The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands by Jon Billman.
Title: The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands.
Author: Jon Billman.
Genre: Non-fiction.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: 2020.
Summary: Until a person is found, you don't know if they're dead, their remains entombed forever under a rockslide or hidden in a crevasse, scattered by wolves or, more likely, birds. The proverbial vanished without a trace incidents, which happen a lot more frequently (and a lot closer to your backyard) than almost anyone thinks. These are the missing whose situations are the hardest on loved ones left behind. On April 4, 2017, a young cyclist named Jacob Gray left his bike on the side of the road, disappearing into Olympic National Park in northwestern Washington. In this book, the author follows Jacob's father, Randy Gray, in his courageous and life-halting search for his son, exploring exactly what happens when someone goes missing. Braided around this narrative are accounts of those who fill the vacuum created by a vanished human being: a bloodhound handler, backcountry search and rescue experts, the world's foremost Bigfoot researcher, psychics, and countless others who dedicate their time to assist family members desperately searching for loved ones or, at least, a sense of closure. By delving into the voids left behind by the missing, this book embraces the faulty memories of those who search and the histories of the lost. But, at its core, the book is about now and tomorrow, when another person will be lost to the wilderness.
My rating: 8/10
My review:
♥ You dream about missing persons, even though the nightmares don't belong to you.
Rational professionals I've met in my research-law enforcement and search-and-rescue personnel-tend to believe that our world is still a big, wild, and remote place, and logic and reason are at the core of missing persons cases. A very difficult puzzle laid out on a massive table, but there are rules and clues, and the puzzle can be solved. I agree with them most of the time.
~~from Author's Note.
♥ Searchers use the acronym POS and sometimes joke that it stands for "piece of shit." It stands for probability of success, finding the missing.
♥ The bike, trailer, and gear along the Sol Duc Road is now what searchers cal the "LKP"-Last Known Position.
♥ Erwin Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who in 1935, in response to a quantum mechanic problem, stated simply that if you stick a cat in a sealed box-along with something that can kill the cat (in his case, a radioactive atom)-you won't know if the cat is alive or dead until you open the box. Before you open the box and look inside, the cat is both alive and dead. Until a person is found you don't know if they're dead, their remains entombed forever under a rockslide or hidden in a crevasse, scattered by wolves or, more likely, birds. What then, when you open Schrödinger's box, and there is no cat inside at all-what if it's empty?
Furthermore, you don't know for sure if a person is missing at all. While it's not likely, there's an outside chance they're alive and perhaps living in South America under a new identity (this happened recently, which I'll get to). A missing person is Schrödinger's cat.
♥ In 2017 I wrote a feature story for Outside magazine called "Leave No Trace" in which I was challenged by my editor to come up with a number representing just how many people are still missing out there, in the wild (magazine editors love figures). Neither the United States nor Canadian governments are keeping track. The Department of the Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, doesn't seem to know. Same with the Department of Agriculture and its U.S. Forest Service. And this isn't getting anywhere close to the Bureau of Indian Affairs-Indian reservations have an epidemic of people, especially women, gone missing. All to say, coming up with figures for people vanished in the wild is harder and far less exacting than Chinese algebra. And uncertainty, of course, leads to speculation and conspiracy theories and, in this case, cryptozoology.
Virginia Woolf wrote in The Waves, "On the outskirts of every agony sits some observant fellow who points." I felt like an empty-ambulance chaser with four-wheel drive. But I was getting paid to try.
♥ Paulides, who claims to have researched more than a thousand cases, agreed with me that 1,600 missing in the wild is not a stretch.
That number has been quoted many times since my article came out in 2017. It's a number that drives fact checkers and mathematicians nuts, a rounded guesstimation. It sounds wiser, more profound than it really is; in actuality, like most things involving missing persons, it's ham-handed at best and maybe even a little irresponsible in its inability to accurately quantify such an important phenomenon. But it would be impossible to come up with an exact number. In most states-Washington is one-after seven years a missing person is considered deceased, dead in absentia, so they're no longer missing. Before seven years, someone who wants you declared dead needs evidence you're not alive. After seven years they need evidence you're not dead.
