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, founder of the North America Bigfoot Search, 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 are so rare that Robert Koester, a.k.a. Professor Rescue, the foremost academic on search and rescue (SAR)Ìęstatistics, lists only “lost mountain biker” in his seminal 2008 book . Koester is certified as a Type 1 SAR incident commander and holds a Ph.D. in search theory from the University of Portsmouth, in England. “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.

But of course it happens. Our Amelia Earhart is a cyclist named Frank Lenz, who in 1892, at the age of 24, lit out from PittsburghÌęto circumnavigate the globe on his Victory “.”ÌęHe wouldn’t be the first to do it, but Outing magazine sponsored his trip so he could chronicle the adventure while demonstrating the high-tech wonders of the newfangled safetyÌębicycle. Two years into the trip, Lenz fell off the edge of the earth somewhere in the Ottoman Empire. You can imagine how slowly no news traveled then. When his family expressed concern, Outing sent another famous cyclist, William Sachtleben, to Turkey to find him. He didn’t, but came back with the information that his probable fate was Lenz pissed off a Kurdish chief, and the warlord had him killed. At the time, Sachtleben’s rescue attempt was considered on a par with the famous hunt for David Livingstone: .

Koester’s statistics missed a 2014 Canadian vanish that is as confounding as any I’ve heard of. It’s easy to miss the Canadian missing—the country is huge and quiet. They like to take care of their own and not broadcast their troubles. I only learned about the case because his identical twin brother, Marcel, contacted me after he read the article I’d written for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine that focused on a missing runner, Joe Keller. Marty Leger, from Halifax, Nova Scotia, was 30 years old when he went for a routine ride at a popular trail network at Spider Lake. There isn’t anything extremely remote about the area—the trailhead is even in a residential area. But it’s the Canadian Maritimes, so wildlands are never not close.

May 29. Marty was riding a new black Santa Cruz Heckler. He planned to ride singletrack for a couple of hours and return home around four in the afternoon. He didn’t. First his family went looking for him. Then the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—RCMP—mounted a search that included nearly 500Ìępeople. Volunteers, dogs, and helicopters searched a search zone that was 30Ìęsquare miles. The search for Marty Leger was one of the largest in Canadian history. Not a granola-bar wrapper was found, let alone a fat-tire bicycle.

“With a bike, you can cover more ground…Ìęso you can likely get yourself out,” Marcel says. “Also, you tend to have to stick to the trails when biking.” Marty almost certainly went off-trail, perhaps in an attempt to take a shortcut. “I am not surprised they didn’t find his bike, because if they would have found it, they would have found him. I cannot imagine him leaving his new bike. It was maybe his third ride on it.” All cyclists will understand that; what’s harder to understand is not finding a mountain biker.

“A body ended up being discovered roughly a year after he went missing,” Marcel says. “It was someone else who had gone missing before Marty. He was found within the search area, so clearly it would have been very possible for them to simply not see Marty or his bike. They had a lot of people searching, but it only takes one person to miss him and then cross off that area. Everyone who searched for him tried so hard day after day, but they had a radius they needed to look at based on age, weight, time of day, weather, and how long since he’s been reported missing. And there’s a good chance Marty was out of that radius when the search started.”

“What’s your theory about what happened?”ÌęI asked him. “My best guess is that he got off trail and got lost,” Marcel says. “Once he realized he was lost, he found the nearest dirt road and tried to follow that until he hit a highway or a neighborhood. He likely went as far as he could and tried to sleep the night off and go back at it in the morning.” This happens a surprising amount in Canada, where logging roads and ATV trails web and spiral and sometimes go for hundreds of miles. “My guess is that he tried hard to get out and covered a lot of ground, but unfortunately, that likely put him out of the radius they were searching. It was cold that night, and he was wearing shorts and aÌęT-shirt. So I’m thinking he went to bed and hypothermia set in and he simply didn’t wake up.” Trying to apply logic to a case like this one is painful.

According to Marcel, it’s possible the trail got too technical for MartyÌęand he fell hard and succumbed to injuries. That’s certainly possible, but if he’d fallen so hard that he was badly injured, it doesn’t make sense he’d have stumbled or crawled far from the trail; at least the bike would have been located. “I have a hard time believing he got hurt badly—he rode very conservatively, never did jumps or crazy lines he could not handle,” Marcel says.

Marty had only ridden the area one time previously, and it’s not believed he intended to ride very far. He brought a map, but it was found in the car, so perhaps he was comfortable enough with his intended route without it. The area is bordered on one side with a highway, but all other directions are dense wooded areas. The army was eventually called in, and, Marcel told me, even the soldiers had a hard time bushwhacking through some of it.

“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 OKÌęwith 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,” Marcel says. “He really needed closure. My dad was not a depressed man before this.”

What people don’t think of are the social pressures for 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,” he says. “I have a hard time answering the phone. I never liked the phone 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 OKÌęif anything happens.”

From the book , by Jon Billman. Copyright © 2020 by Jon Billman. Reprinted by permission of Grand Central Publishing, New York, NY. All rights reserved.

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Update: On August 2, authorities found a damaged johnboat that they'dÌęspotted by helicopter along the Nelson River. At 10 A.M.Ìęon August 7, the RCMP found the bodies of two males in thick bush near the river. An autopsy is pending, but they are believed to be Kam McLeod and Bryer Schmegelsky. They were found approximately fiveÌęmiles from the burnt RAV4. The manhunt has been called off.

It started as an idyllic three-week road trip for an adventurous young couple. Chynna Deese, 24, of Charlotte, North Carolina, and Lucas Fowler, 23, of Sydney, Australia set out in early July to drive from the northern Canadian Rockies to Alaska in a faded blue 1986 Chevy van that Fowler had bought from a buffalo and cattle rancher he’d worked for in British Columbia.ÌęÌę

On Sunday, July 14, the van broke down on a remote section of Highway 97, known as the Alaska Highway, about 12 miles south of Liard Hot Springs near the Yukon border. Motorists reported that the van was stalled on the shoulder with the hood up, while Deese and Fowler—both keen travelers who had met at a hostel in Croatia—cooked a meal and relaxed in lawn chairs. A mechanic and his wife from Fort Nelson stopped and asked the couple if they needed help, but Fowler seemed confident he could get the vehicle going again.Ìę

On Monday, July 15, the bullet-riddled bodies of Deese and Fowler were discovered by another highway worker. The blue Chevy was parked nearby with a rear window broken out. Northern British Columbia and Yukon locals went on high alert—the homicides were heinous and appeared to lack motive. Deese’s brother, British, stated that the bodies were so violated that open-casket funerals were not feasible.Ìę

Then things got even stranger and more upsetting. Four days after the highway worker discovered Deese and Fowler’s bodies, a burning Dodge pickup with a slide-in camper was found on Highway 37, 31 miles south of Dease Lake, south of the Yukon border and roughly 300 miles west of Liard Hot Springs. (Highway 37 and 97 are the only two highways in the massive northern part of the B.C. province.) Less than a mile from the Dodge, the body of a bearded man in his fifties or sixties was found by a motorist in a highway pullout.ÌęHe was later identified as Leonard Dyck of Vancouver. Dyck, a husband and a father, worked as a botanist at the University of British Columbia.Ìę

The Dodge had been driven by Kam McCleod, 19, and Bryer Schmegelsky, 18, according to law enforcement. Both teenagers are reported by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) as 6’4” tall and “approximately 169 pounds.” Both have brown hair, while McLeod has a scruffy beard. Family members told law enforcement that the boys had gone to Whitehorse, in the Yukon Territory, to look for work, perhaps in the oil and gas fields. The two had worked at Walmart in Port Alberni, on Vancouver Island, together, but were looking to make more money and have an adventure, according to their family. Now they’d vanished. On Monday, July 22, the RCMP officially declared them missing persons.Ìę

Theories immediately arose that British Columbia had a serial killer at large. Early speculation linked the three corpses and two missing teenagers to the Highway of Tears, Highway 16, the east-west route infamous for the murders and disappearances of over forty women—mostly First Nations—since 1970. But Highway 16 is 620 miles to the south and none of the victims were indigenous women.

McCleod and Schmegelsky, the teens from Port Alberni, didn’t stay missing persons for long. On Sunday, July 21, the RCMP announced that McCleod and Schmegelsky were seen on surveillance camera footage two provinces away in northern Saskatchewan. They were driving a grey 2011 Toyota RAV4. They were now the main suspects in the deaths of Chynna Deese, Lucas Fowler, and Dyck, according to the RCMP. “Take no actions—do not approach,” warned the RCMP. “Call 911 immediately.”Ìę

At 7 P.M. on Monday, July 22, the Toyota RAV4 was reported burning off Provincial Road 290, along the Nelson River in northern Manitoba about 680 miles east of where they were spotted in Saskatchewan. PR 290 terminates halfway between the small Manitoba town of Gillam (population 1,300) and Hudson Bay. It’s literally the end of the road.Ìę

As of Friday, the RCMP Manitoba as well as the RCMP Special Crimes Unit and the Ontario Provincial Police had highway checkpoints at the intersection of PR 280 and PR 290. Police have deployed dogs and drones as well as armored tactical assault vehicles. Law enforcement believe the teenagers are in the bush—no vehicles have been reported stolen in the area. It’s possible they slipped out in a vehicle, but more likely they’re waist-deep in theÌęunforgiving subarctic bush of the Hudson Bay Lowlands.Ìę

I spent a week backpacking in the bush of the Arctic Ocean watershed near here last summer researching a missing persons case. This is one of the world’s largest wetlands: swamps, bogs and fens with dwarf birch and stunted tamarack, waist-deep water and muskeg that is like walking atop miles of used, soaked mattresses. There are wolves and occasionally polar bears, but the biggest threat is being eaten by mosquitoes and a half-dozen varieties of biting flies. Gloves, bug netting, and highly-concentrated DEET are all but mandatory, and considering the way the teenagers were traveling, I’d be surprised if they were prepared for the bush. Could they have stolen a boat and floated down the Nelson River to the saltwater of Hudson Bay? Possibly, but the Nelson is not an easy river to navigate due to a series of dams and rapids.ÌęÌę

On Wednesday, McCleod and Schmegelsky were charged with second-degree murder for the killing of Dyck. (They remain suspects in the murders of Deese and Fowler.) If convicted—and if they don’t die from exposure in the bush or a firefight with Mounties—they will be sentenced to mandatory life in prison without possibility of parole.ÌęÌę

Schmegelsky’s father, Alan, . “A normal child doesn’t travel across the country killing people,” he said. “A child in some very serious pain does.” Alan and Bryer’s mother divorced in 2005. Bryer bounced between homes and was last living with his grandmother in Port Alberni. Alan says his son was consumed by YouTube and video games. A video game user provided photos from last fall showing Bryer in battle fatigues, another in a gas mask, and Nazi memorabilia including a swastika armband and a knife issued to Hitler Youth.Ìę

“The Mounties are gonna shoot first and ask questions later,” Alan told CTV from his home near Victoria. “He’s going to be dead today or tomorrow, I know that. Rest in peace, Bryer. I love you. I’m so sorry all this had to happen.”Ìę

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In the early morning hours of May 29, a helicopter circled Mauna Kahalawai, on the Hawaiian island of Maui, deploying Forward-Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR) to detect any sign of life. The searchers were looking for a local hiker who had been missing for nine days.

