hikingmysteries

[hikingmysteries]

The (”Mostly Harmless”) Nameless Hiker

Arguably the biggest hiking story of 2020, the tale actually starts a few years ago. Though we love researching and writing our own pieces for Hiking Mysteries, it is tough to top Nicholas Thompson’s article from Wired magazine. So, here it is, along with images.

A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can’t Crack

The man on the trail went by “Mostly Harmless." He was friendly and said he worked in tech. After he died in his tent, no one could figure out who he was.

IN APRIL 2017, a man started hiking in a state park just north of New York City. He wanted to get away, maybe from something and maybe from everything. He didn’t bring a phone; he didn’t bring a credit card. He didn’t even really bring a name. Or at least he didn’t tell anyone he met what it was.

He did bring a giant backpack, which his fellow hikers considered far too heavy for his journey. And he brought a notebook, in which he would scribble notes about Screeps, an online programming game. The Appalachian Trail runs through the area, and he started walking south, moving slowly but steadily down through Pennsylvania and Maryland. He told people he met along the way that he had worked in the tech industry and he wanted to detox from digital life. Hikers sometimes acquire trail names, pseudonyms they use while deep in the woods. He was “Denim” at first, because he had started his trek in jeans. Later, it became “Mostly Harmless,” which is how he described himself one night at a campfire. Maybe, too, it was a reference to Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Early in the series, a character discovers that Earth is defined by a single word in the guide: harmless. Another character puts in 15 years of research and then adds the adverb. Earth is now “mostly harmless.”

By summer, the hiker was in Virginia, where he walked about a hundred miles with a 66-year-old woman who went by the trail name Obsidian. She taught him how to make a fire, and he told her he was eager to see a bear. On December 1, Mostly Harmless had made it to northern Georgia, where he stopped in a store called Mountain Crossings. A veteran hiker named Matt Mason was working that day, and the two men started talking. Mostly Harmless said that he wanted to figure out a path down to the Florida Keys. Mason told him about a route and a map he could download to his phone. ���I don’t have a phone,” Mostly Harmless replied. Describing the moment, Mason remembers thinking, “Oh, this guy’s awesome.” Everyone who goes into the woods is trying to get away from something. But few people have the commitment to cut their digital lifelines as they put on their boots.

Mason printed the 60 pages of the map and sold it to Mostly Harmless for $5 cash, which the hiker pulled from a wad of bills that Mason remembers being an inch thick. Mason loves hikers who are a little bit different, a little bit strange. He asked Mostly Harmless if he could take a picture. Mostly Harmless hesitated but then agreed. He then left the shop and went on his way. Two weeks later, Mason heard from a friend in Alabama who had seen Mostly Harmless hiking through a snowstorm. “He was out there with a smile on his face, walking south,” Mason recalls.

By the last week of January, he was in northern Florida, walking on the side of Highway 90, when a woman named Kelly Fairbanks pulled over to say hello. Fairbanks is what is known as a “trail angel,” someone who helps out through-hikers who pass near her, giving them food and access to a shower if they want. She was out looking for a different hiker when she saw Mostly Harmless. She pulled over, and they started to chat. He said that he had started in New York and was heading down to Key West. She asked if he was using the Florida Trail App, and he responded that he didn’t have a phone.

Fairbanks took notice of his gear—which was a mix of high-end and generic, including his black-and-copper trekking poles. And she was struck by his rugged, lonely look. “He had very kind eyes. I saw the huge beard first and thought, ‘It’s an older guy.’ But his eyes were so young, and he didn’t have crow's feet. I realized he was a lot younger.” She was concerned though, the way she used to be concerned about her two younger brothers. The trail could be confusing, and it wouldn’t be long before everything started getting intolerably hot and muggy. “I remembered him because I was worried,” she added.

Six months later and 600 miles south, on July 23, 2018, two hikers headed out into the Big Cypress National Preserve. The humidity was oppressive, but they trudged forward, crossing swamps, tending aching feet, and dodging the alligators and snakes. About 10 miles into their journey, they stopped to rest their feet at a place called Nobles Camp. There they saw a yellow tent and a pair of boots outside. Something smelled bad, and something seemed off. They called out, then peered through the tent’s windscreen. An emaciated, lifeless body was looking up at them. They called 911.

“Uh, we just found a dead body.”

IT’S USUALLY EASY to put a name to a corpse. There’s an ID or a credit card. There’s been a missing persons report in the area. There’s a DNA match. But the investigators in Collier County couldn’t find a thing. Mostly Harmless’ fingerprints didn’t show up in any law enforcement database. He hadn’t served in the military, and his fingerprints didn’t match those of anyone else on file. His DNA didn’t match any in the Department of Justice’s missing person database or in CODIS, the national DNA database run by the FBI. A picture of his face didn’t turn up anything in a facial recognition database. The body had no distinguishing tattoos.

Nor could investigators understand how or why he died. There were no indications of foul play, and he had more than $3,500 cash in the tent. He had food nearby, but he was hollowed out, weighing just 83 pounds on a 5'8" frame. Investigators put his age in the vague range between 35 and 50, and they couldn’t point to any abnormalities. The only substances he tested positive for were ibuprofen and an antihistamine. His cause of death, according to the autopsy report, was “undetermined.” He had, in some sense, just wasted away. But why hadn’t he tried to find help? Almost immediately, people compared Mostly Harmless to Chris McCandless, whose story was the subject of Into the Wild. McCandless, though, had been stranded in the Alaska bush, trapped by a raging river as he ran out of food. He died on a school bus, starving, desperate for help, 22 miles of wilderness separating him from a road. Mostly Harmless was just 5 miles from a major highway. He left no note, and there was no evidence that he had spent his last days calling out for help.

