[SR71]

Finally had one I remembered. It started outside of a small old wooden house up near the crest of a hill, about 200 yards from the hilltop. The house seemed empty. It was cold and snow was on the laid over field grass of the unkempt yard, which was turning to meadow. There were two other guys with me, I don't know who they were. We left the yard and ducked under an old three stranded wire fence into a pasture bordered by woods and walked up to the hilltop, which was also meadow. It was night at that point. Then we headed back downhill across an expanse of open field toward this big quarry. The hillside was quarried into in a large box shape, and the quarry walls descended downhill in the distance until they finally tapered into the valley. Then, we were inside the quarry on a narrow path built into the quarry wall. We were on a path that was nothing more than a long ledge about a foot and a half wide. It was oddly geometrical, with the path well leveled and the corners squared off, almost the way things are square at the corners of buildings. The quarry walls extended up for a hundred feet and down for maybe 70 feet and were dead sheer. The path was hard clay with small pebbles embedded throughout it. We were moving along it by shuffling sideways with our backs to the wall. We went around a right hand corner and then to our right and about 10 feet later had to make a sharp left corner and about three feet later another sharp right. The corner of the path there was worn away and rounded with a large radius so there was no flat place to walk on. If I remember right, no one spoke, all communication was by way of expressions and gestures. I indicated to the guys we had to turn back, it was impossible to get around the corner. The guy right beside me was like, no, it's too hard, we can't go back! It seemed like we had already traveled a long way along the path. I indicated yeah, but look there! It's impossible! We can't go forward. We can't just stay here. He looked really annoyed and started back the way we came. He had only taken a few shuffles and he slipped off the ledge! Just as it happened he gave me this accusing, angry, sort of eye rolling I-told-you-so look. I watched him plummet down for 3 or 4 seconds. It really was shocking, he was falling so far. There was this weird thing where his body was rigidly erect and oriented vertically feet first as he fell, as if he was standing at attention or something. He seemed to accelerate unnaturally fast. Then I woke up feeling really guilty about saying we had to turn around.