The missing person was not Amanda Eller, the yoga instructor and physical therapist who now famously survived 17 days in the Hawaiian backcountry in a tank top and capris. It was 35-year-old local man Noah “Kekai” Mina who, on May 20, set out on the unmarked Kapilau Ridge Trail, also known as the Iao Valley Secret Trail, roughly 20 miles away from the command headquarters for Eller’s search. Ìę

But the searchers—an unemployed arborist, a formerÌęArmy Ranger and scuba instructor, and a rappelling guide—were the same.

To paraphraseÌęRobert Koester, a.k.a. Professor Rescue and theÌęauthor of , the Bible of search and rescue, a runner tends to run themselves out of the search area pretty fast. That’s just what Eller, 35, did on May 8. She’d intended to do a routine three-mile trail run in the Makawao Forest Reserve, a 2,000-acre rainforest that shoulders the massive Haleakala volcano on the Hawaiian island of Maui. Eller, a local, ducked down a little side path for a meditation break. When she stood up to continue on the main trail, she got turned around, forgetting which way she’d come in. And as outdoor athletes can and sometimes do, she pushed herself swiftly and confidently in the wrong direction, determined not to backtrack, so that her hourlong outing turned into a 17-day bushwhack from hell.

After her boyfriend, Benjamin Konkel, reported her missing to the Maui police department on the morning of May 9, authorities located Eller’s white 2015 Toyota RAV4 at the Hunter’s Trail trailhead. Her phone, wallet, and water bottle were locked inside the car. Her car key was found hidden behind a tire. This wasn’t necessarily unusual—she wouldn’t need her phone on a shortÌęfamiliar route, and the only thing you can do with a car key in the forest is lose it. There was no immediate sign of foul play; Konkel took a lie-detector test and passed.

According to the federal (NamUs), Hawaii ranks eighth in the United States in number of missing persons. (Alaska is far and away number one.)ÌęWhereas in most of the United States the county sheriff is in charge of search and rescue, in HawaiiÌęthe sheriff division of the Hawaii Department of Public Safety acts more like a state police. On Maui, the county fire department is in charge of search and rescue. The Maui police department and the Maui County Department of Fire andÌęPublic Safety were joined by dog teams from the volunteer organization Maui Search andÌęRescue. In a matter of hours there were helicopters, drones, dogs, and trained boots on the ground. Dozens of volunteers showed up to help scour the trails.

“We would take anybody who could walk,” says Sarah Haynes, a friend who was deputized into helping organize the search and taking the role of family spokesperson while Eller’s parents, John and Julie, were unreachable for the first two days while on a diving trip. ÌęÌę

At firstÌęall those searchers were organized under the direction of Maui Fire, who are well versed in incident command. But onÌęMay 11, mandated by a 72-hour limit on rescue-personnel efforts, Maui Fire had to pull the plug on the official search. As of Sunday, May 12, the volunteers were on their own, an army without an officer. That’s when arborist Chris Berquist, 33, and Javier Cantellops, 37, a formerÌęSpecial Operations Army Ranger, scuba instructor, and free diver who’d taught scuba to Eller, stepped in. ÌęÌę

I’ve studied myriad missing-person searches while researching my forthcoming book, The Cold Vanish (Grand Central Publishing, 2020). Searches are like snowflakes in that no two are alike, but the hunt for Amanda Eller was special—only in part because she survived.

In most cases, after the official search is called off and the incident command goes home, the effort is left to family, friends, and sometimes a handful of locals who want to help. The lost person is at the mercy of familial and demographic privilege; in short, who looks for you when the pros go home is a crapshoot. Some searches get a figurative shot of vitamin B when an incident-command expert steps in to run an intensive two- or three-day ad hoc search. The Jon Francis Foundation, a Minnesota-based nonprofit that helps families of persons missing in the wild, will sometimes organize a skilled search of seven to ten days. Neal Keller, father of runner Joe Keller, who disappeared in the San Luis Valley of Colorado in 2015, would fly out from his home in Tennessee to take lonely hikes and horseback rides in the mountains until Joe’s body was found in 2016. Professional adventurer Roman Dial utilized his skillset to search for his son Cody, who vanished in 2014 in the Costa Rican jungle; Cody’s body was found two years later. Randy Gray, a surfer whose son Jacob went missing on his bicycle in Washington’sÌęOlympic National ParkÌęin 2017, left his contracting job to turn over every rock in the Sol Duc River looking for his son.

But these are exceptions, not the rule. And what made the search for Eller especially unique was the army of fit, motivated islanders and the sacrifices made by Cantellops and Berquist, who didn’t even know Eller when she vanished. “We need people who are comfortable being outside six to eight hours a day,” Berquist told Ìęfrom the operations yurt that was erected on site. There were 60 to 150 searchers there every day for two solid weeks. And the spirit was such that they would have stayed longer.

At first, after Maui Fire packed up, things were as DIY as homemade soap. But “Chris showed up and the next thing you know he’s on the other side of the table,” Haynes says of Berquist. “It quickly exploded and we got a small team of people together who then had hundreds of people under them.”

Soon the camp looked like an aid station at an ultramarathon—tables lined with energy drinks and piled with nutrition barsÌęand donated sandwiches from local restaurants. A generator hummed behind the yurt. People shuttledÌęin the most precious commodity for a tropical emergency like this: ice, to keep searchers cool in the humid 90-degree heat. FAA-certified drone pilots flew cameras over the forest canopy. Experienced hikers and fast packers were able to cross off chunks of map. Rappellers spidered down cliffs; free divers checked ponds and pools. Hunters even killed boars and examined their intestines. Maui Search andÌęRescue ran dog teams. A GoFundMe site raised more than $70,000 to help offset private helicopter costs, which can run over $1,000Ìęan hour. And Berquist is quick to point out that members of Maui Fire were still assisting behind the scenes even after they had to officially step down.

Who keeps track of all that activity, all that searching? Berquist and Cantellops started with a flip phone and a legal pad. With the help of Haynes and Elena Pray, 29, a rappelling guide for Rappel Maui, they began by handing out paper “pirate maps”—X marks the spot, with a hairball problem of solving for X. All volunteers had to be checked in, accounted for, and checked out. Their routes and notes had to be logged and added to the map. When needed, Pray would be called to rappel into an area. “One afternoon we assisted a group of searchers out of a deep gulch using technical rope gear just minutes shy of darkness,” she told me. One volunteer, Stephie Garrett, went from yurt ops to being a search-team leader. A Swiss tourist named Susann Schuh spent her vacation organizing data for stacked 12-hour days.

Gradually computers were plugged in and the team utilized apps that allowed coordinators to color in specific areas that had been scoured, aided by the tech expertise of Eller’s father, John, an executive in telematics, the intersection of communications and information technology. Troy Helmer, a local hunter, scouted the topography and consulted on the battle plan. “Troy knows that area better than anyone in Maui,” Cantellops told me.

Still, for two weeksÌęthe searchers found nothing. Surveillance cameras at a grocery store in Haiku showed Eller shopping the morning of May 8. A time stamp on a package placed her at the post office. Police reviewed video footage from doorbell security cameras on the road from Haiku to Makawao to see if she had been abducted or followed. “She was alone in the car and having a normal day,” Haynes says, “so we felt strongly that she took herself to the forest in unsuspicious circumstances.” Hikers reported having seen Eller—theyÌęchatted briefly and sheÌępet their dog.

Still, it was hard to not think of foul play. When Occam’s razor doesn’t prove out quickly, the void left by a vanished person is quickly filled with speculation. Armchair investigators on Facebook and WebsleuthsÌęfigured that if she hadn’t fallen down a lava tube or been eaten by wild pigs, she’d surely been abducted. The boyfriend must have offed her, they theorized, and cheated on the polygraph. Or it could have been an ex. A jealous coworker. She probably stumbled across one of many illegal marijuana operations. Maybe there was a serial killer on the loose.

And out came the psychics. The trail of any missing person in the wild is paved with psychics. Most of them saw her dead. They saw men with tattoos. They saw her tied up and being thrown off a cliff. ÌęÌę

Eller’s case reminded me of Amy Bechtel’s disappearanceÌęin the Wind River Range of Wyoming in 1997. Both women were runners. Both left valuables in their white Toyotas at a place where they presumably parked to run. Both had partners who were suspected of foul play, and tip lines flooded by psychics. As with Bechtel, whose disappearance has never been solved, chances of Eller being found alive were growing increasingly grim.

As all these theories and leads swirled around him, Berquist kept disciplined. He was so dedicated to the search that his employer—a landscaping company—fired him. That didn’t deter him from showing up to look for Eller day after day. “We are nowhere close to stopping by any means,” he told Maui Now. “We have so much more that we can do out here, we’re gonna continue to push it.”

Lost persons, mainly deceased, are often found within an original search area. In this case, the computer mapping allowed searchers to see that they’d fairly saturated the original 1.5-mile radius. On the afternoon of Friday, May 24, Berquist realized he needed to plan for the Memorial Day weekend, when many more volunteers would show up to search. He thought they might need to move the yurt to another location, to push past the radius they’d been focusing on for the past two weeks. He, Cantellops, and Helmer climbed into pilot Pete Vorhes’s yellow Hughes 369D for a reconnaissance flight.

This was the breakthrough. “I just felt that she was alive, man,” Cantellops would tell The Today Show the following Monday. “If we haven’t found her and we haven’t smelled her, that’s because she’s on the move, she’s moving out and she’s way farther out than we think she is.”

With only 15 minutes of fuel remaining, the men on the helicopter prepared to turn around. They were now outside the boundary of Makawao Forest Reserve, about seven miles from where Eller’s car had been found. That’s when they saw Eller on the riverbank, between two waterfalls, waving furiously.

Overnight, the story of Eller’s ordeal would erupt in newspapers and on morning shows. She could see and hear helicopters, she recalled, but they never saw her. Day threeÌęis when she went from panicked, lost-person mode into survival mode, searching for clean water and foraging for food. She fell 20 feet off a cliff, breaking her leg and tearing the meniscus in her knee. She was reduced to crawling. It rained, and her running shoes got swept away in a flash flood. Temperatures at night dipped to near 60, potentially hypothermic conditions when it’s wet. She had nothing but her yoga pants and a tank top. To keep warm, she covered herself with ferns, leaves, and forest duff. She slept in a boar’s nest.