I've had a couple years to live with the figure, and today I'll argue that 1,6000 is wildly conservative. I'm surprised Paulides hadn't coined a number much larger long ago; he'd have gotten away with it. Consider Oregon's national parks and national forests alone. Just since 1997, 190 men and 51 women have vanished. Then there's all the non-public wildlands in Oregon. There's Portland, a city with a bad homeless urban-wildland interface camping problem. More Oregonians go missing every week, and by the time you read this, the math-cloudy to begin with-will be off.
It's not just Oregon that has strange topography on the charts. Most states' missing persons statistical figures climb irregularly upward; however, many of the misssing on public wildlands aren't counted. Or they're not separated from the urban missing. In most states, no one even knows who should be counting. It seems a special mess considering the technological resources we have in our pockets. Sometimes the lost are found, but often not. The mountains are shrouded in fog.
Paulides has identified patterns of "unique factors of disappearances." He lists such recurring characteristics as dogs unable to track scents, the time (late afternoon is a popular window to vanish), and that many victims are found with clothing and footwear removed, even when hypothermia has been ruled out. Severe weather often coincides with the disappearance or the beginning of the search. Children-and remains-are occasionally found unlikely distances from PLS-point last seen-in improbable terrain. Most mysterious to me are the bodies discovered in previously searched areas. This happens with odd frequency, sometimes right along the trail.
♥ But for now, Olympic National Park, overwhelmed with other events as they were, held onto jurisdiction and had invited no outside resources to the search. Absent were the man-trackers and dog teams, trained boots on the ground. A swiftwater rescue team. Drones, fixed-wings, helicopters. In the United States, national parks operate like sovereign countries; search-and-rescue personnel from outside the park must be requested by park officials in order to search. Otherwise, they risk being blackballed from future missions-the park sets the rules.
♥ POD stands for probability of detection-would searchers recognize the target inside the search area? ..A person who falls into a cold river and inhales water will sink. A body-limbs and fingertips-catches easier than you'd think, so it's not likely he'd travel very far downstream. Eventually in cold water-three weeks, a month or so-decomposition produces gases that will cause the body to bloat and often float to the surface.
♥ Olympic National Park is comprised of 1,4000 square miles; 95 percent of those miles are designated wilderness.
♥ One technique for survival from hypothermia is to cover yourself with leaves and forest duff, an insulator.
♥ Sorry all, but without official request from Park Service our Sheriff is not allowing us to deploy, wrote Dietrich Biemiller of Snohomish County Search and Rescue in an email. A cardinal rule among search-and-rescue volunteers is that you never, but never, self-deploy.
..Self-deploying will get a team or an organization blackballed. A mission number had been generated for Jacob's case with West Coast Search Dogs of Washington (Mission #17-201). The mission has to have been generated by park officials, but approval still needs to come from Olympic National Park higher-ups before dogs can deploy, boots and paws on the ground.
♥ bewilder
vb (tr)
1. to confuse utterly; puzzle
2. archaic to cause to become lost
♥ In forty-eight states-exceptions being Alaska and New Mexico, where state police are in charge, in Hawaii, where the respective island police and fire departments have authority-the county sheriff is responsible for search-and-rescue operations. Further exceptions are military bases and national parks.
♥ There is a sense that Jacob might be on a mission. That sense gives Randy and Micah hope that if he's not found where they'd been looking, he's in what search-and-find rescue personnel call TROTW-the rest of the world. And if he's in TROTW, he may be alive.
♥ Randy's niece, her husband, and their new baby arrive to help search. That's how these searches tend to go-family is spelled by other family, including babies. And without family putting pressure on bureaucrats and officials, there's often not much of a professional search at all.
..For anyone close to Jacob it seems as if the gears of bureaucracy are grinding at a snail's pace if they're moving at all. If Jacob had been alive and out there in the wilderness, he most certainly isn't anymore. If he is alive and has taken off voluntarily or otherwise, he isn't the park's problem anymore. Continuous Limited Mode is a nightmarish purgatory. Officially, that's how things go.
♥ The North Fork is an unlikely place for Jacob to be, but by now most places are unlikely. Randy doesn't eat, and he drinks only river water. He takes a board check against the rocks every couple of minutes. His feet still burn from the trench foot inside his neoprene booties. Sixty-three years old. It nearly kills him. But every day he doesn't find a body is a day of hope his son is still alive.
