His right leg dipped, dragging the rest of his body down into the hole. He landed on his right side, slamming his shoulder against the hard, frozen ground. “Shit,” he mumbled, regaining his footing. Throbbing in his shoulder was immediate. There’d be a deep bruise by morning. He was lucky it hadn’t dislocated with that impact.

“Reed, you okay?” Wade asked, appearing at the edge of the hole.

The top of the hole was about two feet above him. His fingers barely grazed the top and the snow at the edge wouldn’t support his weight. “Careful along the edge, we don’t want it to give way.”

Wade lay on his stomach and extended his arms over the edge. “Grab my hands.”

“No disrespect, Wade, but I’m two hundred pounds with fifty pounds of gear.” The slightly older man was maybe one fifty. He was strong, but Reed doubted he could hoist him out.

Luckily, Tyler appeared right beside him. “I’m sure Hercules here has everything under control, but I have a hot date tonight, so quit messing around and get out of there,” he said.

Reed removed his gear and tossed it high to Tyler.

Then both men gripped a forearm and pulled him up. He winced at the pain in his shoulder and rotated it several times. “Thanks,” he said, glancing down the rest of the trail. Were there any more surprises along the way?

“Rethinking this now, aren’t you?” Tyler said.

“Yes,” Reed said. “I don’t trust that there aren’t more of these.” He rotated his shoulder again. The impact of the fall had him already feeling pain through his arm and chest. He didn’t think anything was broken, but breathing was becoming slightly labored. “What do you think of taking the west trail down?” he asked, pointing to a different path, closer to the mountain’s edge.

Tyler nodded. “It holds its own concerns, but I think it’s better than these sinkholes.”

Reed was lucky this one had only been eight feet deep. He’d seen others that were a thirty- or forty-foot fall. A tumble that far could break limbs, or worse. “Okay. We move slowly,” he told the group.

“I wonder who’s winning that poker game,” Wade mumbled as they reached the new trail twenty minutes later.

Before Reed could respond, the ground disappeared beneath his feet and he was free-falling. His arms waved at his sides as he fought to find something to grab hold of, but there was nothing but air around him for a long three or four seconds.