She ateÌęplants she didn’t know, some strawberries, and guava. For proteinÌęshe swallowed an occasional moth. Maui waterfalls look fresh on postcards but can contain Leptospira, a genus of bacteria that causes a whole buffet of problems including meningitis, kidney failure, and death. But to not drink meant certain death.

Eller lost 20 pounds in those 17 days. In addition to her broken leg, she had a severe skin infection from sunburn. But thanks to the determination of friends and strangers, she is expected to make a full recovery.

On Sunday, May 26, not 48 hours after Eller was found, I got a text from Javier Cantellops. He couldn’t talk, he said; they were getting in a helicopterÌęto look for another missing person. As with Eller, local authorities had searched for three days for Noah Mina, after he disappeared on May 20 from the Kapilau Ridge Trail. But because the terrain was so technical, Mina’s father, Vincent, issued a statement advising against ordinary volunteers trying to find him. Ìę

Searchers did find Mina’s flip-flops. But, Cantellops told me, “That’s not unusual. A lot of locals here hike barefoot.” Ìę

I caught up with Cantellops on Tuesday morning, as he and Berquist were gearing up to search. Elena Pray was already in the helicopter. “This is a totally technical search,” he said. “Helicopters with FLIR, drones. It’s like Mina’s dad said: No boots on the ground.”

“This is not a place where people go,” he continued. “Sheer 2,400-foot faces. This is the most primal part of Maui. You’ve seen the mountains in maybe North Carolina or Georgia—smooth, round? This isn’t like that. This is Afghanistan, man.”

But with the help of technology, the efforts of Berquist, Cantellops, and Pray paid off. This time, however, the ending was not a happy one. “In the early morning hours of Wednesday, May 29,” read a family statement issued on the public Facebook page Bring Kekai Home, “a crew of searchers aboard a helicopter spotted the body of missing hiker Noah ‘Kekai’ÌęMina. Mina was found about 300 feet below a fall line in the summit region of Mauna Kahalawai. Recovery efforts are currently underway.”

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“Except for the time I was digging my own grave at gunpoint on the edge of , I hadn’t much experience with a shovel.” So begins , the third Jane Bunker Mystery by Linda Greenlaw, the lobster-boat captain made famous in Sebastian Junger’s . Her heroine is a former Miami homicide detective turned insurance investigator who travels to Acadia Island to check out a mysterious house fire. Bunker discovers a body among the ashes, the victim boiled alive—“like a lobster”—and then burned to cover the crime. Meanwhile, a nor’easter maroons her on the island with the killer.

Shiver Hitch is just one of several new installments in outdoor mystery series worth tossing in your pack. , Erik Storey’s sophomore release in his Clyde Barr series, finds the tattooed ex-inmate, ex-mercenary riding west from Colorado on his horse to clear his head. When he stumbles into hired-hand work on a ranch on Ute tribal lands in northeastern Utah, he finds that a dangerous motorcycle gang called the Reapers has moved onto the rez, wreaking havoc. What ensues is a Sam Peckinpah via Peter Fonda motorcycle western, but with drones. Storey, who lives in Grand Junction, Colorado, is a former ranch hand and wilderness guide; he gives a high-country nod to the influence of legendary Florida mystery ­writer when, near the end, the hero reaches for a Travis McGee novel. Barr may be to the mountains what McGee is to the swamps. “At night, when the sun dropped below the rocky mesas to the west, the higher hills and mountains to the east would bleed red in the alpenglow.” The mountains most ­certainly don’tÌędo all the bleeding before Barr rides off with the sunrise at his back.Ìę

The catalyst for Keith McCafferty’s —my favorite of the bunch—is the true story of the sportsman’s lost Ark of the Covenant: Ernest Hemingway’s steamer trunk full of high-end that was either lost or pilfered in 1940 while the novelist was en route to Sun Valley, Idaho. McCafferty’s hero, Sean Stranahan, is just the man to untangle the lines when a vintage leather fly wallet turns up in a dead woman’s saddlebag. Strana­han is a part-time trout guide, water­colorist, and private investigator who drives a 1976 Land Cruiser, lives in a tepee, and sleeps with most of the women he meets, including a one-armed former rodeo queen.Ìę

This is the sixth Stranahan mystery, but it’s his intermittent lover, sheriff Martha Ettinger, who the reader wants to drink with. The law woman gets a finger shot off and keeps it in a jar of tequila on her pantry shelf. Bodies keep turning up in her backcountry—one was even found in a bear cave—and it’s up to Ettinger to pack them out. “The ­horses’ eyes went to disks like they did when you diamond-hitched elk quarters on to a pack saddle. It reminded Martha that in the end a human being was just another kind of meat.” The tackle caper takes Stranahan to Michigan, Wyoming, and Cuba, but it’s the fictional Hyalite County, Montana, that gives the book such noir terroir.

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July 23, 2015 was the eve of Joseph Lloyd Keller’s 19thÌębirthday.ÌęThe Cleveland, Tennessee, native had been spending the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at Cleveland State Community College on a western road trip with buddies Collin Gwaltney and Christian Fetzner in Gwaltney’s old Subaru. The boys had seen Las Vegas, San Francisco, and the Grand Canyon before heading to Joe’s aunt and uncle’s dude ranch, the , in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado.

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.

Joe, a competitive runner, open-­water swimmer, and obstacle-course racer, and Collin, a member of the varsity cross-­country team at Division I Tennessee Tech, had been running together often during their trip. Neither was totally acclimatized to the altitude—the ranch sits just below 9,000 feet. Joe was a bit slower than his friend. He suffered from asthma as a three-year-old but had kicked it by age 12. The workout would be routine: an hourlong run, likely along Forest Road 250, which bisects the ranch and continues into the national forest, following the Conejos River upstream.

Joe left his phone and wallet at the ranch house. He wore only red running shorts, blue trail shoes, and an Ironman watch. Shirtless, with blond anime hair and ripped muscles, he looked more like a California lifeguard than a Tennessee farm kid.

4:30 p.m. The friends started out to­gether. Neither runner knew the area, but old-timers will tell you that even a blind man could find his way out of Conejos Canyon: on the south side, runner’s left, cattle graze in open meadows along the river. On the north side, ­ponderosa pines birthday-­candle the steep tuff until they hit sheer basalt cliffs, a massive canyon wall rising 2,000 feet above the gravel road toward 11,210-foot .

As the two young men jogged by the corral, one of the female wranglers yelled, “Pick it up!” They smiled and Joe sprinted up the road before the two settled into their respective paces, with Collin surging ahead.

The GPS track on Collin’s watch shows him turning right off Forest Road 250 onto the ranch drive and snaking up behind the lodge, trying to check out three geologic outcroppings—Faith, Hope, and Charity—that loom over the ranch. But the run became a scramble, so he cut back down toward the road and headed upriver. A fly-fisherman says he saw Collin 2.5 miles up the road but not Joe. Collin never encountered his friend; he timed out his run at a pace that led to puking due to the altitude.

No Joe. Collin moseyed back to the ranch house and waited. An hour later, he started to worry.

When Joe didn’t show up to get ready for dinner, Collin and Christian drove up the road, honking and waiting for Joe to come limping toward the road like a lost steer. At 7:30, a small patrol of ranch hands hiked up the rocks toward Faith, the closest formation. By 9:30 there were 35 people out looking. “If he was hurt, he would have heard us,” recalled Joe’s uncle, David Van Berkum, 47. “He was either not conscious or not there.”

“The first 24 hours are key,” says Robert Koester, a.k.a. Professor Rescue, author of the search and rescue guidebook . Koester was consulted on the Keller case and noted that, like most missing runners, Joe wasn’t dressed for a night outside. Plus, he says, it wouldn’t have been unusual for a young athlete like Joe to switch from run to scramble mode. “Heading for higher ground is a known strategy for a lost person,” he says. “Maybe you can get a better vista. And based on his age, it might just have been a fun thing to do.”

Around 10 p.m., the Van Berkums called the Conejos County Sheriff’s Department, and sheriff Howard Galvez and two deputies showed up around midnight. It was now Joe’s birthday. At this point, the effort was still what pros call a hasty search—quick and dirty, focusing on the most logical areas.

It was a warm night, and everyone still expected Joe to find his way back at daybreak, wild story in tow. That morning, as ranch employees and guests continued the search, Jane Van Berkum, 48, alerted Joe’s parents—Zoe, 56, and Neal, 59. Zoe and Jane are sisters, originally from Kenya; their family, British expats, left the country in the 1970s. It took the Kellers and their 17-year-old daughter, Hannah, less than 24 hours to get to the ranch from Tennessee, flying into Albuquerque, New Mexico, and renting a car for the three-and-a-half-hour drive north.

The family arrived at 2 a.m. In the morning, at 6 a.m., the professional search began: starting at what searchers call the point last seen, the ranch’s big ponderosa pine gate, a deputy fire chief from La Plata County named Roy Vreeland, 64, and his Belgian malinois scent dog, Cayenne, picked up a direction of ­travel, which pointed up Forest Road 250. More dogs arrived from Albuquerque—and identified different directions of travel or none at all. Additional firefighters drove over from La Plata ­County. Everyone on the ground—as is largely the case with search and rescue—were volunteers.

There was nothing to go on. In that first week, the search engaged about 15 dogs and 200 people on foot, horseback, and ATV. An infrared-equipped airplane from the flew over the area. Collin’s brother Tanner set up a GoFundMe site that paid for a helicopter to search for five hours, and a volunteer flew his fixed-wing aircraft in the canyon multiple times. A guy with a drone buzzed the steep embankments alongÌęHighway 17, the closest paved road, and the rock formation Faith, which has a cross on top. A $10,000 reward was posted for information. How far could a shirtless kid in running shoes get?

But after several days, volunteers began going home, pulled by other obligations. The few who remained did interviews, followed up on leads, and worked teams and dogs. But the search was already winding down. “We had a very lim­ited number of people,” one volunteer told me. “That’s fairly typical in Colorado. You put out calls and people say, ‘Well, if he hasn’t been found in that time, I have to go to work.’ ”

The absence of clues left a vacuum that quickly filled with anger, resentment, false hopes, and conspiracy theories. A tourist with a time-stamped receipt from a little gift shop in nearby Horca swore she saw two men on the road but later changed her story. A psychic reached out on Facebook to report a vision that Joe was west of Sedona, Arizona. There was even a theory that he’d been kidnapped in order to have his organs harvested and sold on the black market. “We feel like he’s not in that area, he’s been taken from there,” Neal Keller would tell me months later.