..When he gets out of the trees and the country opens up, he drives limbs into the snow so he can find his way back out. No sign of Jacob. If he's lost up here, was here the day after his bike was found, a helicopter could have spotted him in the open. A helicopter with heat-seeking FLIR technology would have sensed him in the foliage. A dog team could have tracked him up the Aurora Ridge Trail. The what-if tango will drive a searching father insane.
The good monkey on Randy's shoulder-the one that reminds him he's a Christian and a good father who taught Jacob courage and how to survive in the wild-tells him Jacob's out there. "He's on a walkabout," Randy says. "He's trying to figure things out."
♥ For someone close to someone missing, the world is reduced to this binary: missing and searching. Two awful gerunds. Most people left to search don't know what to do, don't know where to look. Wildlands can be overwhelming in their scope and scale. Or they're physically incapable of doing much footwork in rough terrain. And they need to get back to their day jobs, to support their families and keep the plates in the air that we all have to juggle. Randy gray will liquidate his world in order to find his son. Or die trying. Living on the open road in a self-contained camper, changing parks, forests, and cold Pacific beaches on a whim-that's every rich man's dream. Except that Randy Gray has lost a kid.
♥ "He wouldn't choose a town. Jacob goes up. He'd always choose the high point." Micah, who studies lost person behavior in the Coast Guard, told her, "That's what young men in their twenties do-they go up."
♥ But Jacob had not been formally diagnosed by anyone, and the preparation for an epic bicycle tour across the country seemed just what the doctor would order. A self-propelled ride across the continent was a chance for growth and change. A good goal. Major bike routs are all-consuming in the planning alone, and it can be harder for your mind to turn in on itself when you're making grocery and gear lists and studying maps and weather forecasts.
♥ Of course a handful of people in Santa Cruz know, but the call seemed too anemic to be a prank. Randy put it in his pocket, another small beach stone of hope.
♥ The first helicopter used in a National Park Service SAR operation was deployed at Olympic National Park. The rescue heli ended up needing the rescue. It was October 1948, and the search for a seventeen-year-old Eagle Scout, Robert Thorson, had turned into a recovery-Thorson had fallen to his death while descending Brothers Mountain-necessitating an airlift of the remains. The Army Air Rescue Service Bell H-13 Sioux (the kind you see on M*A*S*H) helicopter took off from McChord Field; over the mountains the engine quit and the pilot attempted to land in a small meadow near Upper Lena Lake. A gust of wind swept the chopper into the lake, where it landed upside down forty feet from shore. The three-man crew survived and the rescuers were rescued the next day by rangers and Coast Guard personnel.
♥ Hikers go missing with frequency; it stands to reason, there are many of them out there. Runners too. Berry pickers and mushroom hunters. David Paulides is obsessed with disappeared game hunters. Children, of course, get lost in the woods. Skiers occasionally go missing but are usually found when the snow melts. But cyclists, not so much. Mountain bikers and touring riders vanish about as frequently as golfers.
Long-term mysterious vanishings of touring cyclists with as few clues as Jacob Gray's are so rare that Robert Koester, aka Professor Rescue, the foremost academic on SAR statistics, lisyts only "lost mountain biker" in his seminal 2008 book Lost Person Behavior. Koester is certified as a Type 1 SAR incident commander and holds a PhD in search theory from the University of Portsmouth. All cases of mountain bikes were resolved out of 189 incidents," he told me. But mountain bikers did-do-go missing, as opposed to missing touring cyclists, who don't even get a category.
♥ "I keep telling myself it would be easier if it was a heart attack or car accident-at least we could be angry at something," he says. "Not knowing if or how much he suffered at the end is what haunts me. It might have been a quick ending, but the thought of him being really hurt and yelling for help will stay with me for a while. I try not to focus too much on the fact that he disappeared and more so just think of him as gone." The family likely will never know what happened. "There is no getting past it or moving on," Marcel says. "No being okay with it or getting over it. Closure isn't an option, unfortunately."
His is a case of double-negative indemnity. "The fact that we are identical twins makes it a bit more complicated. Not only do I see him every time I look in the mirror, but I'm also a constant reminder to my friends and family that he is gone. Whenever they see me they most likely see both of us." In 2018 their father took his own life. "He just could not make sense of Marty simply disappearing," Marvel says. "He really needed closure. My dad was not a depressed man before this."
What people don't think of are the social pressures or the family after a loved one disappears. "For the first few years we all lived in fear of leaving the house," Marcel says. "We all knew we would at some point run into someone we know and they would ask, How's it going? Any news? Did they find anything? How did he get lost on a bike ride?"