The investigators were stumped. To find out what had happened, they needed to learn who he was. So the Florida Department of Law Enforcement drew up an image of Mostly Harmless, and the Collier County investigators shared it with the public. In the sketch, his mouth is open wide, and his eyes too. He has a gray and black beard, with a bare patch of skin right below the mouth. His teeth, as noted in the autopsy, are perfect, suggesting he had good dental care as a child. He looks startled but also oddly pleased, as if he’s just seen a clown jump out from behind a curtain. The image started to circulate online along with other pictures from his campsite, including his tent and his hiking poles.

Kelly Fairbanks works at the Army and Air Force exchange store on a Florida military base. She normally monitors the CCTV cameras for shoplifters, but if there’s no one in the store she might sneak a look at Facebook. It was a quiet moment, and suddenly the picture popped into her feed. There he was: eyes wide open and looking up. She recognized the eyes and the beard. “I started freaking out,” she says. It was the kind man she’d seen on Highway 90. The sheriff’s office had also posted a photo of the hiker’s poles, and Fairbanks knew she had an image of the same man holding the same gear.

She clicked right over to the Collier County Sheriff’s Facebook page and sent in two photographs she had taken of Mostly Harmless. She got a message back immediately asking for her phone number. Soon a detective was on the line asking, “What can you tell me?”

She told him everything she knew. And she shared the original post, and her photo, all over Facebook. Soon there were dozens of people jumping in. They had seen the hiker too. They had journeyed with him for a few hours or a few days. They had sat at a campfire with him. There was a GoPro video in which he appeared. People remembered him talking about a sister in either Sarasota or Saratoga. They thought he had said he was from near Baton Rouge. One person remembered that he ate a lot of sticky buns; another said that he loved ketchup. But no one knew his name. When the body of Chris McCandless was found in the wilds of Alaska in the summer of 1992 without any identification, it took authorities only two weeks to figure out his identity. A friend in South Dakota, who’d known McCandless as “Alex,” heard a discussion of the story on AM radio and called the authorities. Clues followed quickly, and McCandless’ family was soon found.

Now it’s 2020, and we have the internet. Facebook knows you’re pregnant almost before you do. Amazon knows your light bulb is going to go out right before it does. Put details on Twitter about a stolen laptop and people will track down the thief in a Manhattan bar. The internet can decode family mysteries, identify long-forgotten songs, solve murders, and, as this magazine showed a decade ago, track down almost anyone who tries to shed their digital skin. This case seemed easy.

An avid Facebook group committed to figuring out his identity soon formed. Reddit threads popped up to analyze the notes he had taken for Screeps. Amateur detectives tracked down leads and tried to match photographs in missing persons databases. A massive timeline was constructed on Websleuths.com. Was it possible, one Dr. Oz viewer asked, that Mostly Harmless was a boy featured on the show who went missing in 1982? Was it possible that Mostly Harmless was a suspect in Arkansas who had murdered his girlfriend in 2017? None of the photos matched.

The story pulled people in. Everyone, at some point, has wanted to put their phone in a garbage can and head off with a fake name and a wad of cash. Here was someone who had done it and who seemed to have so much going for him: He was kind, charming, educated. He knew how to code. And yet he had died alone in a yellow tent. Maybe he had been chased by demons and had sought an ending like this. Or maybe he had just been outmatched by the wilderness and the Florida heat.

It just wasn’t a normal story in any way. And, as Fairbanks said, “he was a good-looking dude,” which, she notes, might explain why so many of the searchers are women. In mid-October, one woman in the Facebook group posted a slideshow comparing his photos to those of Brad Pitt. “Actually I think MH looks better. 😉,” one commenter wrote.

The dude, though, seemed to have followed, to near perfection, the hiker credo of “Leave no trace.” None of the clues panned out. Nothing actually got people close to solving the mystery. An industrious writer named Jason Nark spent more than a year obsessively tracking down leads and then wrote an elegy to the hiker that began, “Sometimes I imagine him falling through space, drifting like dust from dead stars in the vast nowhere above us.”

Natasha Teasley manages a canoe and kayak company in North Carolina. As business slowed when the coronavirus hit, she started to spend more time online, and she started to fill the gap in her life with the hunt for Mostly Harmless. She sent flyers to the Chambers of Commerce in every city where people thought he might have come from, including Sarasota, Florida, and Saratoga Springs, New York. She tracked down details about every car that was towed out of Harriman State Park, where he likely started his journey. She scoured missing persons databases. I asked her what motivated her to spend so much time looking for a man she’d never met. She responded achingly, “He’s got to be missed. Someone must miss this guy.”

WHEN WE THINK of DNA tests, we normally think of their miraculous ability to give us a yes or a no. The unique thread of base pairs that make us who we are exists in every cell. So we take the genetic information found at a crime scene, or in the saliva on a coffee cup, or on the hand of a deceased hiker. Then we look closely at roughly 20 chunks, or what geneticists call markers, and we search in a database of collected samples to see whether the markers match. Imagine if a book, 1 million pages long but without a cover, washed up on the shore. And then imagine you could scan one page and search all the books in a giant database to see if that exact page appeared. That’s conventional DNA testing.

But DNA also can tell the story of human history. By running a different kind of test, you get beyond yes or no and into a million variations of maybe. The genetic markers in your body are closer to those of your first cousin than your third. And they’re closer to those of your third cousin than your sixth. There’s a little bit of each generation in each of us, from our parents to our great grandparents to the early apes of the forests of Africa. So now imagine that book, and imagine that instead of comparing one page, you could compare everything in the book with everything in all other books, to find similar words, syntax, and themes. You would need complicated math and pattern tracing, but, eventually, you might figure out the author. And so, early in the summer of 2020, the organizers of the Facebook group searching for Mostly Harmless’ identity sent news about the case to a Houston company called Othram. It had been started two years earlier and pitches itself as a one-stop shop for solving cold cases.

