Thieves Stole a Beloved Boulder From Inside a House—And Left Behind a Riddle

If “the Portable story” means nothing to you—elicits no amount of humor or frustration or anger—allow me to catch you up. Portable is a 50-pound rectangular piece of granite that, up until recently, lived near the classic boulder Superfly in Squamish, B.C. It has two classic problems, a V4 mantel and a V6 pinch. This little rock made local headlines last September when it inexplicably disappeared from beneath Superfly. Four months later, Portable emerged one thousand miles and an international border away—under the famous Ironman Traverse near Bishop, California.

Ethan Salvo, a professional climber from Squamish, happened to be in the Bishop area when Portable was found. He took it into his custody and vowed to bring it home at the end of his trip. To this day, the September disappearance of Portable and its reappearance in Bishop remains a mystery, and that leg of the story alone caught the attention of Reddit, Squamish’s local paper The Squamish Chief, Gripped, and, somehow, The New York Times. Portable’s imminent repatriation was a tidy ending to a somewhat tense but generally funny story: Beloved boulder, gone for four months, reappears unchanged and will now be going home in the sturdy hands of a young professional climber. No harm, no foul.

It wasn’t over, though. Not even close.

***

Housesitting is a great gig for dirtbags, so when Lauren DeLaunay Miller and her husband Bud needed someone to watch their dog and home for a few days while on a trip to Yosemite, they invited the Subaru-dwelling Salvo at the suggestion of a mutual friend, Eric Bissell.

Salvo wasn’t thinking much about Portable while unloading laundry from his car and into the home he’d stay in for a few days. Portable was beside his laundry, and Salvo, seemingly concerned about the boulder’s wellbeing, thought, “I’ll get [Portable] out of the car for a couple days too.” He brought Portable inside, near the front door, and carried on with his day.

A few days later, Salvo headed out to a friend’s birthday party. When he returned around 11:00 p.m. he noticed a void beside the front door. Portable was gone, and in its place, a note that read:

DEAR ETHAN,

I APPRECIATE ALL YOU’VE DONE FOR ME, AND YOUR INTENT TO SAFEGUARD MY PASSAGE HOME. BUT EVERY CLIMBER COMES TO BISHOP TO FIND THEMSELVES, AND I AM NO DIFFERENT. MY JOURNEY HERE IS NOT COMPLETE . I AM GOING CLIMBING. MEET ME WHERE I WAS FOUND, WHEN THE NIGHT IS BRIGHTEST.

YOURS TRULY,

PORTABLE

***

DeLaunay Miller wasn’t thinking about Portable during her trip to Yosemite—her husband didn’t even know what Portable was. She was, however, thinking about her chickens. They had a tendency to fly into her vegetable garden and get stuck, so a few months ago she bought a surveillance camera to keep an eye on them. When she checked on the chickens after a day of climbing, she saw a weird thumbnail from the motion-activated camera timestamped 10:38 p.m., Friday, January 30. Instead of chickens, or Salvo, or their dog Bodie, the camera captured two people approaching her home and looking over their shoulders. “One of them crawled through my dog door,” DeLaunay Miller said.

At first, she didn’t think much of the photos. The footage was a day old—if they had been burgled, or if something had happened to the dog, Salvo would’ve told them. Maybe somebody had become locked out, or maybe he’d thrown a party. DeLaunay Miller didn’t want Salvo to feel like he was being spied on, so she hesitated to broach the topic. But, by the next morning, she still couldn’t make sense of the person going through her dog door, so she texted her friend Eric Bissell, the one who set up the housesitting gig. Bissell, who was already aware of Portable’s theft and helping Salvo catch the culprit, assumed this break in was about Portable and encouraged DeLaunay Miller to call Salvo. Salvo picked up, explained that he’d been pranked, Portable was stolen, replaced with a note, and that he didn’t know who did it. “All of a sudden it felt really extreme,” DeLaunay Miller told me, “like, you don’t know who it is?”

