Who is the Black Marmot anyway?

The Black Marmot is a superhero. He lurks above the treeline on mountainsides, hugging the mist and creeping through low-lying clouds. His is the job of safeguarding other marmots, who, if you don't already know, are wonderful large-rumped rodents who scurry and hop -- they occasionally stop to peer regally down the mountains at the bipeds below. The Black Marmot first donned his mask in 2000.

Marmots Darin Bradley and Jesse Gomez first encountered this notorious little mammal on a road trip they shared during the summer following their twenty-first birthdays. Their wanderings led them through a phantasmagoria of abandoned mines; low-stakes casinos and the retirees who filled them; flooded canyons; crummy movie-theaters; bars; and, of course, seedy motels. When, at last, the duo rode the Cog Railway up Pikes Peak in Manitou Springs, Colorado, they found their shared totem animal. Seeing tawny-furred marmots sunbathing thousands of feet up the mountain struck them as simply divine. They frolicked, they rolled, they sniffed with patrician disdain -- all of it, it seemed, was a show ... an exhibition for the bright-eyed soul searchers fogging the windows in the Railway. Darin and Jesse knew they would one day tell the story, for, at last, they had found themselves.

The road-tripping pair concluded that there must exist some warden, some guardian who ensures the stability of the marmots' idyllic lifestyle on that craggy peak. Through processes of deduction, they eventually came to understand how the mysterious warden styled himself and how, exactly, he went about fighting mountainside crime. With a cape and a mask, this lone marmot oversees the contented dreams of his lazing, lotus-eating kin. It has come to the attention of Jesse and Darin, now four years later, that the Black Marmot worked beats in Europe for hundreds of years before ever arriving in the United States. These rumors are scheduled for verification in the summer of 2005.