Othram’s founder, David Mittelman, is a geneticist who had worked on the original human genome project, and he was drawn to this odd case. The company asks the public for suggestions for mysteries to solve, and that’s one of the best parts of the job. “I like doing the cases from the tip line,” Mittelman told me. “Lab work for the sake of lab work is kind of boring.” If he could crack the hiker’s identity, he’d get attention for his technology. But there was something else, too, drawing him in, a riddle he wanted to answer. The hiker seemed to have found an internet family but had no connection to his real one.

Othram called up the Collier County Sheriff’s Office and offered to help. DNA analysis is expensive, though, and the company estimated that the whole project—from evidence to answers—would cost $5,000. The sheriff's office couldn't spend that much money on a case that involved no crime. But it would love Othram’s help if there were another way to pay for the work. And so three of the great trends of modern technology—crowdfunding, amateur sleuthing, and cutting-edge genomics—combined. Within eight days, the Facebook group had raised the money to run the analysis. Soon a small piece of bone from the hiker was on its way west from Collier County to the Othram labs.

The first step for Othram’s team was to extract DNA from the bone fragment and to then analyze it to make sure they had enough to proceed. They did, and so they soon put small samples of DNA onto glass slides, which they inserted into a sequencer, a machine that costs roughly a million dollars and looks like a giant washing machine made by Apple.

Unfortunately, it’s a washing machine that has a long run cycle. And it doesn’t always work. Sometimes the pages of the book you find are ripped or blurry. Sometimes the process is iterative and you have to tape fragments back together. So, as the sequencer spun, the Facebook hunters fretted that, once again, nothing would come of a promising lead. But by mid-August, Othram had a clean read on the DNA: They knew exactly what combination of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts had combined to create the mysterious hiker. A company spokesperson appeared live on the Facebook group’s page to detail the progress; posters responded with gratitude and euphoria.

Science sometimes gets harder with every step, though, and having the sequence was just the beginning. In order to identify Mostly Harmless, the team at Othram would have to compare his genetic information with other people’s. And they would start with a service called GEDMatch, a database of DNA samples that people have submitted, voluntarily, to answer their own hopes and questions—they want to find a lost half-sister or a clue about their grandpa. That collection of DNA has become a cornucopia for law enforcement. Each new sample submitted provides one more book for the library that can be searched and scoured. It was through this technique that investigators in Contra Costa County, California, found the Golden State Killer in the spring of 2018, connecting a DNA sample of the killer to GEDMatch samples of relatives. Just this past week, Othram helped law enforcement identify the murderer of a 5-year-old in Missoula, Montana, a case that had gone unsolved for 46 years.

It’s been over a month since Othram started looking through the GEDmatch database. It won’t say anything about what it has found, and the Collier County Sheriff’s Office is keeping quiet as well. But one source outside of the company who is familiar with its progress says that, while Othram doesn’t know Mostly Harmless’ name, it has found enough matching patterns to identify the region of the country from which his ancestors hail.

That isn’t sufficient though. Knowing for sure, for example, that his relatives came from Baton Rouge doesn’t mean Mostly Harmless came from Baton Rouge. His parents could have been born there and moved to Montreal. He could have been born in Louisiana and dropped on a doorstep in Maine. But, right now, the data scientists at Othram are combing through all the DNA samples in GEDMatch, looking for patterns and trying to circle closer to his identity. They’re most likely building out a family tree. Let’s say they found someone in GEDMatch whose DNA seems like a fourth cousin of Mostly Harmless, and then perhaps someone who seems like a third cousin. How do those two people connect? Through this sort of slow, painstaking analysis, they can get closer to an answer. Soon they might find his extended family, and then perhaps his parents’ names. And then law enforcement will be able to solve a case that has stumped them for more than two years.

They might get there, and they might not. A source familiar with the work suggests that the earliest we’ll get an answer is December. Unless between now and then, perhaps, someone reading this article or browsing a Facebook group recognizes his face. Or puts together clues that have eluded everyone else. Finally, he won’t be “Mostly Harmless”; he’ll have a real name.

And then, with that mystery solved, a new one will open up. Why did Mostly Harmless walk into the woods? And why, when things started to go wrong, didn’t he walk out?

[hikingmysteries]

The Disappearance of Dennis Martin

This appeared on Dark Tales Blog on June 4, 2020. It has been edited for length.

Six-year-old Dennis Martin went camping with older family members in June 1969. He was last seen preparing to spring a surprise on his father and grandfather alongside his brother and other children. He never emerged from his hiding place and despite the largest search in the history of the national park, no trace of him was ever found.

The Martin family, from Knoxville, had a long-established traditional of the male members of the family taking a camping trip to the nearby Great Smoky Mountains National Park to celebrate Father’s Day. Dennis traveled to the park for his first camping trip alongside his father, grandfather and older brother, initially arriving at Cades Cove. The group then hiked to Russell Field, where they camped overnight. The following morning they set off for Spence Field, a highland meadow and popular camping spot bisected by the famous Appalachian Trail.

On arrival, the two Martin children were allowed to play with others camping nearby. His father watched the boy disappear into bushes to hide alongside the other children as they set about springing a surprise on the adults. However, while the other children quickly emerged, Dennis did not. Immediately his father and grandfather began searching for him, with his father running two miles along the trail shouting his name before returning to camp. His grandfather hiked out to raise the alarm, arriving at Cades Cove ranger station at around 8:30 pm.

An extensive search was launched, with National Park Service personnel supplemented by National Guard troops and Green Berets. In total, around 1,400 searchers found no sign of the child. The search was later criticised, in part due to the large number of personnel involved potentially obscuring tracks in ground that was already difficult to track over due to heavy rain. The tracks of a child were found but dismissed as belonging to one of the Boy Scouts that were helping with the search, however the tracks were later reported to have come from a child who was missing one shoe and which disappeared on the banks of a stream, suggesting they likely belonged to Martin. This was supported when a shoe and sock were found three days into the search.

