So, since I'm waiting for missing books to arrive, I went digging through the library again and came up with Christopher Pike's Alosha, which looks like it was marketed as one of his adult novels, even if the main characters are 13 years old or so.
As an aside, let's talk Christopher Pike. I'm pretty sure several folks around my age have fond memories of his YA books, as do I. (His YA fiction was about 90% fun reading and 10% WTAF. And there's more than a little crossover between them. From interdimensional sapient dinosaurs trying to kill teenagers, teenage ghosts solving their own murders, or the worst YA novel I ever read of his, where the main character is being tormented by the baby she's having aborted while both of them are dying...) His Adult novels haver a less favorable ratio. A few are pretty interesting, but plots that you can slide by with in YA don't work as well in adult fiction, like having Satan and Nazis use ketamine to force people's souls out of their bodies so the bad people can move in.
Ali is a 13 year old girl, living with her truck driver father after her mother died in a car crash on Ali's 12th birthday. Much of her free time is spent in the woods on the side of the nearby Pete's Peak, where she tries to guilt the loggers into not cutting down the forest. Her best friend Cindy isn't as keen on this as Ali is, but...
Anyway, as we open, Ali is on her way up to the forest to tie ribbons on the trees as a small form of protest. She, however, gets interrupted by unknown creatures and winds up buried alive in an avalanche. She manages to escape, and convinces Cindy and Steve (a geek acquaintance) to go back up, since Ali is convinced it was Bigfoot. This occasion leads to finding Bigfoot prints, and Ali getting thrown in the river not far from the falls. She manages to escape and meets a talking tree who tells he she has passed two of seven tests and gives her the thrust of the plot: A Yanti has opened on the top of Pete's Peak, and she has two days to reach the summit and close it to keep Elementals from another dimension from entering our world, all while passing the other 5 tests.
Which leads to Ali roping in Karl, who is slightly older, Cindy, and Steve to climb the mountain the next day, along with a rather larcenous Leprechaun and a troll she meets on the way up.
For the most part, it plays out like a YA urban fantasy, and it's pretty good reading.
Unfortunately, it's also book 1 of a trilogy, and while I found book 3 in my collection, I'm missing the second book, so we'll return to this when book 2 arrives.
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