It occurs to me that I asked Marcel those same questions."There's also small things people would likely not think about that much. I have a hard time answering the phone. I never liked the pone much before, but when you get two phone calls-Marty and for my dad-and on the other end is panic and news that will crush you and change your life forever, it's not easy to answer the phone comfortably anymore. Also being in the woods alone is almost impossible now unless I'm very familiar with the trails or with other people. I also overpack now to be sure I'm okay if anything happens."
♥ But the cadaver dogs indicate in three places on the river. Two indications are deep holes. One of the areas is a logjam, a snarl of imposing Sitka spruce and red cedar pick-up-sticks with a deep, dark depression underneath. It's the logjam that haunts Randy-Moores doesn't want him going near there, where a rope could get tangled in a branch and the current could pin him underwater. The river is still high and running hard-the swiftwater team gets cameras near, but it's too dangerous to perform a thorough enough search under the logjam. They plan to come back in mid-August when the river should be significantly lower.
..The logjam fills Randy's dreams, and he'll wake up thinking about it at four a.m. The dog handlers explain to him that it's unlikely the dogs indicated on a dead animal-they're trained for human cadavers. They could be sensing clothing from a cadaver. Tissue from a cadaver may have washed against a log. A dislodged body part may be trapped under there. Or it could be a whole cadaver.
What they don't emphasize is that it could be none of the above. Dogs are dogs, and sometimes, it seems about as useful as psychics; they want to help, but sometimes their help just gets in the way. Randy is torn. Three cadaver dogs keying in on a logjam focuses all the energy on the logjam. It's more than possible there's nothing to the logjam, that Jacob's not in the river at all. But there's a tendency to want to believe the dogs. There's a tendency to want to believe the Bigfoot people and the psychics, too.
♥ Randy is related to Francis Scott Key, he's told me a couple times. His great grandmother on his mom's side is a Key. He's a former Santa Cruz Assembly of God deacon-that's how he met and befriended Carlos Santana. Now Randy's denominations is the church of the ocean, the redwoods, and now the great spruce forests and snowcapped mountains of the Olympic Peninsula.
On the river back downriver "Jack Straw" by the Grateful Dead plays on the satellite. At times, talking with Randy, it seems he's delusional, that this far hereafter he's still gonna find Jacob alive. But most often people around Randy get swept up in his optimism and want to believe they could channel some of that surfer spirit if they found themselves in his booties. "We can give back, help look for other missing people together." It takes a moment to realize when he says we he means himself and Jacob. The father believes Jacob is on a quest, and now Randy is, too. The wildlife smoke makes the full moon red.
♥ The U.P. is analog, as is going missing and most of search and rescue. When I moved here in 2013 there was a message on the marquee at a local gas station that read WE NOW HAVE PAY AT PUMP. I saw the missing persons flyer fall semester 2016, on the bulletin board outside my office at Northern Michigan University, where I work. I'm convinced no one-least of all students-pauses or looks up from their phones in order to study the bulletin boards, but I'm comforted that they exist. I figured kissing persons flyers had gone the way of milk carton kids. But they haven't.
♥ Malvi was found a week later, accidentally, by surveyors working to move a section of the North Country Trail on the order of the Rock River Wilderness. She was leaning against a maple tree less than a mile from where we'd searched.
..Her discovery fit a pattern that is strange and fuels the Paulidean paranormal fringe who follow these stories: The area where she was found had already been searched shortly after her car was discovered.
♥ Still, as twenty-four hours turned into forty-eight, then seventy-two, things did not look good for Kara Moore. But why couldn't that many trained, experienced personnel-and canines-find a middle-aged woman? Moore suffered from a short-term memory disability, which may have made the search for her more difficult. But the lack of success was as mysterious as it was frustrating for searchers.
Now it was nearly a week since she'd been seen. Statistics were not at all in her favor. That didn't keep the search from going full-steam into day six. By then the family had all but lost hope when a miracle happened-Moore walked out of the wild on the same trail she'd disappeared from. A couple of hikers asked her name. Kara. "A lot of people are looking for you," they said.