“I’m a scientist,” Koester says. “I’m fond of Occam’s razor.” That’s the principle that the simplest explanation usually holds true. “You could have a band of terrorists tie him to a tree and interrogate him. Is it possible? Yes. Is it likely? No.”

Joe Keller had just joined the foggy stratum of the hundreds or maybe thousands of people who’ve gone missing on our federal public lands. Thing is, nobody knows how many. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, calls unidentified remains and missing persons “the nation’s silent mass disaster,” estimating 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.

What I wanted to know was how many people are missing in our wild places, the roughly 640 million acres of federal lands—including national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management prop­erty. Cases like 51-year-old , who, in 2013, vanished from a short petroglyph-viewing trail near the gift shop at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park. , a 22-year-old rafting guide, who was wearing a professional-grade personal flotation device when he disappeared in 2015 in Grand Canyon National Park during a hike after setting up camp. Ohioan , who vanished from the Pa­cific Crest Trail last fall. At least two people have recently gone missing outside the national forest where I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There are scores more stories like this.

The Department of the Interior knows how many wolves and grizzly bears roam its wilds—can’t it keep track of visitors who disappear? But the government does not actively aggregate such statistics. The Department of Justice keeps a database, the ­, 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.

After the September 11 ­attacks, 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 andÌęReporting System, is a —last year, only 14 percent of theÌęseveral hundred reportable incidents were entered into it. The system is so flawed that Fish and Wildlife has said no thanks andÌęrefuses to use it.

That leaves the only estimates to civilians and conspiracy theorists. Aficionados of the vanished believe that at least 1,600 people, and perhaps many times that number, ­remain missing on public lands under circumstances that defy easy explanation.

Numbers aside, 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 or university law enforcement. If foul play is ­suspected, your state’s bureau of investigation can ­decide 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 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 and Alaska, statutes that date back to the Old West stipulate that you’re now the responsibility of the county sheriff.

“There are no federal standards for terrestrial search and rescue,” 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 : it has just one full-time law-­enforcement officer, who wasn’t given clearance to talk to șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű. Ranger Andrea Jones of the 377,314-acre Conejos Peak district, where Joe disappeared, did lament to me that sometimes she discovers cases in the ­weekly newspaper. “On occasions when we initially learn about a search and rescue in the forest from the ­local media,” she explained, “it’s difficult for us to properly engage, communicate, and offer available knowledge or resources.”

But wherever you are, once a search goes from rescue to recovery, most of those resources dry up.

On August 4, 2015, after Joe had been missing for 13 days, Sheriff Galvez pulled the plug on the official search. What had ­begun as a barnyard musical was now a ghost story. The river—already dropping quickly—had been searched and ruled out. Dog teams had scratched up nothing. Abandoned ­cabins had been searched and searched again. “I mean, we checked the pit toilets at the ­campgrounds—we did everything,” Galvez said. “We even collected bear crap. We still have it in the evidence freezer.”

Galvez had been elected sheriff only nine months earlier, and while he had years of law-­enforcement experience, he had no background leading search and rescue operations. One responder told me that by the time he arrived on the second day of searching, tension was already rising between Keller and Sheriff Galvez. Keller felt that Galvez wasn’t doing enough; Galvez felt that Keller was in the way, barking orders and criticizing his crew.

When dogs and volunteers start to go back to their lives and the aircraft return to the hangar, a missing-persons search can look eerily quiet. “For a lost person, the response is limited to five days on average,” Keller told me. “There needs to be a plan for applying resources for a little bit longer.”

The Keller family hired two private investigators, who turned up nothing. Zoe Keller told me that it was a waste of $800 a day; one of the investigators told me he’d never had a case with less to go on. The reward was raised from $10,000 to $25,000 and then to $50,000, but as David Van Berkum said, “There just isn’t a sniff of anything.”

Two weeks after Joe’s cold vanish, Alamosa County undersheriff Shawn Woods, who had been called in to assist by the Colo­rado Bureau of Investigation, told Keller about a tracker he knew named Alan Duffy. A 71-year-old surgical assistant, Duffy became interested in bloodhounds when his 21-year-old brother, David, disappeared in the San Gabriel Mountains in 1978; he was found dead of gunshot wounds six weeks later. Duffy has since taken his dogs to search JonBenĂ©t Ramsey’s neighborhood and to track stolen horses in Wyoming. Calling in Duffy was a wild card, as are so many things in a case like this.

On August 15, Duffy loaded three-year-old R.C.—named after Royal Crown Cola, on account of his black and tan coat—into his Jeep and drove 300 miles from Broomfield, Colorado, to the Rainbow Trout Ranch. A deputy gave him a scent item, one of Joe’s used sock liners. “That’s as good as underwear,” Duffy said.

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.”

R.C.’s trigger word to sniff for a living person, as opposed to human remains, is find. For search and rescue assignments, R.C. wears his orange harness, with Duffy holding the lead. After four hours of searching, Duffy switched R.C.’s harness to his black collar and told him, “We’re gonna go gizmo,” the dog’s cue for cadaver mode.

Four and a half miles up Forest Road 250, at Spectacle Lake—a murky pond, really—R.C. circled, tugged at vegetation on the bank, bit at the water, then jumped in and sat in the shallows. “He wouldn’t leave,” Duffy said.

Duffy wasn’t convinced, necessarily, that a body was in the lake, and he explained that scent is drawn toward water and believed that there was a corpse somewhere nearby. Rain or critters could have depos­ited cadaver material in the lake, enough to set off alarms in R.C.’s snout. But at four and a half milesÌęfrom Joe’s point last seen, the lake was at the far end of the ground game’s probabilities. Duffy offered up a few more scenarios, some of which upset the Van Berkums—such as when he told them that R.C. had picked up human-remains scents under buildings on the ranch. But with few other sources of help, desperation had led to Duffy. “At least he was trying,” Joe’s mom, Zoe, told me. “He could have been right.”

Continued searches in August turned up nothing. Neal Keller was commuting back and forth between Tennessee and Conejos County, searching every moment he could. In October 2015, when he and the sheriff were no longer on speaking terms, he urged the county commissioners for more help, including a dive team to search Spectacle Lake. “I, as the father of a missing boy—my only son, actually—would like to have as much resources as could possibly be made available,” he told the officials.

Keller was feeling the stress. He lost 15 pounds from hiking and scrambling in the altitude. Just before Thanksgiving, he, ­David Van Berkum, and a small posse spent two days searching the snow-covered scree west of the ranch. It was the area that seemed most logical, but it’s mean terrain. “We went in there because that area was likely the least searched,” he told me. No Joe. Keller would have to spend the long Colo­rado winter still not knowing.

The canyon now belonged to the snowmobilers and coyotes. Next season’s fly-fishers and ranch guests wouldn’t show up in any numbers until the snow melted in spring.

I first stepped through the missing-­persons portal back in 1997, when researching updates on Amy Wroe Bechtel, a runner who’d vanished in the Wind River Range of Wyoming, where I lived.

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 1 to 5 a.m. in my time zone. It’s syndicated on over 600 stations and boasts ­nearly three million listeners each week. Most of the time, the 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 . 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.”) So in 2011, Paulides launched the , 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 , most recently Missing 411 Hunters: Unexplained Disappearances. Paulides expects , a ­documentary codirected by his son, Ben, and featuring Survivorman Les Stroud, to be released this year.

Last May, I met him at a pizza joint in downtown ­Golden. The gym-fit Paulides, who moved from California to Colorado in part for the skiing, is right out of central casting for a detective film.

“I don’t put any theories in the books—I just connect facts,” he told me. Under “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. Bodies are also discovered in previously searched areas with odd fre­quency, ­sometimes right along the trail. Children—and remains—are occasionally found improbable ­distances from the point last seen, in improbable ­terrain.

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 on his office wall,

Paulides has identified 59 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, and Rocky Mountain National Parks. But then, it would seem you want to watch your step everywhere in the wild. The map resembles a game of pin the tail on the donkey at an amphetamine-fueled birthday party.

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 for fear that the sheer numbers—and the ways in which people went missing—would shock the public so badly that visitor numbers would go down.

Paulides brought along a missing-persons activist named Heidi Streetman, an affiliate faculty member at Denver’s Regis University who teaches research methods. After reading the Missing 411 series, she became frustrated that there was no searchable ­database for families of the disappeared. In 2014, she floated a petition titled It now has over 7,000 signers, with a goal of 10,000.

Streetman, a spirited 56-year-old who spent her childhood camping all over Colorado, is beset with the case of Dale ­Stehling, a 51-year-old Texan who vanished on on a 100-­degree Sunday afternoon in June 2013. The trail is rated moderate, but it was hot and Stehling didn’t have water. At the petroglyphs, where he was last seen, there is an intersection with an old access trail, where his wife, Denean, believes he may have left the main trail. “If there was a way to get lost, Dale would find it,” she says.

But even if Stehling had taken the wrong, overgrown path, he surely would have realized his mistake and backtracked. Maybe he collapsed in the heat. But rangers searched that area extensively on foot, with dogs, and in helicopters with firefighting crews. They sent climbers rappelling down cliffy areas and collected a whole trunk’s worth of knapsacks, cameras, purses, wallets, ­water bottles, and binoculars—none of them Stehling’s. The park superintendent, , a 32-year Park Service veteran, still holds search and rescue training exercises in the area, just in case they come across a clue. “The thing that gets me,” he told me, “is in all my years with the Park Service, I don’t recall five cases like this.”

It’s not likely that legislation would help the Stehling family, but an amendment to an existing law recently made it easier for volunteer search and rescue outfits to access federal wildlands with less red tape. The issue of permit approval is largely one of liability insurance, but the expedited access for qualified volunteers to ­national parks and forests, and now they can search within 48 hours of filing the paperwork. More such laws would make things easier for experts like , 63, a retired Michigan State Police detective who now specializes in backcountry search and recovery. 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 tracks, and weather.

On February 4, 2016, Keller went to Denver to attend a ceremony for the inaugural . With families of the missing gathered around them, legislators passed resolutions creating the annual event. Keller stood in the capitol, listening as his son’s name was read aloud. It was one of 300.

In late May 2016, I visited Conejos ­County. A month earlier, two Antonito men had been reported overdue from a camping trip to Duck Lake, less than three miles southwest of the Rainbow Trout Ranch, during a spring storm that dumped two feet of wet snow. Teams were called in from Min­eral and Archuleta Counties, along with the ski patrol, based 100 miles west on Highway 17. One of the men managed to struggle back to Horca; the ski patrol eventually found the frozen remains of the other.

The search had also resumed for Joe. Earlier in May, more than 30 volunteers, including Keller, Collin, and 11 dogs from the nonprofit , had spent about a week crisscrossing Conejos Canyon. The mission was to either find a needle in a haystack or to significantly reduce the probability that the youth was in a 2.9-mile ­ra­dius of the point last seen.

