A Night in Castle Crags

How do you explain to your girlfriend why you stood her up for a movie date? Especially when you had stood her up previously. Your solution, hinted at is unusual.
Of course, if you and two fellow college freshmen from Dunsmuir hike into the wilderness the day before, into an area of precipitous cliffs, and shoot at a bear with a .22 rifle, and are stymied in your return hike after finding yourselves at the top of a waterfall between sheer walls of granite when it’s getting too dark to see, you might decide to build a fire and spend the night, as Collins, Sanchez, and Dunnigan chose to do. And if that night in the mountains caused you to miss a date and you were challenged by a Mountain Lion, and you built the fire bigger, how is your girlfriend going to find fault?
The reader might wonder what enticed these young men to hike into the Castle Crags in the first place and what else could it have been than to search for and find the Wells Fargo cash box stolen from a stage coach in the mid-1800s. What they learned was that the Castle Crags is a much more challenging geologic feature that just being a tourist attraction viewed from a distance.