Post by Dakota Snow on Jun 2, 2016 6:32:15 GMT -5
The journey up to Bear Lake would take weeks, as it was waiting game for the snows to clear enough in early Spring for the road up into Rocky Mountain National Park and Bear Lake inside it. For once the world was relatively tame compared to the whirlwind of misfortune that had torn their adopted family apart since Autumn and the most of the whole last year. Spring's slow advance up into the mountains would lead to Estes Park, and then a couple weeks more finally to Bear Lake.
Dakota wasn't sure what she was expecting when they finally got there, but what they found was quite disheartening. The burnt, weathered ruins of a post-apocalyptic settlement with nature already having reclaimed too much of it over the last year to know exactly the fate of those that once called the now abandoned site home. Another couple years, and you might be able to tell anything was here at all without digging down.
Patches of slushy, icy Spring snow still clung stubbornly to the ground here and there, but mostly the world was turning green again. Meadowy mountain grasses and flowers grew in and around the blackened ruins. Any bodies to be found were too far gone to be recognized. About the only saving grace, if Dakota could call it that, was there being no familiar faces among the few walkers that might be found wandering around.
There was no sign of Ash, Mark, Lilly, Tori, Tala, Wyatt, Anthony, Vivian, Remy or anyone at all that they were hoping to find up here. Were any of them among the unrecognizable dead? Were they even here when this settlement met its demise? Did Ash and company Or Tala and company even get here yet?
The dark fate this settlement came to at least seemed so long ago that Dakota thought the last two possibilities to be true, and easy enough to confirm. It would take a little waiting. It would take a few days at least to replenish their food and supplies. That give a little time to wait, before starting off for Texas as the girls had agreed with Nic back in Denver.
Over the next couple days, Dakota was glad to put her marksmanship to use in hunting for once. The reason her uncle pushed her youth rifle into her hands in the opening days of the outbreak in the first place. She got to put more of the skills her uncle instilled in her in those couple days than she had in the last two and half years combined. Hunting, a little fishing and what little there was to gather from early spring plants. It almost felt like going home again... almost.