The search was organized by the , a Minnesota nonprofit that, since 2007, has helped more than 40 families with loved ones missing on public land. It was created by David Francis, a retired Naval Reserve captain, after his 24-year-old son, Jon, disappeared in Idaho’s Custer County in 2006. in a deep ravine the next year by paid members of the Sawtooth Mountain Guides. “Custer County is the size of Connecticut,” Francis says. “The search and rescue budget was $5,000. If you go missing in a poor county, you’re gonna get a short, somewhat sloppy search. In my mind, that’s the national disgrace. Everybody knows someone with cancer. But it’s a minority who know someone gone missing.”

The May search for Joe turned up no sign. But bushwacking off the Duck Lake Trail, about three and a half miles southwest of the ranch, Keller and Gwaltney came upon a sleeping bag, a cook pot, a tarp, and some bug spray—the gear of the lost campers.

One sunny afternoon, I went looking for Sheriff Galvez and found him outside the Conejos County Jail, on the north side of Antonito, directing inmates in orange jumpsuits as they planted flowers. He wore jeans and a gray canvas shirt, with a pistol on his belt and reading glasses propped on thick salt-and-pepper hair. It was clear that he’d rather orchestrate landscaping details than talk with the press, but who can blame him? The department has taken a beating on Facebook, Websleuths.com, Dateline, and the . It would be one of our only conversations—as this article went to press, Galvez didn’t return repeated calls and e-mails from șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

“It’s been a rough year and a half,” he told me. After the Keller search and the hunt for the Duck Lake campers, he said, “I don’t agree that I should be in charge of search and rescue on federal lands. I’m thinking of going to the state senators and saying I’d like to be backed out of that, because I don’t have a $90 million budget.” The starting salary for his five deputies is $27,000. “It’d be more ­effective, I think,” he said. “We’re a small department, a small community. I hear stuff like, ‘I can’t go, my equipment broke down.’ ”

Frustration between Galvez and Keller had continued to roil. “We had dogs, hikers, aircraft,” the sheriff said. “Horseback, drones, scent dogs, ­cadaver dogs. We had so many resources, it was un­real. When searchers took a break, he criticized all the resources. Cut everybody down.”

“This is an ongoing investigation for a missing person,” he continued. “We have no evidence—he’s just missing. It looks more like that than anything else. Over 18, you can run away all you want. If Joe was to call us, show me some proof he’s OK, I’d close it up.”

Before I left Conejos County, I took a run up Forest Road 250. I parked at a turnout in front of a massive ponderosa pine with Joe’s missing-person poster stapled to it, then jogged down to the point last seen and tried to retrace his run. Based on the varying sniffer-dog evidence, some figure that he ran up the road a ways, rounded the first or second bend, then got into trouble. I ­slowly shuffled upriver. A truck or SUV passed every three minutes or so. Locals told me that in July, the traffic on Forest Road 250 is even heavier. Wouldn’t someone haveÌęrecalled seeing Joe if he’d stayed on the road? After my run, I rinsed my face in Spectacle Lake; according to Duffy, R.C. could tell him I’d been here.

On Wednesday, July 6, John Rienstra, 54, a search and rescue hobbyist and endurance runner—and a former offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers— in a boulder field below the cliff band.

“I heard there had been a lot of searching for two and a half miles,” Rienstra said. “I started looking for rapids, caves—cliffs, of course—and right at two and half miles, there is a place to pull off the road, and there were cliffs close by. It took me about an hour to get up there to the base of the cliff, and I went left until I ran out of room. Then I turned around and went back toward the ranch on the base of the cliffs and found him.” The area was too rugged for horses or dog teams. When the Colorado Bureau of Investigations came to retrieve the remains, they packed horses in as far as they could, then had to reach Keller on foot.

Joe’s body was 1.7 miles as the crow flies from the ranch. Searchers had been close. In November 2015, Keller and David Van Berkum had come within several hundred yards. “I regret not searching there on the 25th of July,” Keller told me. “That’s where I wish I’d started. What part of here would take a life? It’s not the meadow on top; it’s the cliff.”

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” Jane Van Berkum wrote me recently. “But since there was a blanket of snow, I am not sure they would have found him even if they had chosen to go higher. But it is painful to think that they were that close.” Every day, she said, she and her husband had searched for Joe as part of their ranch activities. “I have sat on the cliffs many times since he went missing and scanned below over and over, and I never saw him,” she said. “That tortures me.”

The preliminary cause of death, according to David Francis, was “blunt force trauma to the head.” Jane told me he also suffered a broken ankle. It appears that Joe scrambled up and then fell—perhaps the lost-person behavior laid out by Professor Rescue, Robert Koester. Occam’s razor wasn’t as dull as it had seemed for most of a year.

Still, Joe’s death remains a mystery to his mother. “The events do not fit for a one-hour run before dinner,” Zoe says, “after they had just driven 24 hours straight to get to Rainbow Trout Ranch.” The boys hadn’t slept in over a day. Joe had just split wood with his uncle David’s 75-year-old father, Doug Van Berkum. She can’t see her son running up to the canyon rim—she insists that he did not like heights and was not a ­climber. “There is something we still do not know about what happened, is how I feel about it.”

It’s hard to put your hunches and suspicions to rest. We’ll never know for certain what happened to Joe Keller. We’ll know even less about what happened to a lot of other people missing in the wild.

One question I had early on was, Are you better or worse off going missing in a national forest than from a Walmart parking lot? I thought I knew the answer. You can see an aerial view of my firewood pile from space on your smartphone. I thought that in the wild, someone would send in the National Guard, the Army Rangers, the A-Team, and that they wouldn’t rest until they found you. Now I’m not so sure.

Correspondent Jon Billman () wrote about mountain-biking legend Ned Overend in March 2016.

The post How 1,600 People Went Missing from Our Public Lands Without a Trace appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

It’s two days after Ned Overend’s 60th birthday, his back hurts, and he’s staring into the weeds at Suicide Six—billed as one of the oldest ski areas in the East—puzzling out how to avoid a broken hip. He pushes his gray carbon cyclocross bike up a 30-degree slope, noting ruts, loose dirt, a toad, and the keen left curve that tomorrow he’ll be taking at considerable velocity during the finishing sprint of the . Overend—known to his fans simply as Ned, Ă  la Sting or Prince—stands five foot eight, weighs 140 pounds, and walks slightly bowlegged, like a cowboy who has forked a horse every day for six decades.Ìę

“This isn’t good,” he says.Ìę

Ned is concerned about the myriad loose-gravel descents throughout the 52-mile grinder, essentially a cyclocross race on non-maintained roads. Event director Peter Vollers calls it a gentleman’s race, since the purse is a faux-plaid-flannel jersey and bragging rights. “You do stupid shit when you’re racing,” Ned says. It’s August now. He doesn’t want an injury to jeopardize his fall season, which would upset his winter fat-bike season—with a new national title to defend.Ìę

Ned’s backache was inflamed by the flight from California, where he spends part of the year working as a brand ambassador for Specialized. He arrived three days early to adjust for jet lag and check out the course. Vollers can’t believe Ned has come to his race in only its second year. Like gravel-grinder racing in general, the Vermont Overland is swelling in popularity, and there are license plates in the parking lot from all over New England. A racer himself, Vollers shakes Ned’s hand and asks if he’ll roll through to meet some riders. Ned obliges, but he’s anxious to recon the course, then get an IPA and hit the sack.Ìę

Watch: The 10 Commandments of Lifelong Fitness

Champion cyclist Ned Overend shares his secrets to crushing racers a third his age

The next morning at the starting line, a field of nearly 500, including six-time national cyclocross champion Tim Johnson and pro roadie Jesse Anthony, fiddle with their Garmins as Vollers runs through announcements. When he lists Ned’s greatest hits—the 1990 UCI Mountain Bike World Championship, his place in the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, the recent 2015 USA Cycling National Fat Bike Championships title—there’s an eruption: We get to ride with Ned!Ìę

But make no mistake, this is no ceremonial lap. “You gotta do more than schmooze and be an ex-racer,” Ned says. And it’s no comeback; he never went away. Nor does he race with a handicap. “If you think, ‘Well, I’m doing pretty good for an old guy,’ then you’re not trying to stay at the front,” he told me. “You might be in the front of the old guys. But that’s not enough.”Ìę

The course climbs 5,900 feet over tarmac, ski slope, and “pavĂ©,” Vermont-speak for crumbly granite and rooty two-track. Ned is in the running most of the way, chasing a breakaway of three. He drops the steep line to the finish, coming in sixth, eight minutes behind winner Jesse Anthony. He’s all smiles. Everyone wants to shake his hand.Ìę

Later I check on him at his motel, and he’s got the shades closed; his laptop is glowing, and his reading glasses are on. For 25 years, he’s been asked his secret. How does he cheat time, beat the clock? Finally, I’m gonna see Ned Overend’s Dark Web, the ass-numbing training plans and age-reversing nostrums he buys on the secret Internet. Instead he shows me the Overland course, mapped out on Strava, with the excitement of a kid demonstrating his favorite video game. He went 48.5 miles per hour down the Cox District Descent. “That’s pretty crazy speed on a dirt road,” he says. On the Oxbow Road Climb he’s got a King of the Mountain—the fastest time on a segment of trail or road—and tiny golden trophies are scattered across the screen. Ned’s geeking out over all the little races, 22 of them, within the big race. Strava is his New York Times crossword, his sudoku.Ìę

How can it be that a man who started riding when mountain-biking shoes were hiking boots is still relevant, still a threat, still a champion in the age of electronic shifting? Back in 1985, when I was in high school, I saved enough summer pay to buy my first mountain bike. The shop smelled of new tires, and Ned’s poster was on the wall. My ride was a champagne gold steel Schwinn Sierra, and I’d fantasize that I was Ned when I whizzed through the woods. Young gun John Tomac was a hero of mine, too, and fat-tire legend Tinker Juarez from his BMX days, but Ned had the Magnum P.I. mustache. I was certain he never used his granny gear.Ìę

One of six kids, Ned was the only athletic bird in the family tree. His father, Edmund, was a fighter pilot turned diplomat, and Ned was born in Taipei, Taiwan, in 1955. The family moved back and forth between Bethesda, Maryland, and posts abroad, including Ethiopia and Iran, until he was in tenth grade, in 1971, when they settled in Marin County, California. Two years later, Edmund died of a second heart attack, at 56.Ìę

Ned credits his running coach in high school, Doug Basham, for emphasizing high-intensity, low-volume workout programs. In junior college, Ned was selected for the 1976 California all-state team in cross country. But then he stopped running and moved to San Francisco to wrench motorcycles before working his way through San Diego State University. There he shared an apartment with future Ironman Hall of Famer Bob Babbitt and began competing again—10Ks at first, then adding swimming and cycling with the goal of doing the 1980 Hawaii Ironman Triathlon. He and Babbitt trained in a 15-meter apartment pool, thousands of laps. Ned—a 2:28 marathoner—completed Hawaii twice.Ìę

