The Gray on Suicide Hill | Night Walking in the Old La Sal Basin
Updated: Sep 4
An Old La Sal walk in the night isn't something most people plan. It’s something you either avoid—or do on purpose, because you’re willing to see what the dark reveals.
He hadn’t meant to go back out after the sun set on the ridge.
The evening had already given him more than enough to settle in: the familiar basin, the slow arrival of stars, the quiet breath of fields settling under night. He’d eaten a simple dinner in the main cabin’s kitchen, washed his dishes, and watched the sky ripen out the bay window—the same window that framed the La Sal Mountains by day like a painting, and by night like a veil.
Solitude, Shadows, and an Old La Sal Night Walk
He could have stayed inside.
He could have read, watched t.v. or fiddled on his iPad.
He could have sat with a cup of tea in the comfortable glow.
Instead, sometime after 11:30 PM, something tugged at him from his inner soul.
Not a voice.
Not a command.
More like a question.
If you trust the night this much from the porch… do you trust it from the road?
He looked at his headlamp sitting on the table by the door.
He thought about Suicide Hill.
Locals called it that for a reason. For reasons no one quite understood, deer tended to drift into headlights there—both directions of the road, all seasons, hot, cold, windy or calm. These animals needlessly stepped out into traffic, as if some unseen force pulled, or pushed, them from the trees onto the pavement at the worst possible moment.
He had driven it many times.
He had known more than one driver whose night had changed there.
Tonight, the hill was a half‑mile walk up the road from the cabin, past scattered fields and the faint, respectful lights of neighbor homes. The flat basin around Deer Creek Retreat felt familiar now—five fenced acres, clustered fields beyond, ridges guarding both sides of the bowl like silent sentries. The dust had settled on the dirt road from the traffic of the day.
He slipped on his shoes.
He snagged the headlamp, and set it to its dimmest setting before putting it on his head.
He opened the door and stepped into the dark.
The dark cool night air met him immediately.
Under a thin sliver of moon, Old La Sal felt even wider that usual. The sky arched overhead, dense with stars, the Milky Way drawn like a pale scar across the black. The cabin’s light leaked out only a few feet before surrendering to the dark, leaving most of the property in shadow.
He clicked the headlamp on revealing the low burn of light reflected on the ground. The narrow cone revealed the road in front of him—just enough to watch his footing.
The gravel and dirt track led away from the cabin, curving gently upward. Fence lines marked the edges of neighboring fields, posts and wire catching small highlights from his beam. He walked past the gate, onto the road, then to highway 46.
Distant porch lights flickered here and there.
It seemed no one in the area was awake.
He continued walking.
With each step, the world behind him shrank. The cabin became a warm rectangle against a sea of shadow, then a glow, then a memory. Ahead, the road slipped between fields, bending toward the steep grade that would eventually crest Suicide Hill.
The air was cooler here than in the day, the mountain wind and elevation seemed to accomidate the walk.
He could smell soil and dry vegetation, a faint metallic hint of dust.
Somewhere far away, a dog barked once, then fell silent.
After a few minutes, he reached the point where the road shifts to an upward slope.
Suicide Hill, he thought.
In a car, you feel the engine’s strain, the gentle lean of your body as you climb, the nervous awareness of deer that might step out without warning, making it necessary to slow down. On foot, walking, the hill felt different. The grade wasn’t steep, but in the dark it did something to perception. The road ahead became a narrow tunnel of potential.
He clicked off his headlamp and waited for his eyes to adjust.
Stars flooded back into awareness.
His eyes, already partially adapted, opened wider.
The basin around him became a silhouette painting—fields as darker patches against slightly lighter ground, fences as faint lines. The ridges on either side stood as jagged shapes against the sky.
He stood there for a moment, breathing.
The quiet was nearly complete.
No cars.
No wind.
No insects loud enough to notice.
Only his own heartbeat and the deep, layered silence of a high‑desert night.
He whispered, more to test the air than anything else.
“Oh, boy… I must be foolish, or is it faithful?”
The wind provided no answer in words.
The question itself lingered.
He began to walk up the hill.
Without the headlamp, each step he extended wonder why he left the comfort of the house.
His feet learned the texture of the road—the scattered stones, the packed dirt, the small dips. His ears felt strangely amplified. Every tiny sound became noteworthy. A pebble shifting under his shoe. A faint rustle from a distant field. The subtle creak of a fence wire cooling in the night.
The Old La Sal night walk became less about exercise and more about awareness.
He remembered his normal life, how working, the hospital corridors at 3:00 AM, the way the quiet there wasn’t truly quiet—monitors beeping softly, ventilation humming, footsteps approaching or receding. You learned to listen for difference: the alarm that didn’t sound like the others, the urgent voices down the hall.