Despite searchers continuing their effort for over two weeks, no further trace of Martin was ever found. A $5,000 reward offered by the family turned up a number of calls from psychics, but never anything that led to a breakthrough. Some years later a man who had been illegally collecting ginseng in the park claimed to have come across the skeletal remains of a child but failed to inform authorities until 1985 for fear of prosecution. When followed up, searchers again drew a blank.

In regards to what happened to the boy, most researchers believe that he became disorientated and lost after straying away from camp, or that he lost his footing and fell down one of the numerous steep slopes and ravines in the area. Despite wearing a bright red shirt that should have been easy for searchers to spot, Martin’s small size and the thick brush in the area means a body could well have been overlooked. Other researchers points to the presence of black bears in the area, as well as copperheads and feral pigs. One underweight bear had been caught in a boar trap in the area two weeks earlier before being released, suggesting that the animals may have been struggling to find enough food.

Martin’s father, however, believes that his son was taken by another person. This theory appears to be based largely on the eyewitness account of Harold Key, a visitor to the park that reported hearing a loud scream on the afternoon Martin disappeared. Shortly after, he claims to have seen a disheveled man, covered in hair and attempting to remain unseen, fleeing through the woods. Key’s family elaborated than the figure had a red object slung over his shoulder, matching the clothing Martin was wearing.

Despite the report, FBI investigators ultimately dismissed it, given that the sighting had taken place more than five miles from where Martin had vanished and Key was unclear on the timeline. Key later speculated that the man may have been a moonshiner, explaining his reluctance to be seen. One retired park ranger lamented the failure to properly follow up either the footprints or the sighting of the rough-looking man. He arguing that as the location of the sighting was downhill from where Martin disappeared it was more than reasonable for a relatively fit individual to cover that distance in the time frame, even carrying a child.

[hikingmysteries]

Strength, Will and Inspiration

There are many things to be aware of when hiking. Proper gear, food, water, and a clear plan. Not many hikers anticipate a violent attack by a stranger. It is an exceptionally rare occurrence. That holds true of the Appalachian Trail. In its 83-year history, 12 hikers have been killed by another person. None of these murders have been in the back country. They occur when the trail is near civilization.

In 2019, the most recent murder took place.

Kirby Morrill, age 28, of Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, has been tenacious from the start. At the University of New Brunswick, she was a rugby star, known for her “off-the-charts” tackling, and sustaining two broken noses. Morrill is also a powerlifter who loves to kayak the rivers and lakes of coastal Canada and cycle her province’s trails. Her bucket list included completing a thru-hike of the 3,500-kilometre Appalachian Trail.

In March 2019, shortly after defending her Master of Science thesis at the University of New Brunswick, a survey of sea lettuce species in Canada’s Bay of Fundy, Morrill flew to Atlanta. This was the start of a solo hike that would take 5-7 months. The trail ends on Mount Katahdin, a final scramble up Maine’s highest peak.

All was great for the first several weeks. She loved the trail, experiencing the best sleeps of her life. Fellow American hikers provided her with the trail name, Toque, a Canadian word for stocking cap they had not heard before. Then in May, a mobile app used by hikers was issuing warnings of man threatening people on the trail. Descriptions of the man and his dog were posted. By May 10, Morrill, had passed the quarter-way point.

Kevin Bissett of The Canadian Press interviewed Morrill for a first-hand account, “I stopped at a restaurant because another hiker was going to meet me there with a new food bag for me.” Seated at the restaurant, she saw the hiker she now refers to as “the crazy guy with the knife” walking down the road. His real name is James Jordan. Morrill Googled his name based on the app’s warnings and confirmed his image from a previous mugshot.

Grayson Haver Currin of Outside Magazine writes, “for weeks, Jordan had harassed hikers in North Carolina and Tennessee, wielding a guitar and a 17-inch knife and making violent threats, prompting his arrest near that state line. For him, it was just the latest in a lifelong string of legal troubles. Despite efforts to buy him a bus ticket and send him home upon his release from a Tennessee jail, Jordan—who had dubbed himself “Sovereign”—returned to the AT just south of the Virginia border.”

After spotting Jordan, Morrill left a note at the restaurant register warning people and set out to get ahead of the man. As it turns out, he was ahead of her. She says, she went, “full Canadian,” pouring on pleasantries and petting his dog, Felicia. They parted ways and was grateful to meet three other hikers who all camped together that night.

Among them was Ron Sanchez, who she had met a few days earlier. Sanchez, age 43, was a U.S. Army veteran. “He was really comforting. He was a really great guy,” she said. “I really appreciated him, so it was nice to see him at that campsite again.”

Then the “crazy guy” showed up.

“As far as I know he didn’t have a tent, and he wandered around the campsite talking to himself,” she said. He sang to himself for half an hour by the campfire. “And then he came around to the tents threatening to kill us in a variety of ways and telling us why we deserved to die.”

Jordan retreated into the woods. The four hikers decided to pack up and get the hell out of there. It was not fast enough. He came back. Two managed to escape, Morrill and Sanchez, were confronted. Jordan then attacked Sanchez with a knife. He would later die.

Then Morrill was fallen upon, “I was pinned. Because we had packed up and tried to get out of there with all our things, I had everything on me. I had a 30-something-pound pack on my back, and when he came at me, he came at my front, so I fell onto my back like a turtle, and he was on top of me,” she said. “There was nothing I could do.”

Thankfully, it was pitch dark. The killer may have thought she was dead and left. She got up, deciding to head where she knew other hikers were camped, about 10 kilometres away. Morrill did not know the extent of her wounds, “I had so much adrenaline coursing through me at that point, I barely felt it. It was just kind of a general feeling of badness, like something is wrong here.”

It took about three hours to reach the next set of hikers. She was flown to a hospital in neighboring Tennessee. Morrill had suffered nine stab wounds and 40 individual lacerations, requiring about 50 staples and 10 sutures across her face. Her right hand barely worked, there were multiple wounds to her left leg, and gashes across her face and fingers. Her mental toughness shines through, “I look like scarface now.” Yet, she mourns for Sanchez.