In San Diego he met Pam Moog, a registered nurse, at a disco. They got married and settled in Durango, Colorado, where Ned took a job working on Volkswagen engines. They had two kids—Allison and Rhyler, now in their twenties and living in California. “Pam’s life is not being a Ned fan,” he says. “I can go to an important World Cup event, and I’ll be back home for a week before she’ll ask me how I did.” Pam still works part-time and spends some of the year in their second home in San Diego.Ìę

Ned was winning mountain runs until he injured his hip in 1981, which pushed him into road cycling. But the next year, he started riding a Schwinn Sidewinder in the dirt. He tried a mountain-bike race, won it, and was hooked. In 1984, at age 29, he got a contract with Schwinn and proceeded to dominate the National Off Road Bicycle Association circuit throughout the eighties; in 1988, he jumped to Specialized and won the , held in Durango in 1990.Ìę

But even at 35, Ned was considered old. In 1991, he told a Sports Illustrated reporter, “I crashed my road bike this spring and I ached for days. That didn’t happen when I was 25.” In the same article, John Tomac, then 24, said, “Age is really a state of mind. I think Ned can go until he’s 40.”Ìę

At 41, Ned finally retired from World Cup racing. He’d chosen mountain biking in part because doping wasn’t prevalent in the sport. But by the mid-nineties, drugs had bled into the European mountain-bike scene, and he decided to get out. He’s been outspoken ever since, going so far as to propose that future dopers be prosecuted as criminals. “It’s theft,” he says, “of millions of dollars in contracts.”

People thought that was the end. But Ned, incognito without his mustache, was quietly kicking ass in different mediums: off-road triathlon, singlespeed racing, cyclocross, hill climbing, even cross-country skiing. “I didn’t retire,” he says. He retooled and stayed on at Specialized to work in product development and marketing. In 1998, at 43, he raced his way to an Xterra World Championship off-road triathlon.Ìę

Pedal your time machine forward almost 20 years and Ned is dominating in the snow. He won the 2014 in Cable, Wisconsin—a race billing itself as the fat-bike national championships—and last year won the inaugural USA Cycling Fat Bike Nationals, at Powder Mountain, Utah, by 32 seconds. He trained by doing intervals on a snow-covered fire road above Durango. “It’s not often a win is a surprise,” he says. “I wasn’t just there to experience Fat Bike Nationals—I went there to win.”Ìę

If there’s another athlete in another sport who has pushed success as far into their dotage, I don’t know who it is. Diana Nyad is still out there at 66, performing remarkable feats of endurance in the water. But while Ned gets older, his competition gets younger.Ìę

“Ned lives what I preach,” says Joe Friel, 72, masters coach and author of Fast After 50. “He’s always been a fan of short workouts with high intensity.” Whittled down, the recipe for success as a geezer is this: 1) Decrease volume and increase intensity. 2) Recover, recover, recover. 3) Don’t stop training, ever; you can retain much of your VO2 max as you age, but once you lose it, it’s a lot harder to get it back. “When you’re 60, you can’t take a month off at the end of the season, have a good time like younger athletes can,” Friel says. “There’s an accelerated loss of fitness. Take Greg LeMond, for example—he just quit. Hung it up. Ned never did that.”Ìę

“Force times time,” says Northern Michigan University’s Scott Drum, an exercise physiologist who previously codirected the High Altitude Performance Lab at Western State Colorado University in Gunnison. “The least amount of time with a lot of force equals longevity. After 30, we lose 1 percent a year in VO2 max, unless you continue to train at a high intensity.” Another benefit, Drum says, is that “high-intensity exercise can elicit greater concentrations of growth hormone and epinephrine, leading to greater metabolic and muscular adaptations.”Ìę

Drum suggests training 10 to 15 hours per week, tops, for athletes over 40. With that recipe, Ned’s at no risk for overtraining syndrome. He pedals hard for an hour and a half, rarely much more, three or four times a week, and does easy rides on off days. In the winter, he mixes in nordic skiing and weight lifting, although the fat-biking season has taken time away from cross-training. “I tried yoga, but I didn’t have the focus for it,” Ned says. “It’s amazing how little discipline I have for simple stretching and strengthening exercises.”

With the exception of Specialized lunch rides when he’s in California and his weekly group rides in Durango—the Tuesday Night World Championships—Ned trains solo. “I do a lot of things by myself,” he says. But the Tuesday rides are more than his bridge club; they’re his weekly check-up. You can’t be too upset about getting dropped when the regulars include current national mountain-bike champion Howard Grotts, Israeli national champion Rotem Ishay, and pros Ian Burnett and Keegan Swensen. National cyclocross stars Todd and Troy Wells regularly come to hammer. All but the Wells brothers are under 30; none are over 40.Ìę

Ned has never had a cycling coach. “I don’t like structure,” he says. He doesn’t wear a heart-rate monitor or use a power meter. He relies on what he calls “perceived effort”—essentially going by feel. He does not appear to have a VO2 max that’s off the charts; he just knows how to train smart.Ìę

“There are people as talented as me,” he says. “What I’ve done is put together a few good races in a season, then manage to put a bunch of good years together.” Tinker Juarez, 54, one of the last old-schoolers still in the saddle, broke his hip in June at a race in Mexico. Bike racing is a bone game, and for nearly 40 years Ned has managed to avoid a serious injury.Ìę

Sounds simple. But the man isn’t rustproof. “Shit wears out,” he says. He pinches his forearm. “Your skin wears out.” Did he mention his back is aching?Ìę

Durango, late September, and Ned’s just gotten off the mountain, a demanding 42-mile solo over Coal Bank Pass on Highway 550. He’s training for the Mount Diablo Challenge hill climb in California in October; now he’s gonna soak away his inflammation in the Animas River, as he does after hard rides.Ìę

The water has cleared up, but rocks along the bank are still yellow and orange from the Gold King Mine spill in August. “Just don’t eat the mud,” Ned says. No one else is swimming. He walks out into the current, chest deep, slips, and is carried ten yards downriver. He pops up laughing and spits out a mouthful of the 60-degree Animas.Ìę

The next afternoon, we ride the flowy singletrack at Overend Mountain Park. Ned stashes his reading glasses in his jersey pocket, in case he needs to adjust something small, like derailleur screws, or study the fine print on the Garmin. He’s bashful about the park being named for him. “I don’t need to be any more famous in this town,” he says. The trails follow the natural contours of the Mancos Shale and are lined with burr oak, juniper, and piñon. Back in town a guy hollers, “Slow down, old man!” Even without the mustache, everyone recognizes him.Ìę

Durango is Ned’s town. He swaps his trail bike for a step-through Globe with a wicker basket and a sticker on the frame: THIS BIKE CLIMBED MT. WASHINGTON. (Ned won the famous hill climb in 2011, on his 56th birthday.) He’s known for his love of American IPAs; on a wild night he’ll have two. At Carver Brewing on Main Street, there’s a beer on tap called Ned’s Nitro Pale Ale. An aluminum Fat Boy—lucky race number 13, his winning ride from last year’s fat-bike championships—is displayed in the window of Mountain Bike Specialists.Ìę

“It’s pretty cool when you’re 60 and improving your time from a couple years ago,” Ned says. “That’s always a good indicator, right? I had the KOM on Rafter J until I made the mistake of telling my neighbor, then he went out and took it.” You live and you learn.Ìę

Ned had skipped the Tuesday-night group to ride Coal Bank, sneaking out early between rain showers to get in some intervals. “Where were ya?” asks Todd Wells when we see him at his house. But Ned’s just as happy riding solo with Strava.Ìę

“I’m getting old one day at a time,” he says. “I only know how age affects you based on my own experiences. Otherwise you base it on what everyone else tells you. When my dad died at 56, I remember thinking, Dad died of old age. I mean, he had gray hair. People shouldn’t just assume it should be so hard to hold onto your fitness.”Ìę

When will he hang it up for good? Never, says Ned. But he can foresee a time when he switches from elite to master-class competition. “When I’m midpack,” he says. “All it would take is to back off on my training.”Ìę

Ned podiums on Mount Diablo, placing third. He broke away with the top three, but the leaders dropped him with a half-mile to go. “I was OK with the result,” he says. “My back felt OK, but I think it had an effect on my preparation and maybe my motivation leading up to it. I noticed on Strava that my volume was down in September.”Ìę

I got a text from him on the Sunday evening after the race: “The guy who won was 18!” He was referring to Jason Saltzman.Ìę

But Ned got it wrong: the kid was 17. ÌęÌę ÌęÌę

Correspondent Jon Billman () is the author of . He teaches at Northern Michigan University.

The post Ned Overend Is the Champion Cyclist Who Never Grows Old appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Peter Clyde’s three-hour round-tripÌęfrom Seattle to his day job in the Bellevue tech district isn’t smooth bike-path commuting. Rain, fog, snow, and choking traffic combine to make a hair-raising, often death-defying, trip.

To boost his visibility on the road, Clyde—who holds an electrical engineering degree from Seattle Pacific University—tried all the top-of-the-line taillights from the industry’s biggest players, but he still felt vulnerable. Though they had plenty of wattage and state-of-the-art LED bulbs, all were too focused, like a flashlight, limiting their range of visibility. Others succumbed to constant exposure to moisture. Some ran through a charge far too quickly.

So, three years ago, the 23-year-old decided to invent his own bike light company, Orfos, a transliteration of the Greek and Hebrew words for light that “loosely translates to ‘a light to become light.’”

“It took about six months to get from the idea to proof of concept,” he says. “While the first prototype was fully functional as a safety light, the aesthetics, optical efficiency, and durability increased substantially with each revision.”

Clyde took cues from automotive illumination when designing the Orfos Flare, his first and still only product. With nine superefficient half-watt LEDs, the red light casts 300 lumens that match the intensity and light dispersion of a modern car’s taillight.

A reflective interior surrounds the LEDs to boost the beam’s range. The whole package is ensconced in a clear, low-viscosity-silicone case that’s as waterproof as a silicone spatula. (To test this, the Flares underwent extensive scuba trials at saltwater depths below 50 feet.) The light diffuses throughout the lenslike polycarbonate case and emits a muscular red 360-degree shroud behind a rider.

“My first night ride with the final prototype was an exhilarating feeling,” Clyde says. “I actually felt equally safe as I did in my car. That’s when I knew they were finished.”

Turns out, designing the world’s best rear cycling light was the easy part. Obtaining patents and funding was much more difficult. Clyde turned to Kickstarter for capital, with great success. Last November, at the end of Orfos’ 30-day campaign, the company had raised $157,323, nearly 800 percent of its initial goal.