***

Back before the heist, when Salvo first heard of Portable appearing in Bishop, he knew his friend Rachel Heagle was camping at the Buttermilk Boulders, so he asked her to go to Ironman Traverse and verify if the rumors were true. She found the boulder and carried it back to the “Square Lot”—the de facto Buttermilks campground—before eventually handing it off to Salvo for its journey home. Naturally, Portable lingered as a topic of conversation in the Square Lot. Questions about who had originally taken it from Squamish eventually turned into jokes about different people taking it again, and then, as Heagle put it, “my friend had an idea.”

“He wanted it to be fun and meaningful. The idea was that a series of riddles would take you through the story of a Bishop climber: Ironman, The Grandpa [Peabody Boulder], and then A Little Life (V14)….” Breaking into a house was never a part of the plan, according to Heagle: “They told me [how they got Portable], and my first reaction was ‘You did what?’” With Portable in hand, their first riddle lured Salvo to Ironman with the clue: “When everything started to go downhill.”

Meanwhile, Salvo was stressed and upset. He accused one friend of stealing Portable, and demanded to see his phone’s location history to exonerate him. Eventually someone who knew the thieves offered to put Salvo in touch by phone. Salvo told them he didn’t need to know who they were, but they were going to bring Portable back, and they were going to apologize to the homeowners. When a woman’s voice responded, something clicked for Salvo. Rachel Heagle’s voice. It was his friends.

It was “worst case scenario” for Heagle and her crew. The weight of what they had done resulted in deep conflict. They couldn’t decide what to do next with Portable. Should it stay in Bishop? Onward to Hueco? They all agreed it needed to eventually make its way back to Squamish. The group pressured Heagle to take the fall for Portable, since she had technically not stolen the boulder, and would therefore—according to the thieves—not get in “as much trouble.” “We started playing clean up, bringing the boulder back to Ethan [Salvo], and having a conversation with him, which was not the greatest,” Heagle said. Salvo was furious: “I didn’t see how it was funny…they sent me on a wild goose chase and broke into a house, so many lines crossed.”

Some harm, some foul. It was an ill-thought out prank gone wrong, or, as DeLaunay Miller put it, “Something you would do if you were 23.” Indeed, there are elements of either ignorance or privilege, or both, that are glaring: DeLaunay Miller wondered what would have happened if her and her husband were home a few days early, with their infant, and they saw someone sneak in through the dog door. Or what if their reactive dog (whose door it is in the first place) attacked them? Or what if they broke into a home belonging to one of the millions of gun owners in the United States?

***

In the gossipy Square Lot, it is surely no secret who crawled under a dog door, took a rock, and left a cryptic code, but nobody was willing to say who they are. I encouraged those who knew the thieves to get in contact with me, but had no leads at the time of publishing. Salvo knows, but didn’t see how sharing their names would help the situation, and even though they made a mistake, he didn’t want them to be the subject of internet hate. Heagle, also, wouldn’t give up the thieves’ names. She had given her word she wouldn’t throw them under the bus. She did apologize to Salvo, and they reconciled. DeLaunay Miller still doesn’t know who did it.

For Salvo’s part, he’s flabbergasted, exhausted, and hopes that “whatever media comes out of this is big enough to discourage anyone from doing this again.” DeLaunay Miller and her husband see the humor in the sheer absurdity. They joked that they should somehow prank them back, or that Portable should be theirs now, or at least should come back to the home so they can climb it. At the same, “this was a prank, but also a felony,” and the family now has an element of anxiety, if not fear, that they didn’t before; the thieves may have only taken a rock, but someone broke into their home.

As for the ones who took Portable? It is naive to think that withholding their names from this article or others will keep them from any sort of consequences, especially when it is those around them—and those they victimized—doing the heavy lifting. “I don’t want to get these people in actual trouble,” DeLaunay Miller said, “but I would like them to know that the only reason they aren’t in trouble is because I’ve decided to be chill about it.”

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