Trail of the Lost by Andrea Lankford

What do I like to do in retirement? Read mysteries and thrillers (of course), hike/camp (or most anything that gets me outside), play soccer, get my grandsons in trouble. You know, the usual. When I find something that intersects two of those pleasures, it’s a good use of my time.

Trail of the Lost is a mystery . . . about hiking . . . and because the stories are in this book are  true makes this one of my rare ventures into non-fiction. Don’t remember what prompted me looking for this 2023 title, but my local library had a copy. Betting your library does, too.

Andrea Lankford is now an RN in California. In the 90s, she was a long-time senior member of the National Park Service’s Search and Rescue teams. A boss who organized and directed teams of professional and amateur trackers looking for people missing in the California wilderness. 

This book is about the search for three missing through hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail. Yes. That 2650-mile trail that gained considerable notoriety with the movie Wild, about one damaged woman’s (Cheryl Strayed) search for personal redemption by attempting to hike the PCT alone. 

Lankford points out that since December 2022 there have been just 16 deaths of through hikers making the PCT statistically far safer than the freeways leading hikers to a trailhead. Plenty of folks try the full hike and most quit early on, typically within the first week to month. The trail isn’t a casual ramble through the forest on pine straw covered trails. The footing can be treacherous, the ascents and descents are killers, weather is unpredictable, water and food can be scarce. Add to that the wide range of predators, human and animal, between Mexico and Canada. This book is about three hikers who started and were never found.

Kris Fowler began at the Canada border. An experienced hiker around 30yo. Started hiking in May 2016 and hiked in sandals so he could ‘feel the earth.’ Christopher Sylvia began at the Mexico border. Also around 30. Started north in February 2015. David O’Sullivan, an Ireland native, just out of university, had studied the trail and trained for his hike. He started at the Mexico terminus in March 2017. Each had been in contact with family and friends early in their hike before all contact was lost not all that long after they began their respective treks. Local search parties were organized but were unable to find much evidence.

By the late 2010s, Lankford had left her SAR days behind her but for personal or existential reasons, the disappearance of these three tugged at her sensibilities. She contacted all three families to get their blessing to pick up the search. A difficult sales pitch telling families that you are good at this and want to help but can make no promises.

The book details the history of each hiker prior to and what was known about their treks. Like any missing persons case or even crimes, knowing the victim is critical. When it comes to what had already been done (and not done or lost) reveals a lot about national, state, county, and local law enforcement, the Park Service, and the myriad of jurisdictional issues, national and international. Now throw in a tutorial about how to run three disparate wilderness searches is the southern California desert and the Pacific Northwest conducted by pros and amateurs. Finally, all this is being conducted in era of social media. Once the word got out across the numerous platforms, thousands of clues, evidence and outright lies that come in from well-meaning, casual, and seriously disturbed individuals who populate the Internet must be run down.

The more and more clues that become dead ends makes it harder and harder to continue the search. As such, the intensity of everyone involved tends to wane over time and others join in for reasons of their own. This book is, on one level, an attempt to widen the search. As of the publication date of this book, the families are no closer to knowing the fates of these 3 young men than they were when they first lost contact.

I read a truly excellent book (The Last Season by Eric Blehm) about the disappearance of a back country ranger in the Sequoia National Park (but for some reason I can’t find it on this blog. Go figure. Trust me. That book is a seriously great piece of nature writing). Randy Morgenson spent the spring through the fall of most every year of his adult life living in a tent as a park ranger. Grew up in Yosemite.This guy was one of the most skilled outdoorsman alive at the time. All told he’d spent more time in the CA mountains than John Muir. Right up until he just vanished. At least in that book, that mystery was solved. 

Unfortunately, not so for these families. 

 

East Coast Don