James Jordan, age 30, from Massachusetts was arrested just hours after. He was charged with murder and assault with intent to commit murder. He underwent treatment after being found unfit to stand trial by a federal judge.

Recovery for Morrill involved physiotherapy, exercise and weightlifting in an effort to restore feeling and the use of various muscles, especially in her arms. Despite the pain, she was back on the Appalachian Trail in September that same year, although just for a day. While in hospital, she had promised a woman she had met on the trail to join her at Mount Katahdin and do that last peak together. And, Morrill did, through a great deal of discomfort balanced with joy.

Currin writes, “When she made it to the summit, she didn’t simply turn around and descend the mountain the way she had come. True to form, she bid her old trail-family member goodbye and pressed on, heading east across Knife Edge, the infamously steep, thin, and exposed trail that traverses two more of the massif’s peaks. “Coming down the Knife Edge, I thought, Now this is Katahdin. When I reached the bottom, I was exhausted. My knee hurt. My right hand was barely functional. Yup, that was a good day.””

Since that terrible night, James Jordan, has been deemed fit to stand trial. His lawyers plan to claim insanity with the trial scheduled for January 2021.

Morrill had planned to finish what she began, to complete the entire Appalachian Trail in 2020. Covid-19 interrupted those plans. Yet, there is no doubt that Morrill, based on character and ability, will get it done, “I am statistically more likely to die in a car crash than I am on the trail. It’s just pretty bad luck, a complete fluke, that I got stabbed. I wasn’t scared the first time, and I won’t be scared the second time. And even if I was scared, are you really going to let a little fear stop you from what you want to do in life?”

[hikingmysteries]

He Made It

Paul Gasford got lost hunting for sarsaparilla. His mother has offered a sixpence to the child who collected the most. This was on the shore of Lake Ontario in 1805. Paul took to the task with energy. The family was in the process of moving from the Bay of Quinté in Ontario to their new home in Niagara, New York. All had been cramped into a small boat loaded with their few possessions.

His older siblings did not notice that Paul was missing. What makes this story amazing is the boy was just 4 years old. Where they landed on the New York shoreline, the family was forty miles from their destination. The father had decided to put in to shore to rest, fix a meal, and eat. That is when the hunt for the wild sarsaparilla began.

In the fun of competition, Paul was not only lost to his family but became turned around when returning to the family camp. He tried to get his bearings. Instead of finding the beach, he went further inland. Fear set in and the young lad cried, soon turning to panic. With the sun setting, Paul finally found the shoreline and walked it in both directions. There was no sign of the camp, boat or his family.

By all accounts, Paul had come out on a different part of the shore, a distance from the family. In anguish, after a three-day search, Gasford’s parents gave him up for dead. His mother was highly reluctant but realistic given the circumstances. They believed that a child that young could not survive multiple nights exposed in a strange place.

During that time, Paul had calmed himself. He remembered his parents saying that Niagara was within forty miles. He knew it was to the west and that is where the sun sets. Paul decided to walk it, following the beach, surviving on a few berries along the way. At night, he dug a hole in sand to sleep in. Wise beyond his years, he stuck a stick in the ground pointing towards the west to point the direction for the next morning.

On the fourth day, keeping a ten-mile a day pace, he walked into the town of Niagara. According to accounts, there was a huge party. This incredible journey became a children’s book. The True and Wonderful Story of Paul Gasford, was published in 1826. Many hiking stories have sad endings, this one is worthy of celebration.

[hikingmysteries]

From a Great Camp

Camp Santanoni is one of the earliest examples of the “Great Camps of the Adirondacks”. For lovers of this architecture, photos and descriptions hardly do it justice. It was the brainchild of Robert C. Pruyn (1847–1934), a prominent Albany banker and businessman. Pruyn acquired 12,900 acres (52.2 km²) just south of the Adirondack High Peaks. He hired three architects to design a summer residential complex.

It turned out to be a sprawling wilderness retreat of extravagant proportions. The complex numbered 45 buildings and was regarded as the grandest of all such Adirondack camps. It consisted of three main groupings of buildings: The Gate Lodge complex; the farm complex; and the Main Camp. These were built from 1892 to 1907.

The scale of such an endeavour in such a location is incredible. The Gate Lodge not only signified entry, it was a monumental, stone, arch structure holding six staff bedrooms, a caretaker’s home, and assorted barns, wagon sheds and other buildings.

The farm complex was a massive set of barns, three farmhouses and workers cottages, a stone creamery, workshop, chicken house, kennels, smoke house, root cellar and other service buildings. The family raised imported and domestic breeds of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry. It supplied the camp with its meat and produce, while surplus dairy products were sold in Newcomb and sent to Albany for the Pruyns and their friends. Many Newcomb residents today still own milk bottles with “Santanoni” embossed in raised letters.

The Main Camp held an excellent view toward the Adirondack High Peaks. The central lodge was actually a grouping of six separate buildings. It held the main living and dining lodge with seven bedrooms, a kitchen and service building with seven staff bedrooms, all connected by a common roof and porch system. 1500 spruce trees were used in the log construction. The structural and decorative features defined rustic chic for its time, including a liberal use of birchbark wall coverings that exists today. A boathouse, artist’s studio, workshop, icehouse, and additional staff quarters made up the camp.

Pruyn’s heirs sold it to the Melvin family, leaders in the business and professional community of Syracuse, in 1953. And that is where this story begins.

Douglas Legg, also known as “Dougie,” disappeared when he was 8 years old from the camp.  He was a grandson of the Melvin family. This took place on a July afternoon in 1971. The young boy and his uncle started out on hike on the familiar terrain. Due to the risk of poison ivy, the uncle sent him back to the camp to change from shorts into pants. They were about a half mile away from the camp at the time.

