final entry was dated August 18. It read: “It was at the lake again this morning, closer. I don’t think it’s a bear.” The entry from the previous day noted something at the lake at first light, watching.
Rens searched the camp perimeter. He found no signs of struggle. He found no tracks leading away. He found Pel’s sleeping bag unzipped and folded back, as if its owner intended to return. He did not find Marsden Pel.
Following Halberstam’s advice, Rens did not camp in the basin. He climbed 300 feet above it and made a cold camp on a ridge shoulder with a clear view of the valley below. He did not light a fire.
Around 11 that night, he heard a sound from the basin. He could not place it. He later described it as the sound of someone trying to call out across a great distance, but with their voice pulled inside out. It came from near the upper lake. Then it stopped.
At first light, Rens descended again. He found a pile of stones on the beach, stacked into a rough cone. The stones were wet on the underside, as if pulled from the water that morning. He kicked the pile apart. He found two more such piles along the shore. One had been built around a vertical piece of driftwood.
He circled the lake that morning. He found no human tracks in the beach gravel. He returned to Pel’s camp and inventoried the food cache. Pel had taken a sealed bag of oatmeal and a small pot with him on the morning he disappeared.
Rens found a single set of bootprints leading from the tent toward the lake. They ended at a small cove. There was one bootprint in the sand at the water’s edge, a right foot pointed at the lake. There was no left footprint.
He radioed the district office. Halberstam told him the search team was being called. He told Rens to stay above the basin. He added: “If you go down to that camp again tomorrow, take the long way back at sundown.”
The search team could not arrive until the next day. Rens spent a second night alone on the ridge. He woke near 1:30 in the morning when something brushed the outside of his bivy sack near his head. He lay still. A small stone was knocked loose about ten feet from him. He worked his rifle into position and waited.
Later, a shape moved past the ridge camp at the edge of his vision. It was taller than the spruce branches. It moved slowly, without sound. Rens did not lift his head. He held still until it was gone.
In the morning, he found indentations around his camp. They had the size and shape of prints, but no structure of a foot. No heel, no toes, no claws. Just shallow oval depressions about 13 inches long. There were 47 of them circling his camp. They came up from the basin, paused beside his head, circled the camp, and went off northward along the ridge.
Rens radioed Halberstam again. The team was on the way. Rens told Halberstam he was going down to the lake one more time before the team arrived. He wanted to see it quiet.
The basin felt different that morning. The smoke from Idaho fires made the light flat and gray. There were no shadows. Rens went first to Pel’s camp. On the stump where the notebook had been sat Pel’s camera bag. The same bag Rens had last seen locked inside Pel’s truck at the trailhead, four miles away on the other side of the pass.
Rens opened the bag. Inside was Pel’s Nikon F with a motor drive, three lenses, and a roll of film with the frame counter showing 24. Rens closed the bag, placed it inside the tent, and zipped the tent shut.
He walked to the lake shore. The stone piles he had kicked apart the day before had been rebuilt. The driftwood was back in the center of the second pile. He did not kick them apart this time.
Standing at the water’s edge, he looked down at his reflection. The water was very still. In the reflection, he saw the upper portion of something tall standing on the slope behind him, above the timber. It was long, narrow, and inclined slightly forward.
He did not turn around. He counted to ten. He stepped to the side and turned to look up at the slope. Nothing was there. He returned to his original position. The shape was no longer in the reflection.
He walked away from the lake at a normal pace. He did not run. As he crossed the meadow, something moved in the alder thicket to his left. It paralleled him. When he stopped, it stopped. When he walked, it walked.
Near the trail, he sat down with his back against a boulder and waited. After 20 minutes, he heard voices far up the trail. The search team was coming over the pass. He moved sideways toward the trail, watching the alder thicket. Nothing came out of it. He climbed the switchbacks without looking down.
He met the team two-thirds of the way up. He told them about the camp, the camera bag, and the stone piles. He told them about the bootprint at the cove. He did not tell them about the reflection or the prints around his bivy sack. He saved that for Halberstam, alone on the pass.
Halberstam listened. When Rens was done, he said only: “We’re going to find that camp empty. He’s not coming home, son.”
The team spent four days in Sourwood Basin. They dragged the upper lake with a grapple system. They found no body. They found the camera bag inside the tent. They photographed the stone piles, which were rebuilt every night between the time the team left camp and the time they returned. A man posted on the beach overnight saw nothing. The stones were rebuilt anyway.
The film from Pel’s camera was developed in Libby. The first 23 frames showed ordinary wildlife photography: loons, an osprey, a moose in a meadow. The 24th frame was different. It was never released.
The frame showed the upper lake at first light, from the angle Pel would have been standing at if he had walked from his tent to the cove on the morning he disappeared. In the photograph, the bootprint Rens later found was visible in the sand. The print was fresh.
In the water, about 40 feet from shore, stood an upright shape. The water at that point was at least 12 feet deep. The shape was angled slightly forward. It did not have features that could be described. It was looking back at the camera.
Rens described the frame once, to an old trapper named Wendell Strom. Strom had worked the Cabinet Mountains since the 1920s. He listened without interrupting. When Rens was done, Strom said: “There’s pieces of this country a man shouldn’t be alone in. The basin’s one.”
Strom told him the Kootenai people had known about the basin. They did not go in. The trappers of his grandfather’s time did not go in. Strom told Rens he should let it alone too.
When Rens told him the thing had come up out of the basin to the ridge, Strom asked if he had slept down in the basin. Rens said no. Strom said: “If you’d slept down in the basin, you’d be in the lake with the photographer. The fact that you slept on the ridge is the reason you came home.”
Strom told him the thing was not done with him. He told him to stay out of the mountains north of Heron Pass.
Rens stayed out for the rest of 1977. He married Lucille Pomeroy in May 1978. He returned to the Cabinet Mountains that summer but did not patrol north of Heron Pass. Wendell Strom died in the spring of 1981. He never told Rens it was all right to go back.
In 1982, Rens transferred out of the Cabinet Mountains entirely. He took a posting in the Beartooth Absaroka on the other side of the state and remained there for the rest of his career. He retired in 1998. He died of cancer in 2009 at the age of 71.
His widow gave his field books to the regional Forest Service archive in Missoula. The field book from August 1977 is in that archive. The entries about Sourwood Basin are there in his handwriting. The 24th frame is not in the archive.
The Lincoln County case file still lists Marsden Pel as missing, presumed deceased in a backcountry accident on August 28, 1977. The file notes that a roll of film was developed in connection with the case. The roll is no longer in the file.
Otis Halberstam retired in 1985. Before he retired, he quietly stopped recommending that anyone camp in Sourwood Basin. He told visitors the fishing was better on the other side of the divide. He never wrote that down.
Late in his life, Rens told his wife that he never went back to Sourwood Basin. But twice, once in 1986 and once in 2001, he had the brief sensation of something looking at him from a great distance. The direction was northeast and slightly higher than where he was standing. The direction of the Cabinet Mountains. The direction of Sourwood.
He told her he did not think it was over. He thought it was patient. He thought it could wait.