Tim Sprinkle

A Mountain of Trouble

Two of the three American hikers currently being detained in Iran are local to Colorado (or have local ties) so this piece in the latest issue of Outside caught my eye.

As we hiked into the Zagros Mountains, which rise to nearly 12,000 feet along the border between Iraq and Iran, the driver grew nervous. "We're going to have lunch in Tehran," he said with a tense laugh. He had reason for his gallows humor: Six months earlier, three Americans—Shane Bauer, 27; his girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, 31; and Josh Fattal, 27, Bauer's former housemate from the University of California at Berkeley—had walked along this same trail, with disastrous results. The hikers had—accidentally, it seems—strayed across the unmarked border into Iran, been seized by border guards, accused of being U.S. spies, and transported to the notorious Evin Prison, in Tehran, where they remained as this story went to press, in March. Bauer, Shourd, and Fattal are experienced globetrotters who've traveled to such hot spots as Yemen, Kosovo, and Lebanon; two of the three speak Arabic. Yet somehow—through lack of preparation, cultural misunderstanding, ignorance, or a combination of all three—these sophisticated nomads had wandered into one of the worst places on earth to be an American. Now I was retracing their footsteps, trying to understand how they'd made such a catastrophic error.

The path was deserted; when the American hikers were here, at the height of summer, it would have been crowded with families of Iraqi Kurds. The trees along the river would have been leafy and bountiful with fruit, and wildflowers would have speckled the now monochromatic pale green slopes. Ahead of us, a sign in Kurdish script identified the settlement of Zorm, a cluster of stone-and-mud huts perched on an outcropping. We slid down a muddy slope to talk to a farmer drying pomegranate rinds on the roof of his house. He remembered seeing the Americans when they stopped for tea before continuing to the waterfall. Two mornings later, he said, police and intelligence officers swarmed the village, informing locals that "the Americans have been arrested in Iran." The farmer suspected that their transgression had been deliberate, though there are no signs to announce the border. "Nobody has ever made that mistake before," he said. "Who knows? Maybe it was their secret task to go."