Dougie was last seen by his older brother and a cousin about 50-60 yards from the main lodge.  He never met back up with his uncle, and he was never seen from or heard from again. According to an article from the time, he was a “mini woodsman.”

The disappearance sparked a massive search, mostly funded by the very wealthy family. Almost 1,000 volunteers along with planes equipped with heat-detecting infrared FLIR tried their best. All efforts were unsuccessful over a 6-week period. It is still unknown if Dougie simply wandered off and was lost, succumbing to the elements, or if foul play was involved.

Given the mystery, several theories have sprung up. In 1993, 22 years after Dougie disappeared, a woman undergoing psychiatric treatment believed a boy fitting Dougie’s description was kidnapped and murdered by one of her relatives. It proved to be false. The subsequent news coverage generated what investigators believe is the most credible tip.

A man on leave from the Navy in 1973, two years after Douglas Legg disappeared, was hunting in the area when he separated from his friend to chase a deer. He crossed a peninsula leading to a 21-acre island in Newcomb Lake. This is a half mile from the main lodge. He stumbled upon a small skull and partial skeleton which he believed to be human. He told his friend of his find but was worried about returning on time from Navy leave and he was on land he should not have been on, so never reported the find. Neither man was aware of the disappearance.

The man who had chased the deer heard from his friend in 1993 when the friend saw a news story on the renewed search. He immediately called the police to report his experience. The story fit with the last known sighting as the original hike was around Newcomb Lake.

Police theorize that Dougie, attempting to follow his uncle, stumbled across the peninsula and thinking he was still following the lake shoreline became disoriented in the thick, dense growth and perished on the island. The area was searched in 1971, yet, police are not sure how thoroughly due to the large number of volunteers and extremely dense vegetation.

The man, then living in Montana, was flown back to help. The remains could not be located. Authorities believe it was buried under inches of sediment and moss from the passing years. This new search covered a very small area.

In the early 1970’s the Melvin family, not caring to return to the scene of the tragedy, quickly contracted with the newly formed Adirondack Conservancy Committee to purchase the entire camp. The furnishings were removed, and the Conservancy then resold the property to the state of New York for incorporation into the State Forest Preserve.

Now called the Santanoni Preserve, it is open to visitors. Though not up to its former glory and grandeur, the scale and quality of build impresses. Preservation efforts are ongoing. The state encourages cross country skiing, wagon rides, and … hikes.

[hikingmysteries]

2,000 Feet from Survival

The Appalachian Trail is the Moby Dick of many a hiker. Especially those who choose to do it as a thru-hike. Completing the entire 2,190 miles in one go is a daunting undertaking. Each year, thousands attempt the trail. About one in four succeeds, usually over 5 to 7 months.

In 2013, Gerry Largay set out with a friend to tackle it. Her husband, George, shadowed them from a distance in a car. They would meet up when the trail crossed intersections every 2-3 days to replenish supplies. Her friend had to drop out due to a family issue, so the 66-year-old grandmother, with the trail name “Inchworm”, continued on her own.

It is a too familiar tale in hiking. Nature calls then nature calls. Hiking etiquette requires you to move off trail to do your business. That is what Largay did in late July and lost her direction. The result is predictable but unbelievably tragic given where she was found. According to fellow hikers she bumped into, Largay was increasingly disoriented. Many expressed concerns but she soldiered on as a former Air Force nurse would.

However, she was on two powerful anti-anxiety medications (once lost, she would have gone through withdrawal contributing to worse decisions). So, she failed to meet up with her husband and a search was called. Largay had hiked nearly 1,000 miles by that time.

When lost, experienced hikers follow a brook or stream until it leads to a river or a road. Chris Busby, a very experienced hiker and who has written on this event, states, “An older, less physically fit hiker like Gerry would presumably prefer paths on level ground. Hikers who are injured or otherwise unfit to bushwhack are advised to stay put, take shelter, build a signal fire, blow their emergency whistle, and take other steps to signal rescuers.”

In his 2019 book, When You Find My Body: The Disappearance of Geraldine Largay on the Appalachian Trail, author D. Dauphinee, is credited with an additional factor that added to Largay’s woes. She did not think like hiker, instead she relied on her cellphone (which would be constantly charged during meetups with her husband, and she would receive more medication).

Once lost, she does what cellphone users do, seek better reception. To her, and many, that means climbing higher. A stream of unsent texts and written notes documented her last weeks. Busby writes, “Had wardens made it a priority to search all the high ground in the area where she disappeared, it seems certain they soon would have found her. A call placed to her phone the afternoon she got lost was not received, but it produced a ping that, using cell-tower data, indicated her general location. Her body was found about a mile from that ping’s coordinates.”

The cellphone was a critical tool rather than a nice-to-have and it failed. Real outdoors people state the number one tool they want is a knife.

There are many reasons for her situation. Reliance on the cellphone, age, inexperience, medication, and comfort of meeting up with her husband. She died over a period of weeks, found camped atop a hill roughly 2,000 feet from the trail. If she wondered another direction for a short period, she may have met up with a logging road. Incredibly, she went missing along the trail that borders a base run by the U.S. Navy. Called a SERE School (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), the program teaches military personnel how to survive in the wild, evade capture, resist torture while in enemy hands, and “escape” confinement.

In the fall of 2015, Largay’s body was discovered by a land surveyor inside the borders of the SERE facility. Her camp is also telling. There was no evidence she’d made a rational attempt to build a signal fire. Instead, she tried to burn whole trees and wrote texts and notes. Her food running out in days.

Those last weeks would have been tortuous and terrifying. What is shocking is, 98% of people lost in the Maine woods are found within 24 hours of being reported missing. Largay was so close. Yet, a lack of skills and experience and, some say, a flawed search, meant she may have well been much farther away.

[hikingmysteries]

Up in Smoke

This account comes from the Strange Outdoors website, originally published October 27, 2017 and updated May, 2020. Edited for length.