Kara Moore found herself. Dozens of searchers with canines and technology covering more than 73,000 acres, and six days later the missing person appears at the place she disappeared. There are myriad incidents where bodies are found in areas that had been previously searched, but rarely does a subject who wants to be found unintentionally evade an all-out search. It's as if she ventured inside a quantum physics problem of her own; perhaps stepped through a portal to another dimension, then hiked back through.
Not even Kara Moore herself can say. Because of her previous brain injury, Moore reported only vague memories of drinking from a pond and sleeping by a log. She didn't know how she got lost or how she found her way back. But she was fine.
Pictured Rocks typically sees between five and ten missing hikers a year-nearly all of them are found within twenty-four hours.
♥ The day Carlo went missing, three-year-old Casey Hathaway had been missing for nearly three days near his great-grandmother's rural Craven County, North Carolina, home. The weather was miserable-deadly-for a three-year-old not geared up properly; temperatures dropped to below freezing and rain blew in sideways, making swamps of the surrounding forest. Under three feet tall, Casey wasn't dressed for cold, wet nights. He had no food or water. At one point more than five hundred volunteers aided in the search for Casey. Foot searchers worked a grid through the woods, starting at the boy's last known point-his great-grandmother's yard-and walking line-of-sight so that chances of missing a clue were minimal. Crack canine teams were quickly brought in, and a heat-seeking FLIR-equipped helicopter flew almost constantly in the search for Casey. None of those resources proved effective.
On the evening of January 24, a woman walking her dog heard a cry in the bush. Shane Grier, an EMS coordinator, and his team walked through waist-deep water to where they found the little boy wet but alive, entangled in briars and whimpering for his mother. He checked out fine at the hospital, and within a couple of hours he was eating Cheetos and watching cartoons. The spot where he was pulled from the brambles was a quarter mile from his great-grandmother's house.
I'd been following the Casey Hathaway story with keen interest. If anything, I'd learned just enough through my research regarding missing persons in the wild that it was unlikely the outcome in his case would be good. How Casey managed to avoid deadly hypothermia is a miracle-similar weather has killed scores of adults. Casey's story gained international media attention when he told his grandmother that while he was missing he'd been kept company and taken care of by a bear.
Tanya Barba of OMRT told me this regarding Casey: "I am one hundred percent certain that these children are picked up by Bigfoot," she says. "How does a child travel four thousand feet in elevation in his bare feet in two days? Or, in Casey's case, travel through waist-deep swamp water?"
I think about whether it's any less likely that Casey had kept company with Bigfoot than that hundreds of searchers, dogs, and helicopters couldn't locate him a quarter mile from the LKP, forty yards from a road.
..A couple of years ago I would have smirked at Tanya's assessment and probably made a stupid joke, but I told her I wasn't about to argue with her. I'd studied too many cases with outcomes so strange as to be unexplainable. Or with no outcome at all and the person is still missing. Maybe Casey was befriended by a bear; maybe the bear was actually a Bigfoot. Maybe something else just as strange happened, and we'll never know about it. But these cases happen frequently enough that it can be misleading to simply dismiss the circumstances through conventional wisdom. I'd seen firsthand the kind of passion and intelligence OMRT exhibit in the response to Jacob's vanish, and it equals their passionate and intelligent quest fore more knowledge regarding Bigfoot.
♥ Hell's Angels. Aliens from space. Russian mafia. Portals to other dimensions. Sex traffickers. Moonies. Body-part merchants. Aliens form the hollow earth. String theory. Satanic cults. They're as unlikely as Sasquatch, yet they're all Randy's "possible impossibilities." "I've looked from basic to extreme," he says. "I knew the stepdaughter of Jim Jones. She didn't go to Africa." We talk about David Koresh and the draw of cults. They don't seem like Jacob's scene, unless, Randy believes, he found the right one.
Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan, had his Black Lodge compound in the sixties in Santa Cruz. It's on Randy's mind. "These people are so frickin' twisted."
Those things-motorcycle gangs, syndicates, and cults-are prpobably more likely in a wild vanish than being attacked by a black bear or a mountain lion, and less likely than stepping off-trail to go to the bathroom and getting lost. Or a widowmaker tree falling on you. And far less likely than slipping off a slick rock and falling off a cliff or into a river.
If a person crawled out of ice-cold water, a known survival technique is to bury yourself in a blanket of pine needles and forest duff, where you could succumb to hypothermia and be hidden from searchers. A rotten log is enough to hide a body. The forests of Olympic National Park and Olympic National Forest are a giant's hair shirt of downed trees.
