“Well, you do know this is gold country, right?”

“Uh, uh.” I grunted.

“Well, it is. People used to come here to pan for gold. You still can now, too. Anyway, the story goes that Darmo was this counselor here, twenty years back. They say he was really intense—the kind of guy that would make Mike look like a wimp. Darmo heard that someone had found gold in one of the streams up here. So, he told these two kids that he was going to take them on a hike. But instead he made them walk a mile away from everyone else back down by the streams running off the meadow.

“He made the boys pan for gold for three days. And he only let them stop to sleep and eat once in a while. Peanut butter sandwiches and water out of the stream were the only things they had to eat. Darmo said that if they tried to leave he would follow them and tell their parents they had run away from the program.