On Friday, September 25, 1981, 58-year-old, Thelma Pauline Melton, often called “Polly”, was hiking with two of her friends, Red and Trula, on the Deep Creek trail near the North Carolina side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They started their hike around 3 pm.

It was an easy, well maintained trail on gravel that Polly had been hiking for 20 years and she knew the area well. The Deep Creek Trail, began close to the group’s campgrounds and continues into the National Park. About a quarter of a mile inside the park, the trail splits. The right side leads to a picnic area and campground and the left side of the trail continues into the forest.

That day the picnic area and campsite inside the park was busy, with around fifty cars in the parking lot. There were many people hiking, fishing, camping and riding horseback that day. Polly, Red and Trula walked more than a mile past the picnic area and the fork in the trail. They stopped at a turn around and Polly smoked a cigarette. The conversation amongst the friends was positive and lighthearted.

As they headed back to the trailhead at around 4 pm, one hour into their walk, Polly suddenly picked up her pace and began putting distance between the two other women. Red and Trula were not sure what had gotten into Polly, with Red calling out, “I wouldn’t want to be in a foot race with you, Polly.” Polly looked back and laughed, but she kept up the pace until she was out of sight. Red and Trula kept expecting to round a bend or top a hill and find Polly waiting for them. They knew she would need rest and couldn’t keep up that fast pace.

But the friends weren’t able to catch up and did not find Polly waiting on them. Although it was strange, they weren’t worried as Polly knew the trail well. They arrived back at the campsite at around 4.30 pm and went straight to Polly’s trailer. But Polly had not returned. Confused, they began asking everyone else at the campsite. No one had seen Polly.

Red and Trula never saw Polly again. She had vanished without a trace.

Polly and her husband, Bob (78 years of age), spent the fall living in an Airstream trailer at the base of the Great Smoky Mountains, in the Deep Creek Campground. She’d been calling that area her second home for more than 20 years. Polly, Bob and their friends stayed there several months of each year, before returning to their Jacksonville home. The campsite was private with about 10 other couples. The others on the site were close-knit and no newcomers could join the campsite without unanimous approval from the rest of the group.

Polly was on her third marriage to Bob with no children. They had married 6 years before in 1975, and Bob’s health was declining. Bob had two adult sons from a previous marriage.

As she grew older, Polly struggled with her weight and her health. At the time of her disappearance she was 5'11" and weighed about 180 lbs. She had high blood pressure and suffered from nausea. She took medication for both conditions. She smoked two packs of Virginia Slims cigarettes a day. She did not drive in the summer of 1981, as she’d temporarily lost her license due to her medical issues.

Polly had also suffered from several episodes of depression. For example, when her mother died in 1978, Polly fell into a deep depression. She told her pastor that she wanted to go to heaven to be with her mom. During this conversation with her pastor, she made comments that led him to believe she may have had an extra marital affair that she felt very guilty about. In 1979 she was again depressed and revealed to her pastor she was a heavy user of Valium. However, things seemed to improve, and by 1981, the pastor said she was in a much better place mentally. Polly’s father visited her and Bob in early September of 1981. He and Polly had grown very close in the priory years and he stated she seemed normal during his visit.

On the day she disappeared she was wearing a white and pink sleeveless striped blouse, tan polyester pants, size 8 ½ shoes with crepe soles and glasses. She also had a diamond studded white gold wristwatch and a wedding band.

Bob was not physically able to search for his wife, but began calling everyone he could think of to see if they’d given Polly a ride. Trula, Red, and two other friends headed back to the park and checked the picnic area and parking lot. They hiked the trail again and began asking other hikers if they’d seen a woman matching Polly’s description.

At 6 pm, Trula, Red and Bob reported Polly missing to a park ranger and a large search was launched involving around 25 people. They began searching the trail and picnic area, including the creek that ran parallel to the trail.

Polly was terrified of snakes and her friends said she would not go off trail. Furthermore, there was thick vegetation on both sides and it would be easy to spot any disturbance. There were several forks along the path, but they were all marked.

Many of the park rangers knew her and described her as intelligent and strong. They stated she was very familiar with the area and they didn’t believe she could have gotten lost.

Over 150 people searched for Polly over the next week. Nine search dogs were brought out and the trail was closed. One of those dogs alerted on a downed tree near the creek. The handler believes Polly must have rested on the tree, but none of the other dogs detected her scent. Rangers posted pictures and spoke with many campers, hikers and fishermen to no avail.

Since Polly suffered from high blood pressure and nausea it seemed unlikely she could have got a long way in a short time. Her medical problems had caused her to lose her driving licence and she did not have any car keys with her.  

Authorities were unable to even get a good set of tracks to follow, which would have made things easier considering Melton’s left shoe had apparently had a noticeable crack in the sole which would have made her tracks easy to differentiate from those of other hikers.

Bob Melton was so distressed that he was admitted to the hospital the night Polly went missing. The following year his sons helped him sell the Airstream and he moved into a nursing home. Bob’s sons refused to speak to the media. One son did comment that his only interest was the impact on his father. According to the Meltons’ pastor, Bob later realized his bottle of Valium was missing from the Airstream. Polly’s nausea and blood pressure medications were untouched.

One theory is that Polly ran off with a secret lover. She volunteered at a Presbyterian Nutritional Center during the times she lived in North Carolina. For the previous four years, she had been serving food to the elderly at the Center. At the end of a shift, the volunteers would write down the next day that they would be in. Polly always worked on Fridays, but on Thursday, September 24 she did not write down that she’d be returning the following day, as was her habit.

The center’s supervisor later revealed something else that was outside of the norm that day. Polly had never before asked to use the facility’s phone. But on her last day she asked to use the phone several times. The supervisor did not hear the conversations and no long distance charges were on the phone bill. Authorities were unable to trace the phone calls.

Perhaps Polly arranged for someone to pick her up whilst on her hike, to make it look like she was lost in the woods, thinking that this way would be easier on her husband, rather than him knowing she left him for somebody else. This is postulated as a reason why she picked up her pace and moved ahead of her companions on the trail.