Another thing in the cascade of possibilities of what happened to Jacob is another half theory Paulides raises, concerning a rash of men found drowned with levels of GHB-gamma-hydroxybutyrate-in their bloodstreams. GHB is a depressant pushed toward bodybuilders and partyers as a strength enhancer, aphrodisiac, and one of several substances listed under the heading "date rape" drugs. That bodies are pulled out of water with GHB-and usually alcohol, too-in their system is obviously concerning, but Paulides seems to be ambulance chasing and giving oxygen to a new conspiracy before he races along to the next one.
This is the kind of thing Randy thinks about most of the time.
♥ This may be one of Randy's last pushes of the summer, and the only thing left now is more improbable bush. It takes everything I have to keep up with him as he crawls up riverbanks and squirrels over downed Sitka spruce logs flicked through the forest like overlarge pick-up sticks. We walk through fresh bear scat and over the beds where they'd just slept. We're clawed again and again by the ubiquitous and noxious devil's club. The root of the shrub is traditionally used for medicine to treat ailments from arthritis to diabetes, but the stems are covered in nettle-like spines that scratch through gloves and sleeves.
He'll say he's looking for clues. An item that Jacob carried. A wrapper from a candy bar Jacob likes. Initials carved into a tree. But I can tell it's an exhausting relief when he walks for hours and hours and doesn't find anything at all. It's a relief when he doesn't find his son's body.
♥ Soon we come to a big downed Sitka spruce, one of the tallest living things on the planet, they can get to be three hundred feet tall, fifteen feet in diameter, and this one is close to that.
♥ The not-knowing. That's the mental and emotional cancer, the thing Randy can't see, can't control. Jacob gray could be in TROTW-anywhere else but Olympic National park or the Olympic Peninsula or Washington State. Or he could be pinned in some freak hydraulic in the Sol Duc State River or under a log off one of hundreds of miles of trail. The not-knowing is mad-making.
♥ In the world of the lost-in-the-wild, people soon find out that the circle is small. ..The left-behind are Randy's tribe now.
♥ Researcher and family therapist Pauline Boss, author of Ambiguous Loss, coined the term frozen grief. A pain that's like radiation, a slow cook at your nerves that might take many years to kill you. Boss claims that a family member missing to the unknown is the hardest thing a human being ever has to face.
Her book places Alzheimer's disease in the second category of ambiguous loss, opposite of a missing person in the wild, whereby a person is physically present but psychologically missing. My dad suffered Alzheimer's, and it was difficult, but his personality was still evident. He'd get lost in his own house and his tastes changed-he switched from beer to Dr Pepper, Tabasco to ketchup. But he still loved animals and old westerns on television. His sense of humor held almost up until he died. He was there. We could talk with him and enjoy his presence in the room, even as he slept. He was there. Mostly. Alzheimer's disease is hard on everyone, my mom especially, but I don't think it can come close to a child being physically vanished when it's unclear whether or not that child is dead or alive.
♥ The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, calls missing persons (and unidentified remains) "the nations' silent mass disaster." They estimate that on any given day there are between 80,000 and 90,000 people actively listed with law enforcement as missing. The majority of those, of course, disappear in populated areas.
Those figures are big and lumpy and far from exacting. If fewer people vanish in the wild, it stands to reason there would be a better accounting of them. But the government does not actively aggregate such statistics. The Department of the Interior knows how many wolves and grizzly bears roam its wilds, but has a hard time keeping track of visitors who disappear. The Department of Justice keeps a database, the national Missing and Unidentified Persons System, NamUs, but reporting missing persons is voluntary in all but ten states, and law enforcement and coroner participation is voluntary as well. So a lot of the missing are also missing from the database.
According to NamUs, more than 600,000 persons go missing in the United States each year; thankfully, many of these are quickly found alive. Sixty percent of the missing are male, 40 percent are female. The average age for a missing person is thirty-four. California-a huge, wild state with a mammoth population-has the most missing persons: 2,133. In contrast and not surprisingly, Rhode Island has the fewest with twenty.
Of course, not all of the missing vanish into the wild. But consider that the state with the most missing persons per capita is Alaska, with a staggering 41.8 people missing for every 100,000. Outside of Anchorage and Fairbanks, Alaska is pretty much all wild. You could say there are only 309 missing persons there, but when you consider its total population is only three quarters of a million people, that's an unsettling number.