When commuting like the mailman, you trust a rear light with your life, and I see the Flare as the most important Monday-though-Friday piece of gear I own. I’ve been running the red Flare (there’s also a white Flare for the handlebars) on my daily 25-mile commute since January. The unit looks utilitarian, industrial, and a little erector-set DIY, and at 112 grams mounted, it’s about the size and weight of a roll of quarters.

But it works damn well. The Flare mounts pretty much anywhere thanks to badass neodymium magnets that attach through your pack or via zip ties to your seatpost. And it’s eye-wateringly bright, with two steady modes (bright and brighter) and a strobe.

A 90-minute charge of the LiFePO4 lithium iron phosphate cell battery gives me 24 hours of run time on the low setting, even in temperatures below zero. (Battery drain in cold temperatures is one of the biggest issues I have with other manufacturers’ lights, which use cheaper lithium ion batteries.) The Flare’s battery lifespan is also three times longer than that of typical lithium ion models.

The Flare’s internal components aren’t cheap, and Orfos’ profit margins can’t compete with the already established players: The Flare sells for $119—double the price of most of its competitors.

But it may be the last rear light you ever need. And why wouldn’t you spend as much on your rear light as you do on a decent helmet? The FlareÌęis available through the Orfos website and Amazon.

The post Let There Be (a Better Rear Bike) Light appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Claustrophobics beware: John Vaillant’s novel ($26, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) takes place almost entirely inside the 10,000-gallon tank of a Dina water truck stranded near the Arizona-­Mexico border. Hector Gonzalez and his friend Cesar decide to leave Oaxaca for the United States; Hector for family reasons, and Cesar, a plant geneticist, because a Mexican Big Ag corn cartel wants him dead for exposing a sprawling conspiracy involving GMOs. The two buy in with coyotes, who seal them—along with 13 other immigrants—inside the sand-colored truck with AGUA PARA USO HUMANO inscribed on the tank. (Someone has tagged it with a J and an R, so that AGUA now reads JAGUAR.) Once safely across the border, the plan goes, the coyotes will cut a hole in the tank and free the passengers.

Though the geog­raphy of the story is that of Cormac McCarthy, the plot shares more ter­ritory with Edgar ­Allen Poe, and it soon becomes clear that the Dina truck is not a jaguar but a Trojan horse from hell. Cesar is critically injured when a jounce on the road knocks his head into a sharp pipe. Then the truck breaks down a mile inside Arizona and the drivers flee like, well, coyotes, leaving the passengers trapped. “The screen on ­Cesar’s phone makes everything look cold and blue like we are underwater, or dead already,” Hector says as he uses it to record an audio file. The story is told mostly through these files—which Hector hopes to eventually send to a woman named AnniMac, the lone American contact in the phone, once he regains service.

Eventually, though, the other travelers grow tired of Hector’s constant yammering and violence erupts—think Lord of the Flies in a drum. “I couldn’t hear the coyotes any­more, only one bird outside warning the others, because the sound in here was terrible, a frenzy,” Hector says. “I was trying to get them off, shouting, pushing and kicking them away, but we were like a bucket of crabs with the lid on and no place to go.”

In the wrong hands, this story could come off as overbaked or schlocky. But Vaillant, the author of the 2011 award-winning nonfiction book The Tiger, guides us to an ending that is improbable, dripping with irony, and entirely satisfying. Border fiction has a new top-shelf title.

Book Reviews in 30 Words or Less

Two other debut novels on our nightstands:

, by Daniel Galera
$27, The Penguin Press

After his father’s murder, a triathlete with face blindness moves to a Brazilian surf town to swim, fall in love, and find the killer. Brilliant prose from a big-deal translator.

, by Tim Johnston
$26, Algonquin

A young girl disappears in the Rocky Mountains on a morning run, and her family sets out to discover why. An original and psychologically deep thriller.

The post The Darkest of Border Passages appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

My wife got the Subaru. We’re still married and still live in the same house—a drafty wreck of a beach house built for the eight-week summer—but the Faustian bargain was that if I took a teaching job in Marquette, on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, she’d get a new all-wheel drive with heated seats and mirror defrosters, and—when we could afford it—I could get a fat bike. But hey, I lobbied: a fat bike isn’t a toy, it’s a tool. A carpenter needs a hammer, I said. You need another bike like a hole in the head, she said.

Ìę

I’d never been to the U.P. and hadn’t given it much thought outside of Hemingway’s Nick Adams stories and the novels of Jim Harrison (who, oddly, lives in Arizona during the winter). We’d been living in Stillwater, Oklahoma, which gets its share of weather but nothing like the Upper Midwest. The U.P. is a little Alaska—we have wolves and whitefish and logging trucks—but better since it’s only four hours to Green Bay! It’s been colder than a tin toilet seat on the Edmund Fitzgerald since late November. I wear ski goggles to take out the trash, walk the dog, and shovel the driveway.

Most people have to bring their own job to the UP because there aren’t many jobs here. There are iron miners and lumberjacks and stevedores and fisherman. I have the least North Country around—I’m an English professor. When I interviewed almost exactly one year ago, I stepped off the tiny jet in a sideways snowstorm. But it was warm, in the 20s! From my hotel room I saw a lime green creature roll through the whiteout down Front Street. Then a pylon-orange streak. This is how people got around on this frozen outpost, atop fat bikes! I could be a fat bike commuter. Since I loved to ride it’d be fun and maybe I could skip the gym.

This is my kind of place, I thought. Marquette is a type of Whoville. Spirited zipping and zapping. There’s a world-class ski jump called Suicide Hill, and the UP 200 dog sled race runs through in February. There’s an Olympic speed-skating training center here, along with the North American Skiing Hall of Fame. There’s a manicured skating rink in the center of town. They groom 20 miles of snow-covered singletrack specifically for fat bikes. And in the evening you can watch fat bikers spin up and down the hills of the old downtown district; fat bike bar hops are an evening ritual here. It’s this simple: You love outdoor winter pursuits or you move away.

MOVING AWAY ISN'T an ill-considered idea. As I write this, in late February, the “real feel” temperature is minus 39 degrees. I’ve lost count which Polar Vortex we’re on, but the deep freezes have neutered the normally moderating effect the big water has on Marquette winters. Lake Superior resembles a Frank Hurley photo of Shackleton’s Antarctica as it swallowed the Endurance. My route to work is 12.5 miles each way. I didn’t get off the bike last night until 8:30 p.m., when I ate some aspirin and shellacked my entire body with Tiger Balm.

In the summer and fall, it took me a pleasant hour on my 29er. Then the snow fell and didn’t melt. I garaged my 29er and harnessed up a new Specialized Fat Boy. The bike had arrived on a truck and I assembled it in our living room and pumped up the tires. It looked like a cartoon come to life. There’s nothing high tech about the bike, it’s just mathematically smart, well-balanced, and pragmatic. It sports an aluminum frame, to resist corrosion. Lake Superior may be unsalted, but the Department of Transportation uses oceans of salt each winter. There’s a carbon-fiber fork. Wide cranks, hubs and rims to accept the widest tires made. Hydraulic disc brakes, though I rarely reach speeds where they’re necessary. That’s about it. Not much more evolved than 1984.

Fatter is the future, Specialized said. And certainly around here, they’re right. The Fat Boy comes with 4.6-inch Ground Control knobbies, nearly the fattest tire available. I’m gonna go on record that the tires are only going to get wider and tubeless and that the narrow-hubbed frames with less clearance are headed the way of the 26er.

“It’s just blown up,” says Greg Herrman, the man in charge of dealer support at Borealis, a Colorado-based company that builds high-end carbon fiber (sure, carbon fiber resists corrosion, too) bikes that can weigh as little as 23 pounds complete. He says that fat bikes are the fastest-growing segment of the cycling industry. Last fall parts suppliers had trouble keeping up with demand. “When it started they appealed to guys who wanted a fourth bike in the garage,” he told me. “Now it’s gotten to the point of mass adoption.”

HILARY TOOK ME to the big-box craft store in her Subaru and I bought three 99-cent hobby-foam panels, cut them to shape with scissors, grabbed a handful of zip-ties and voila—fenders. The Fat Boy weighed in right at 30 pounds with my heavy clipless platform pedals; my office pack, by comparison, weights forty by the time I load it with my antique laptop, a pump, a spare tube, a soup Thermos, a coffee flask, various books, office clothes, and protein bars.

The best way to get your glasses broken in Marquette is to step off your new Fat Boy, amble into the Black Rocks Brewery on 3rd Street, and start bragging about your little ride to the office. There’s a shortage of fatties and parts nationwide—especially tires and rims—and some of these guys had put a down payment on the Fat Boy sight-unseen in August and still hadn’t seen it by December. Now the English professor wrangles one straight from the factory? In an attempt at stealth, I replaced the Fat Boy decal with a sticker of the U.P., which resembles a Seussian dogfish.

Some fun! In the videos it looks like skiing on wheels. Cold smoke, face shots, and float. Why, rolling to work would be a type of cheating, I thought. I’d fairly cane it! The popular documentary Cold Rolled was filmed in Marquette. The video shows locals trialing over natural ice sculptures and flowing along singletrack manicured with a proprietary groomer invented in the U.P. The bike-specific winter trail is called the NTN SBR—Snowbike Route—in the UP they call them snowbikes, as if to ignore non-winter altogether; I prefer the term fat bike so as not to confuse the rigs with those silly sleds the Beatles ride in the “Ticket To Ride” video. Nothing like some fat bike porn to get you fired up to ride; but the reality of the fat bike was not as YouTubey as I’d imagined.

Fat bikes don’t coast. Ever. At least on any amount of snow. It’s like riding a fixie through a swimming pool. The difference is that you have 20 fixed gears to choose from, but you’re either spinning or standing. In fresh snow you have to pedal down hill. The fattie has made me realize how much I cheated on my 29er in the dry—I hella coasted. My friend and go-to fat bike guru Yook, who has flames tattooed on his calves, said, “What did you expect? You gotta earn every inch.”

Yook is a mountain biker, cyclo-crosser, and “not a skier”; I was noticing a pattern and a line in the snow—skiers don’t fat bike and vice-versa. There’s a lot of non-flow on a fat bike that no one talks about.

On my first ride, I headed into the jackpine woods. Three pedal strokes in I found myself doing a reverse snow angel after a header into the powder. I was moist and winded by the time I made the quarter-mile to where I’d tie in to the old railroad grade that is now called the Iron Ore Heritage Trail—my ice road to work. An old woman on cross-country skis glided past me. The next morning I woke up with a half dozen bruises on my thighs from whacking the top tube in that many falls.