Tonight, there were no machines.
Only the night and whatever it held.
Halfway up the hill, he paused again.
He turned his head slowly, scanning the fields on either side.
In the distance, he could make out the shapes of scattered houses, mostly dark, each one a small human outpost in the basin. Closer, the fields themselves lay dormant, their borders traced by fence lines and occasional trees.
Then he saw movement.
Not dramatic.
Not obvious.
Just a shift in the shadow near one of the closer fences on the right side of the road.
He squinted.
At first, he thought it was a deer. The hill had a reputation; his mind went there automatically. But the shape didn’t match. No quadruped outline. No flick of ears. No familiar arch of neck.
It was tall.
Slender.
Still.
He clicked the headlamp back on—only for a second, a pulse of light sweeping the area.
Nothing.
Fence.
Field.
Empty road.
He turned the light back off.
His heart hammered, louder than the silence.
He told himself it was imagination. Eyes straining past their limits, brain filling in gaps. He’d read about that kind of thing. He’d counseled people whose minds played tricks under stress.
But beneath the rational explanation, another feeling persisted:
He was not alone on this hill.
He kept walking.
The grade leveled as he neared the crest.
From here, in the daytime, you could see more of the basin—a broader sweep of fields and homes, the road continuing down the other side toward the farther edge of Old La Sal. At night, the world narrowed again to shapes and the occasional pinprick of human light.
He stopped at the top.
He turned slowly in a full circle.
Sky above.
Ridges flanking.
Fields below.
Cabin lights now a faint glow behind him, a reminder that there was still one place in the landscape that belonged briefly to him.
He thought of all the drivers who had topped this hill with their headlights cutting through the dark, only to find a deer standing directly in their lane. No malice in the animal. No intent. Just presence at the wrong moment.
He wondered, suddenly:
What would step out if there were no headlights? What would appear for someone who chose to walk instead of drive?
As if answering the question, something shifted again at the edge of his vision.
This time, he didn’t move the light.
He held still.
The shape was closer now.
Standing near a fence line on the left side of the road, just below the crest.
It was thin.
Humanoid.
Not a neighbor out for a walk—no jacket, no hat, no flashlight beam sweeping the path. The figure seemed almost woven from the dark itself, a gray form with edges that blurred slightly into the night.
His breath caught.
Every instinct screamed: Turn on the headlamp. Flood it with light. Identify it.
He did not.
He had spent years stepping into rooms where panic lived—ICUs, emergency bays, grief‑heavy waiting rooms. He knew that immediate reactions rarely tell the whole truth. Sometimes, waiting a few seconds, breathing once, changed everything.
He forced himself to inhale.
Exhale.
He watched.
The figure remained still.
It was maybe six or even seven feet tall.
Bipedal.
Limbs too slender for a human silhouette. The surface of its skin—if that’s what he was seeing—looked unnervingly smooth, a pale gray that did not reflect the starlight so much as absorb it. Where the face should be, two large, black, oval shapes suggested eyes.
They did not glint.
They did not blink.
They did not catch light.
They were like holes in the night.
He knew, rationally, that this could not be right. The human brain, under strain and sparse input, could create visions. The high‑desert night, with its contrast and depth, could trick.
But deep in his gut, another reality settled:
Something was watching him.
Not rushing.
Not attacking.
Simply watching.
He whispered, the words barely audible.
“I see you.”
The figure tilted its head a fraction.
The motion was small but precise.
A gesture of acknowledgment.
He did not move.
He did not know how to protect himself, though the impulse was there. Instead, a prayer surfaced, unbidden, from some deeper part of him.
“God… help me not lie about what I experience.”
The night held.
The Gray held.
For a moment, he felt stripped down to essentials—no title, no credentials, no comfort. Just a human standing on a hill in the dark, a guest on that ridge that had existed long before him and would exist long after.
He wondered what it meant to be the object of a gaze like this.
Not a clinical observation.
Not a predator sizing prey.
Something else.
Curiosity.
Or recognition.
Or a kind of judgment that wasn’t about guilt, but about truth.
He did not know.
Then, subtly, the figure began to move.
It did not step forward onto the road.
It did not approach the cabin.
Instead, it seemed to shift sideways, gliding along the fence line without disturbing it. The motion was smooth, almost frictionless, as if the Gray were not walking through the field but moving through a thinner layer of reality adjacent to his.
As the creature moved, its body seemed to flicker—not with light, but with presence. One moment it was entirely visible. The next, it was partially transparent, the field faintly showing through its torso. The effect was like watching something slip out of phase with the world he inhabited.
He blinked hard.
It remained.
It moved a few yards, then paused again.
Their distance never changed dramatically.
The figure never came close enough to touch.
It stayed just far enough that he could see, but not reach.