Arizona is a wild state and is number two in terms of the missing per capita. No one professes to know for sure how many people are missing in the Grand Canyon because the government doesn't keep those records-or, like UFO research, they're hiding them. Oregon is third on the list. Washington, Jacob's PLS, is fourth on the list.
For some reason the state with the least number of missing persons per 100,000 is Massachusetts, even though neighboring Vermont is fifth on the list, right after Washington. The top ten round out with Maine, Wyoming, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Montana.
After the September 11 attacks, the Department of the Interior tried to build its own database to track law-enforcement actions across lands managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The Forest Service is under the Department of Agriculture.) The result, the Incident Management Analysis and Reporting System, is a $50 million Database to Nowhere-in 2016, only 14 percent of the several hundred reportable incidents were entered into it. The system is so flawed that Fish and Wildlife has said no thanks and refuses to use it. That leaves the mathematical prognosticating to civilians and conpiracy theorists. People like David Paulides.
♥ I mention Bigfoot, and he discourages me from conflating Sasquatch and missing person, but his website does that very thing-canammissing.com is part museum of disturbing missing-persons cases, including the gift shop, and part calendar of upcoming appearances at UFO conventions. It's tempting to dismiss Paulides as a crypto-kook-and some search-and-rescue professionals do-but his books are extensively researched. On a large map of North America that has become iconic in the missing-persons-in-the-wild underworld, Paulides has identified fifty-nine clusters of people missing on federal wildlands in the U.S. and southern Canada.
..To qualify as a cluster, there must be at least four cases; according to his pins, you want to watch your step in Yosemite, Crater Lake, Yellowstone, Grand Canyon, Mount Rainier, Rocky Mountain, and Olympic National Parks.
..Paulides has spent hundreds of hours writing letters and Freedom of Information Act requests in an attempt to break through National Park Service red tape. He believes the Park Service in particular knows exactly how many people are missing but won't release the information for fear that the sheer numbers-and the ways in which people vanished-would shock the public so badly that visitor numbers would fall off a cliff.
♥ From the parking lot, Spruce Tree House looks exactly like the memory I have of Mesa Verde from my third grade textbook. Though it's high, at 8,000 feet at its highest point, the park itself is not huge as national parks go, at a little over 50,000 acres, and it has the feel of a living diorama. Most visitors who are reported missing are found-or find their own way back-within a couple hours. No park visitor has stayed missing since the park's inception in 1906.
..At 7:30 a.m. on Memorial Day weekend I ambushed Mesa Verde superintendent Cliff Spencer on his way into the office. Paulides had stormed in with a video camera tean recently, and Spencer was understandably media shy regarding the disappearance of Stehling. No one wants to be infamous for overseeing the one cold vanish in the hundred-plus-year existence of a national park.
..Mesa Verde, the largest archeological preserve in the country, is more museum-like than most western national parks, but there's also a palpable energy there, to the point that I could believe one of the theories that Stehling stepped through a portal to join the ancients, which is what some believe must have happened. The Ancestral Puebloans, who in 1200 AD numbered around 30,000, had mysteriously vacated the Mesa Verde area by 1280. The dwellings of Mesa Verde remained hidden for seven hundred years, when cowboys looking for lost cattle stumbled across it in the 1880s. The area is sacred to the Ute tribe, who, long after the first Anasazi inhabitants vanished, would not venture there. Visiting Mesa Verde does feel like trespassing.
Hundreds of years before the cliff dwellings were built, between 500 and 1100 AD, residents lived on top of the 8,000-foot-high mesa in pit houses, or kivas. They were hunters and farmers, growing, among other things, corn. In the floor of the kivas is found a sipapu, or hole that symbolized the portal through which ancient ancestors first entered the world from inner-earth, changing form lizard-like beings to human form.
♥ The issue of permit approval is largely one of liability insurance, but the Good Samaritan Search and Recovery Act of 2013 expedited access for qualified volunteers to national parks and forests, and now they can search within forty-eight hours of filing the paperwork. More such laws would make things easier for searchers. Michael Neiger lauds Streetman's database and wants to take it further. He'd like to see a searchable resource that gives volunteers like himself the same information that government officials have-including case profiles, topo maps, dog tacks, and weather.
