WYOMING
I got home from climbing, it’s just a normal day, get unpacked, feed the dog or whatever, then I start wondering, Where is she? Make some calls, drive around a little bit. It gets to be like eight p.m., nine p.m., ten p.m., that incredible anxiety builds up. You’re just worried. I hope she didn’t break her ankle, I hope she didn’t run out of gas, those normal things where you’re like, this sucks. But you’re not going, “I hope my wife wasn’t grabbed by some psychopathic serial killer.”
—Steve Bechtel
Eric Schrödinger was an Austrian physicist who in 1935, in response to a quantum mechanics 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’s 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.
I first stepped through the missing persons portal in July of 1997. Olympic marathon hopeful Amy Wroe Bechtel disappeared at age twenty-four while running on the Shoshone National Forest in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, 150 miles from where my soon-to-be-wife, Hilary, and I lived at the time. Her car was found up-country near midnight, along with her keys and wallet, but the woman had vanished without a clue. Law enforcement, family, and residents spent nearly two decades suspecting her husband had gotten rid of her, and some still do. I don’t.
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.
My intrigue only grew. I tend toward insomnia and the analog, and each night in bed I listen with earbuds to Coast to Coast AM on a tiny radio. The program, which explores all sorts of mysteries of the paranormal, airs from one to five a.m. in my time zone. It’s syndicated on more than six hundred stations and boasts nearly three million listeners each week. Most of the time, the white noise talk of space aliens and ghosts lulls me to sleep, but not when my favorite guest, David Paulides, is at the mic.
Paulides, an ex-cop from San Jose, California, is the founder of the North America Bigfoot Search (NABS), established in 2004. His obsession shifted from Sasquatch to missing persons when, he says, he was visited at his motel near an unnamed national park by two out-of-uniform rangers who claimed that something strange was going on with the number of people missing in America’s national parks.
He wouldn’t tell me the place or even the year “for fear the Park Service will try to put the pieces together and ID them.” I wonder how actual those park rangers might be—it’s curious that park employees would say, let’s go tell the bigfoot guy we have a missing persons problem, but it makes good lore.
In 2011, Paulides launched the CanAm Missing Project, which catalogs cases of people who disappear—or are found—on wildlands across North America under what he calls mysterious circumstances. He has self-published six volumes in his popular Missing 411 series, most recently Missing 411 Hunters: Unexplained Disappearances. Missing 411: The Movie, a documentary co-directed by his son, Ben, and featuring Survivorman Les Stroud, was released to mixed reviews in 2016. Missing 411: The Hunted, about hunters gone missing, came out in 2019.
Paulides makes his living off both Bigfoot and missing persons—selling self-published books that read like seed catalogs for the missing, making documentary movies with the tone and editing tricks of horror flicks, and speaking at events like Colorado’s Mile High Mystery Conference—but he does his homework. Paulides’s Missing 411 series of books aggregates hundreds of wildland missing persons cases in the U.S. and Canada. Paulides is coyly careful not to present theories as to what is behind all the disappearances, but the books fact-check out, even if he traffics in confirmation bias and foments tinfoil hat theories about space aliens, string theory portals, and cryptoids. He didn’t come out and offer a number, so we played a sort of editorial numbers game. 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 1,600 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.
Many of the missing 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’s not just Oregon that has strange topography on the charts. Most states’ missing persons statistical figures climb irregularly upward; however, many of the missing 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 the 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.
While many of the incidents are readily explained—swept down a roiling river, caught in an avalanche, dragged off and eaten by a mountain lion, hypothermia, suicide, etc.—I’m drawn to the stories that defy conventional logic. The proverbial vanished without a trace incidents, which happen a lot more (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. The cases that are an embarrassment for park superintendents, rangers, and law enforcement charged with search and rescue. The ones that baffle the volunteers who comb the mountains, woods, and badlands.
The stories that should give you pause every time you venture outdoors.
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That summer, 1997, I read about Amy Bechtel in the paper, listened on the statewide NPR affiliate (my preferred daytime listening), and talked to people who knew Amy and her husband, Steve, a professional rock climber, from the close-knit world of outdoor athletes in Wyoming. The disappearance split the family. Amy’s brother Nels Wroe sparred in the media with Steve. Statistics show that most of the time it is indeed the husband. But in Wyoming—hell, all over this continent, all over the world—there are so many other possibilities for how someone goes missing.
Hilary and I attended a benefit run a month after Amy vanished. We wanted to help raise awareness and a little money for search efforts, but mostly we were curious. I wanted to trace the probable route that Amy had run the day she disappeared. I wanted to meet her husband and see if I could size him up. Also, we enjoyed weekend running events, and it would be good to get into those gorgeous mountains for some exercise with a purpose.
Informational flyers were included in our race packets. I can remember the race T-shirt for the Amy Bechtel Hill Climb vividly. A large color photograph of smiling, blond-haired Amy had been hastily screen-printed on the front of a basic white T-shirt, along with the words have you seen amy? and a phone number: 1-800-867-5AMY. Amy’s photograph started to mute with the first wash. The shirt was one that got noticeably softer with each laundering, and I wore it often since it was so comfortable. It wasn’t long until Amy faded to the white of the shirt, like a ghost, and all that remained was have you seen amy? and the phone number, which has long been disconnected.
I wish I’d saved that shirt, but I ripped it crawling under a barbed-wire fence, a bullet-sized hole in the back, and it took two runs in the 7,500-feet Wyoming sunshine that resulted in a painful sunburn on my back the size of a quarter before I tore it to rags to be used on my greasy bicycle chains. But even now, twenty years later and without a T-shirt to trigger my memory, I often think about Amy Bechtel and wonder what happened that summer day back in 1997, a time in my life when I was convinced I had more answers.
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