With each phase‑shift, it looked less physical and more like a precise outline cut into the dark.
Then, in one final, uncanny slide, it simply faded.
Not upward.
Not downward.
Not left or right.
Just… gone.
The space where it had stood held only field, fence, and shadow.
He waited, heart pounding, eyes scanning, half expecting the creature to reappear behind him, or nearer the cabin, or even closer on the road.
It did not.
The hill returned to the kind of emptiness he was used to.
Stars above.
Fields below.
A distant dog bark again, as if nothing had changed at all.
He turned the headlamp back on, more for his legs and footsteps than his mind.
The road glowed in front of him.
He started walking back down, each step measured, feeling the slight strain of the descent. The cabin’s faint light grew slowly, a small promise of warmth and walls and familiar objects.
His thoughts, however, did not slip back easily into familiar categories.
What did I see?
He could write it off as imagination, tired eyes, the brain playing with contrast. He had listened compassionately to people whose minds had constructed figures in the dark, and he knew how delicate those stories could be.
But something in him resisted the easy dismissal.
This had felt different.
Not chaotic.
Not fragmented.
Focused.
Purposeful.
He thought of all the times he had told others that God saw them—that they were known fully, even in their darkest moments. Tonight, the metaphor had taken on an unsettling sharpness.
What if being “seen” was not always comfortable?
What if being known meant standing on a hill in the dark, under a gaze that did not flatter or soften, but simply reflected who you were?
By the time he reached the cabin, his legs felt steady again.
He stepped onto the porch, clicked off the headlamp, and opened the door. He thought, I expected to find deer on the hill or some kind of evidence for suicide hill.
Inside, the normal world returned: the full kitchen and table by the window, the couch by the fire with its quiet TV, and bathroom down the hall, the small signs of human life arranged neatly against the vastness just outside.
He closed the door gently.
He leaned his forehead against it for a moment.
He whispered to himself, “If that was just my imagination, thank God for the reminder that fear still lives in me. If it was something more, thank God for letting it watch me without hurting me. Either way, help me walk honestly in both light and dark.”
He did not expect an answer.
The prayer itself felt like the point.
He made tea, sat at the kitchen table by the window, and looked out toward the mountain and the starry sky last time that night.
The hill was not visible from here.
But the sky above was.
The stars looked ordinary again, if anything that old can be called ordinary.
He opened his journal.
He wrote down what he had seen:
The road.
The fields.
The fence.
The Gray.
The way it watched.
The way it shifted.
The way it vanished.
He did not try to interpret.
He only recorded.
Later, guests might come to Deer Creek Retreat and walk the same road under the Old La Sal night sky. They might see nothing unusual—just fences, fields, distant house lights, and stars. Or they might feel, at some point, that strange sensation of being watched by something they cannot name.
Either way, the hill would be there.
The basin would be there.
The night would be there.
Ready.
🌌 Staring Into the Infinite? Get the Official Field Guides Before hitting the trail or sitting under the dark sky of Old La Sal, equip your journey with our printable and mobile 12-page companions:
High-Desert Survival Field Guide: Real-world wilderness prep, our 1-gallon hydration formula, 12:00 PM alpine lightning rules, slot canyon flood protocols, and the 10-essential trailhead checklist.
Staring Into the Infinite Field Companion: The 20-minute rhodopsin night vision protocol, short-wave radio porch vigilance, anomaly identification matrix, and dawn/dusk reflection journals.
Download these essential Moab & La Sal field guides instantly for your phone or daypack.
A Challenge to You
If part of you is drawn to mystery more than comfort, consider taking your own night walk in the Old La Sal basin. Stay at the Main Cabin, or the Tiny Home, wait until the stars are bright, then step out and walk the road—headlamp on low, senses open. Don’t go looking for terror; go looking for truth. See what rises in you when you know you are visible in the dark, to yourself, to God, and perhaps to more than you can explain.
Cheers,
Justin
🌌 The Staring Into the Infinite Series
Epilogue (Series Finale): Staring Into the Infinite | Night at Deer Creek Retreat
About the Author
Justin holds a Ph.D. in Education and is an ordained professional chaplain, specializing in the integration of motivation and choice theory, psychological resilience, and pastoral soul care. He transitioned from a ten‑year active duty career as a Chaplain in the U.S. Army, serving in the high‑intensity environment of a critical care military hospital, where he learned to sit with people in their deepest valleys and darkest nights. His work now bridges empirical behavioral science with practical strategies for long‑term identity formation and spiritual growth.
Justin serves as the primary researcher and writer for grittygritgrit.com, a digital platform dedicated to helping individuals cultivate authentic perseverance through profound transitions, traumas, and seasons of suffering. You can explore more of his high‑mountain‑desert reflections, stories, and resources at deercreeklasal.com.
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