♥ The ranch is in Conejos County, which is bigger than Rhode Island, with 8,000 residents and no stoplights. Sheep graze in the sunshine; potatoes and barley are grown here and trucked north to Denver. Three new marijuana dispensaries in the tiny town of Antonito lure New Mexicans across the nearby state line.
Conejos-Spanish for "rabbits"-is one of the poorest counties in Colorado. It's also a helluva place to get lost. While its eastern plains stretch across the agricultural San Luis Valley, its western third rises into the 1.8-million-acre Rio Grande National Forest, which sprawls over parts of nine counties. Go missing out here and your fate relies, in no small part, on which of those nine counties you were in when you disappeared.
♥ Duffy will tell you that bloodhounds are out of fashion. "They fart and they drool," he said. They're susceptible to disease, they die young, and you can't let them off a lead under any circumstances. "Everybody wants a shepherd," he says. But going old-school has its advantages. "Who's gonna find you? It's not a shepherd. It's not a Mexican Chihuahua. It's not a pig. You know how they say a great white shark can smell a drop of blood in water five miles away? That's a bloodhound."
♥ It matters tremendously where you happen to disappear. If you vanish in a municipality, the local police department is likely to look for you. The police can obtain assistance from the county sheriff or, in other cases, state police, tribal police, or even university law enforcement. If foul play is suspected, your state's bureau of investigation can be requested to get involved. Atop that is the FBI. With the exception of the sheriff, however, these organizations don't tend to go rifling through the woods unless your case turns into a criminal one.
But all of those bets are off when you disappear in the wild. While big national parks like Yosemite operate almost as sovereign states, with their own crack search-and-rescue teams, go missing in most western states and, with the exception of New Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii, statutes that date back to the Old West stipulate that you're now the responsibility of the county sheriff. And it matters a great deal where inside those states you fell off the map.
"There are no federal standards for terrestrial search and rescue," search-and-rescue researcher Robert Koester says. "Very few states have standards. A missing person is a local problem. It's a historical institution from when the sheriff was the only organized government." And when it comes to the locals riding to your rescue, Koester says, "There's a vast spectrum of capability."
Take Rio grande National Forest: it has just one full-time law-enforcement officer..
♥ Some counties will operate under a memorandum of understanding-MOU-with neighboring counties and federal land managers, which means they'll respond with appropriate resources with the best efficiency, even if they're not in the same county jurisdiction. Then again, some counties don't. SAR is a county responsibility, and the sheriff approaches it as he sees fit. That said, many if not most of the country SAR teams-volunteers-are professional in every sense of the word except payday.
♥ "For a lost person, the response is limited to five days on average," Neal Keller, Joe's father, told me. "There needs to be a plan for applying resources for a little bit longer."
..But wherever you are, once a search goes from rescue to recovery, most of those resources dry up. Like Randy Gray, Neal Keller was left to search for his son-and pay for it-nearly alone.
♥ A human body weighs slightly more than fresh water. While a fatter body will float slightly better, all bodies will sink in fresh water..
♥ ..Tate Thompson, an Escanaba, Michigan-based swiftwater-rescue veteran. The bigger issue, he says, is hypothermia. "In water, your temperature loss is twenty-five-times faster than in air. In moving water, [the loss] it's two-hundred times-the moving water washes the heat away."
♥ They just won't go there," she says. "As humans we care. As a corporate entity, you're a number." Laura doesn't wallow in what authorities aren't doing; rather she travels to the Sol Duc as often as possible to continue the search.
♥ There's a lot of "meanwhile" for a family of missing persons.
♥ My friend Chris Solomon has written for Outside about the phenomenon of human feet-still in shoes-washing up on the shores of the Salish Sea in Washington and British Columbia. It's not just a couple of shoes, it's dozens. Some come in pairs, some don't. And disarticulated feet have been a thing for decades, though fairly recent changes in the foams of athletic shoes have caused the newer feet to float. Some of the feet have been matched with accident victims. Some have been thought to have drifted all the way from Japan following the Kyoto nuclear disaster.
Randy's familiar with the strange story of the feet washing up in shoes, but now every time a beachcomber finds a New Balance with a foot inside, it's another catalyst for another bad dream.
♥ Vortices are one of the more prominent paranormal explanations for missing persons in the wild. Some Native Americans talk about similar things, and the ancient pagan Celts told of "thin places," a Lapland between heaven and earth.
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