After the fall

About 10 students who had arrived at lunch early were eager to continue with the hike before everyone was done eating. So the group, with Colt and Steve Jean among them, headed down Boot Canyon toward the trail up to Emory Peak. Colt was one of the first students to reach the notch at the summit, where the trail ends at the rock wall leading up to the very top of the mountain. Several students who got there about the same time asked him whether he was going to climb it, but he refused. He put his pack down and waited for the rest of the group.

Bloomfield, who was walking with his adult son, was at the back of the pack. When he arrived at the intersection of Boot Canyon Trail and Emory Peak Trail, a mile below the peak, he found a student asleep on a food-storage-container bin. Bloomfield would later tell investigators that the girl was the unofficial counter, the person who would tell him who had gone up and who stayed behind. She told him that everyone she had been with had gone up to the peak. Bloomfield and his son decided they were too tired to climb the steep 1-mile peak trail and waited at the intersection with a dozen or so of the students who chose not to go up.

Bloomfield would tell investigators that a few things about this hike were different from the ones he had made in the past. In previous years, another teacher, an experienced climber, would be the first to make it to the summit notch. He would assist all the students up and down the perilous peak. The teacher had transferred school districts the year before. This was Bloomfield's second year leading the trip without him. Another difference: This year many more students were interested in climbing the peak than in the past.

To Colt and many of the other students, the summit of Emory Peak must have looked as daunting as Mt. Everest. The mountaintop is capped with a sheer, 30-foot rock wall with 600-foot falls on two sides. There are two ways to get to the top from the notch. One is to rock-climb straight up the middle, gingerly feeling your way for hand- and footholds. Although terrifying at first, it is actually the safest route. The second way is to follow a path that curves to the right and up the summit. Once the path disappears around the rock, it becomes a foot-wide precipice with a 600-foot rock chute below.

Colt sat at the base of the peak while about 10 students climbed up. An upperclassman who had been on the trip before showed a few students how to ascend in the middle of the rock face.

Several of the students asked Colt to join them, but he shook his head. Soon Steve Jean arrived with his son, Eric, and several other members of Colt's group. Steve Jean wasn't sure how to climb up either and waited to see how some of the kids were doing it. Then he encouraged Colt to go with him. "You've come this far; you might as well go all the way to the top," several students recalled Jean telling Colt. "I hear it's beautiful up there."

Colt continued to sit there. So Jean was surprised that a few minutes later he felt someone climbing up behind him. He turned to see Colt. A girl turned around and said, "Colt, aren't you afraid of heights?"

"Let's not talk about it," Colt replied.

When they reached the top, Colt crouched down in the middle of the boulder-strewn summit and held his ashen face in his hands. Eric Jean walked over to talk to him. He asked him whether he was afraid of heights, and he said yes. Steve Jean went to Colt.

"You made it, Colt," he said. "Good job."

No one knows for certain what happened next. Steve Jean told the park rangers two stories. At first he said he turned around and Colt was gone. Another time, he told the rangers he saw Colt descend the peak. Steve Jean and several other students said that about 10 minutes after anyone remembers last seeing Colt, they heard what they thought was a rockslide far down the south side of the mountain. They didn't think anything of it. Steve Jean told DISD investigators that he saw a friend of Colt's go down the mountain and assumed Colt was with him. He also told the investigators that he went along to be with his son and wasn't there to supervise anyone.

Bloomfield waited about a mile below the summit for the last students to climb down from the peak. Two girls told him they were the last ones on the peak. No one noticed Colt's backpack left at the summit notch. Bloomfield and the rest of the group headed back to the Chisos Basin, where they had left the vans. It was almost 6 p.m. Not until the students had loaded into the vans did anyone notice that Colt was missing -- a full three hours after he was last seen crouched and petrified on Emory Peak.