About the Story

I have been posting a serial-type story on the message board of an online hiking community (club) for a few months. The story was posted as a series of “short chapters”, at a rate of about 2 per week. The story gained, on average, 1,000 page views for every chapter posted. The story has about 30 chapters so far, and therefore, about 30,000 page views.

Unfortunately the online version of the story is now locked by the message board administrator. He locked it due to the “virtual turmoil” it was creating between many of the members of the online community. People are still emailing me (over six months after the message board thread containing the story was locked) and ask about the conclusion of the story. Many people really want to know how it ends.

What was posted on the online hiking community’s message board, before it was locked, was not the complete story. The story was locked about halfway through. Many readers were outraged that the story had not been completed.

The story takes place in the raw wilderness of British Columbia, Canada, and starts out no different than any other tale of a hiking trip. Nine friends set out on a good-intentioned, fun, off-trail hiking trip. Laughing, joking, even flirting with each other, it all starts out so well. Until… well, you’ll have to read it to find out.

What the group experiences over 8 days is the story. Or, should I say, the tragedy. Nothing happens to them that couldn’t happen to any other group of typical hikers. No one gets abducted by UFO’s, or anything extraordinary like that. What transpires over the 8 days is simply a series of normal, but unfortunate, events.

Human nature, in its most raw and desperate form, is to survive: at any cost. What we did to ourselves, and each other, in order to stay alive out there shocked and shamed us to our very cores. We frightened ourselves. The out-of-control events changed us. Forever. For now we know how high the cost of surviving can be, and that we were willing to pay the price. Even if it means someone else does not.

The hikers in this story have not been identified; their names have been changed to protect privacy and, of course, legal issues. Times, dates, and places in the story have not been disclosed.

The text of the story invoked quite an emotional literary response from many of the readers. I found the comments posted by the readers interesting and had entertainment value. They are worthy of reading as well.

The readers’ comments ranged from praise and encouragement to outright condemnation of the story, and of the storyteller. While many of the readers openly supported me, many others waged a vicious campaign of nasty comments. In time, after failing to get a response from me, they turned on each other.

Some readers urged me on. Others demanded me to stop posting the short chapters of the story. Still others pleaded with the authorities to shut me down. Some people loved the short, periodically-posted chapters. Others hated the format and wanted it all at once, when completed in its entirety. Either way, people want the conclusion.

A lot of people debated whether the story is true, or not. One reader confessed that he had gone to the Vancouver public library to search for the story in past news articles. Is the story true? Or made up? He certainly wanted to know. One reader claimed that he overheard the story being discussed at gatherings in Vancouver