Months after Polly disappeared, in April 1982, a check was cashed in her name in Birmingham, Alabama. The check was for interest due on a bank certificate. Investigators followed up on the lead, but it led nowhere as they could not prove if it was her handwriting. The teller later had no recollection of who cashed the check.

No trace of Polly Melton has ever been found and she remains missing.

[hikingmysteries]

She Created a Mystery

There are many stories of hikers slightly veering off trail and getting horribly lost. This could involve a bathroom break. That is how Fauna Jackson disappeared in August, 2016 in the rugged wilderness of Grand Teton National Park. The Ohio 16-year-old was working with twenty other people on a non-profit trail project with an environmental group when she failed to return.

An immediate search found just one of Jackson’s hiking boots down the trail. Rangers were called but a local search found no further trace. The search was expanded over the next two days with more than 100 people deployed. Dogs and ATVs, helicopters and infrared imaging were used to detect heat sources on the ground.

Missing person posters circulated describing what Jackson was last seen wearing: white hat, tan pants, a long-sleeve green shirt that said, “Find Your Park” and “Groundwork USA,” and perhaps a purple backpack.

Many of similar stories end with bad news, this one had some good news, Jackson was found. However, it only deepened the mystery. Jackson didn’t look the same. This was two days after she went missing. Her hair color and cut were changed. Jackson wore different clothes. Most peculiar, she ran from her rescuers. This was near the Snake River Outlook, a popular sightseeing spot, about three to four miles away from where she left the trail.

After a medical welfare check that found nothing, she was interviewed. No explanations were given. Her cellphone and bank activity ceased on the day she walked off. Jackson was known in her community as kind, reliable and a budding young leader, reported the Cincinnati Enquirer. After eight weeks in a youth employment program through the Cincinnati chapter of Groundwork USA, a national civic organization that focuses on green issues, she was one of three teens who made the trip to the Grand Tetons. No surprise for a well-liked straight-A student.

Alan Edwards, with Groundwork’s Cincinnati chapter, told ABC affiliate WCPO. “Honestly, one of the best employees we had and that’s why she got to go.”

The Wyoming trip lasted nine days and included attending outdoor activities, leadership and team-building, and fieldwork. Jackson “worked hard, got along well with the fourteen other youth in our summer program, and showed leadership potential,” Robin Corathers, executive director told NBC News.

Like most teens, Jackson documented the trip on social media, posting Instagram photos of herself at Old Faithful and atop mountain peaks. According to Katie Mettler, writing in The Washington Post, “the day before she disappeared, she posted a selfie with two other teens. In the caption, she wrote: “Last day in Wyoming is tomorrow!! I can’t wait to be home and see everyone. Today I’m going to be blazing a trail, pretty siked. I love you all a bunch and can’t wait to see all of you soon!””

Concern and best-wishes sentiment from the general public quickly dissipated after her discovery. Many were upset with the dangerous and expensive search. Her family and Groundwork USA were just happy to have her back. However, Jackson’s actions have not been explained and no stories have been written since 2016.

[hikingmysteries]

Two Men Gone

Colorado is a beautiful state made of 64 counties. Clear Creek County has a population of less than 10,000. That speaks to its isolation and tough terrain. The county is bordered by ski country including Breckinridge, Keystone, and Copper Mountain. On the other side, sits Golden Gate Canyon State Park and farther on, the city of Denver.

Nestled below peaks in Clear Creek County is Silver Plume, a former mining town. Comprised of no more than 200 citizens, it is referred to as a “living ghost town”. The first mystery is why it would attract two outsiders at different times to start businesses in the same old building.

Tom Young, former Army Special Forces and high school teacher, moved to the tiny, remote town in 1969. The 49-year-old lived alone with his dog, Gus. On September 9, 1987, Tom Young left his bookstore in the old Knights of Pythias building, with Gus. Bumping into friends along his walk, he told them he was going on a trip to Europe. Young was never seen again.

Months later, Keith Reinhard moved to Silver Plume, opening an antique store in the same building that held Young’s, now vacated. This commenced an obsession with the previous tenant. In fact, Reinhard immediately began writing a novel based on Young’s disappearance.

Reinhard was a 50 year old Daily Herald sportswriter from Chicago. It was during a three-month sabbatical that he moved to Silver Plume and into the former bookstore. The original draw to Colorado was to exercise more, lose his fear of heights, write, and start the business. An old friend, Ted Parker, lived there and had encouraged the move. The plan was to permanently relocate with his wife.

Eleven months after going missing, Young’s remains along with Gus, were found in the mountains. Each had been shot in the head. Initially, the discovery was ruled a suicide primarily because Young’s gun was found beside him. However, no ballistic testing was done to prove that the gun was the one used, leading to speculation.

This had great effect on Reinhard, who told everyone he was going to climb to the top of Pendleton Mountain. One week after the remains were found, he did just that. However, he left at 5pm on the difficult 6-hour hike, ill-equipped, and still fearing heights. He never returned. Over the next week, 200 volunteers from neighboring counties searched, one of the largest in state history. It was called off after a search plane crashed, killing one and injuring another. Reinhard has never been found.

The unfinished novel was found inside his apartment. Final paragraphs read like a description of his own disappearance, "Guy Gypsum changed into some hiking boots and donned a heavy flannel shirt. He understood it all now, and his motivation. Guy closed the door, then walked off towards the lush, shadowless, Colorado forests above.” This fueled speculation of a staged disappearance. It gets more involved. Many now think that Young’s death was not a suicide and that both were killed. Relatives and friends of both men believe they discovered something in the old building they rented. The Clear Creek County Sheriff’s Office still has an open case on Reinhard.

A documentary called, Dark Side of the Mountain, is currently in post-production. It covers this amazing story. It promises to tell the definitive story, here is its impressive website.