I had to carve out an extra two hours in my day if I wanted to ride to work and back. More fresh snow and, even riding atop snowmobile tracks, the going was slow. I tried to figure out how I could engineer one of those magazine racks you see affixed to the exer-cycles in the gym so I could prep for work as I spun. Before the first test ride I thought for sure I’d want a cycle computer to gauge my speed, time, and mileage, but soon found that idea to be depressing. One night on my way home, a porcupine ran in front of, then alongside me. Then he pulled away, leaving me alone, crunching over the snow.

TIRE PRESSURE IS the paradox of the fat bike. Fatties talk tire pressure like roadies talk wattage and heartrates. How low can you go? I learned the hard way that it’s much easier to let air out than to add air on the trail when it’s -15 degrees.

I accompanied Yook to the Noquemanon 24-kilometer snowbike race and at the start racers mingled around in the sub-zero cold grabbing each other’s tires like they were shopping for grapefruit. Except for Yook, who has a cool brass low-pressure presta gauge. But while it means extra floatation and grip, low is slow. And yes, there can be such a thing as too low, wherein your rear tire doesn’t bite. In extreme polar cold, the tire can freeze in the deflated stance and, like a frozen flat basketball, not rebound to the round so that it clears the bike’s frame as it revolves.

Roald Amundsen, the Norwegian who, in 1911, was the first to reach the South Pole, was a bicycle geek. In 1899, in part as a training trek, he and his brother Leon set off from Oslo and pedaled south to the southern coast of Spain. Two years ago my friend Edward and I reenacted the ride. But that was in shorts in summer, with all the spoils Europe has to offer.

That trip—and my daily trek to-and-from work—pales in comparison to Daniel Burton. Burton, who turned 50 in Antarctica this winter, rode his carbon-fiber Borealis Yampa with five-inch-wide fatties 750 miles from Hercules Inlet on the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and became the first person to do so entirely by bicycle. He pulled two sleds—weighing nearly 200 pounds—behind the fat bike, over crevasses, through sastrugi, and into 40-mile-per-hour katabatic winds. His tire pressure was low (at times less than 1 psi!) and his speed was slow: some days he only covered between two and three miles (all day, not per hour). His longest day was just over 24 miles.

I spoke to Dan, who lives in Saratoga Springs, Utah, while he wrenched a bike in his shop, Epic Biking. I tried to brag about my ride to work, which is a little like telling Roald Amundsen you made a snowman in your front yard. Sweat mitigation was his biggest challenge (and this is on a trip where he was forced to cut outer-mittens from spare fat bike tubes). Daniel validated that it wasn’t just me who had to work harder on a fat bike than on skis. “On skis you can ease off,” he says. “On a bike you have to work to keep moving and stay upright.” Much of the time, he says, he was struggling just to make “two to three knots.” He admits that the trek from the coast to the pole can, in certain segments of the route from the Ronne Ice Shelf, be done faster on skis. “If you want to get to the South Pole fast,” he told me, “take an airplane. It’s not about being more efficient—I was trying to find out, Can you bike to the South Pole?”

I TEACH A NIGHT class on Thursdays. I can see it dumping in the security lights out the window. I leave campus at 10 p.m. It’d been snowing most of the evening—ski goggles mandatory, but I can tell by my feet (they’re comfortable) that it’s warmer. I’ve got Neil Young’s Dead Man soundtrack on the iPod—appropriate music for a solo mission. My breath makes fog in my headlight. I roll down slushy Seventh Street—the only section where I really test my brakes, which honk louder the colder it is, but tonight are quiet and don’t fade, telling me it’s warmer—and onto the bike trail system. The trail along the lake is soft with fresh snow, which my tires push. I bleed two or three pounds of air from the tires which helps with float and grip, but costs me a couple gears. The snowmobiles have not been out and I’m spinning fast and going slow. I can see my rear Blinder reflecting red in the fat falling flakes like an airplane light.

I need to tell you that I’m hooked; far worse than a bleak forecast is the thought of having to catch a car ride to work. I’m not that excited to be at work, and the people I work with who are cranky—I promise you this—all drove themselves there. To fat bike in winter is to make your own fun, which is what you have to do in the U.P. And on the SBR there is a section of chicanes where you can rail perfectly bermed curves and the air-hockey feeling of super-fat tires on snow makes for a pretty good definition of flow. So in that sense, I tell myself, all those miles to and from work are training in order to make the climb up Benson Hill to get to the fun singletrack stuff.

I’m hooked on the fattie for the same reason I’m hooked on the literature of polar exploration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Movement—transportion—is a constant puzzle in a wild, inhospitable environment. It’s strategy. Equipment, calories, time, and air pressure. And I don’t have to kill any dogs. If I had to have only one bike it’d be a fat bike (and the fat bike has me thinking this isn’t a bad idea). I’m going to hear from the studded-tire cyclocross townie set here, but I’ll argue that, out where I live, it’s literally the only machine that will let you ride every day, all year long.

Has spending three to four hours a day on the bike gotten me into the shape of my life? I’ll let you know in spring, if it ever arrives. The commute makes the fat biking mandatory in my life. But more than that the commute has become the highlight of my workweek. It’s a great view of the world: the one through foggy goggles, atop the big rig. Sometimes, as I rolled along at my porcupine pace, I’d think of something Daniel Burton told me, and to which I could relate: “I had gotten to where I just hated winter, but the fat bike has made it not so bad anymore.”

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Credit the Labrador and the horn hunters that , 45, the infamous Mountain Man of southern Utah, is currently cooling his heels in the Sanpete County Jail in Manti. On March 29, Good Friday, Dale Fuller and his 15-year-old son, Jordan, were scouting for shed elk antlers below Skyline Ridge on the eastern side of the 10,000-foot Wasatch Plateau in Emery County. Walking down the narrow Dairy Trail, they came across a man loaded for bear and headed upcountry. He was scruffy, in his mid-forties, with a gray-and-blond beard. He carried a fully loaded pack. His sidearm was not unusual in Utah, but what was noticeable was the assault rifle slung over one shoulder. Jordan’s two-year-old brown Lab, Duke, growled—and continued growling for the whole encounter, even after Jordan tried to quiet him.

One of the camps Knapp left behind.

The first confirmed image of Knapp, captured by a wildlife cam.

“The guy seemed way friendly,” Jordan told me. They talked about snowpack levels—this area was at 60 percent of normal, and the trail was an Easter succotash of mud, corn snow and vegetation—and whether or not they’d seen anyone else in the area. Dale asked what he was doing headed into the high country. “Going camping,” Knapp responded. “I’m a mountain man.” Either that or, “I’m the Mountain Man”—the Fullers couldn’t tell.

Ìę“I don’t plan on shooting you guys,” Knapp continued when Duke would not stop growling.

Nobody had mentioned shooting anyone. But of course, the Fullers—who were armed themselves, but lightly in comparison to the assault rifle—had heard of the Mountain Man, and when they got within cell service, they called a friend who is married to an Emery County sheriff’s deputy; the deputy forwarded them photos.

It was him all right. For nearly seven years, the , breaking into cabins, stealing firearms, and roaming on foot between 3,000 and 10,000 feet in a nine-county area the size of Delaware—wild country made wilder by winter mountain weather. South to north, his territory covered 180 miles. In the southwestern counties of Iron, Kane, and Garfield—his main range for much of that time—Knapp was suspected of dozens of cabin burglaries. He faced 19 felony charges and ten misdemeanor burglary and theft charges in those three counties alone.

That was before he shot at the helicopter.

Over the Easter weekend several residents opening up their cabins after the winter discovered evidence of an unwanted guest. Investigators fingered Knapp for a break-in near Joe’s Valley Reservoir—about 15 miles north of the Fullers’ encounter, near the border with Sanpete County—where a crowbar was left at the scene. On Easter Sunday, they responded to another break-in report in the same area; this time guns had been taken.

The Fullers’ sighting gave authorities the fresh lead they needed. Officers on snowshoes slowly tracked Knapp over three days and 15 miles; his bear paws led into Sanpete County and to a cluster of 13 cabins near 9,000 feet at Ferron Reservoir, on the shoulder of Ferron Mountain.

On Monday, April Fool’s Day, a 50-person task force that included members of seven county sheriff departments, the (DPS), Adult Probation and Parole, and a half-dozen federal agents from the U.S. Marshals Service, gathered at the Sanpete County Sheriff’s Department to strategize. Emery County detective Garrett Conover told me that they discussed the February cabin standoff in California that ended with the death of ex–Los Angeles policeman-turned-murderer Christopher Dorner. When authorities located Dorner in a cabin near Big Bear Lake, a firefight ensued; tear-gas canisters caused a fire that burned the structure to the ground. Dorner was found dead. That’s the scenario the Utah team most wanted to avoid.

The next morning, April 2, just after midnight, the lawmen headed into Ferron Canyon in snowcats and on snowmobiles with two Utah DPS helicopters at the ready, then quietly took position on snowshoes in the frozen dark, even though they weren’t yet sure which of the cabins Knapp was inhabiting.

It was part of the plan that the racket from one of the helicopters would alert Knapp. It did. The first helicopter came in from the east; they could see Knapp on a cabin’s porch. “At about nine in the morning, Knapp is out chopping wood for his morning fire when this big-ass bird comes in over the trees,” U.S. Marshal Michael Wingert, the lead federal agent assigned to Knapp’s case, told me. “He grabs his rifle and shoots at the bird.”

Knapp, who was also armed with a handgun, squeezed off several rifle rounds. The men in the helicopter saw him reload. The fugitive strapped into his snowshoes, grabbed his rifle, and took off running to the south. After an exhausting 100-yard dash, he encountered Emery County Sheriff Greg Funk. Knapp raised his rifle. Funk fired and missed. Knapp broke back to the north and ran into a line of lawmen. Knapp realized he was heavily outgunned—and surrendered.

“You got me,” Knapp told arresting officers. “Nice job.”

The high-country cat-and-mouse game was finally over. But for seven years, Knapp had had an incredible run in the wilderness. Here was a lone man on snowshoes running circles around sheriffs and marshals with little but his physical fitness and backcountry savvy—an alpine athlete living on rabbit and Dinty Moore stew. He’d earned a sort of grudging admiration from the men on his tail; Knapp seemed to understand that you didn’t have to outrun the dogs, you merely had to outrun the handlers. He was good at staying ahead of the handlers.

FROM MEDIA COVEREAGE AND REACTION IN UTAH, you might have thought the authorities had captured Bigfoot. Wanted posters had been tacked up in gas stations from Kanab to Payson. Hikers and hunters grew leery of heading into the high country, and families became shy about visiting their weekend cabins. The fugitive had even acquired a Facebook page, set up by an admirer, filled with mountain-man poetry and clumsy odes to outlaws and Waylon Jennings. The name Unabomber was bandied about. Some recalled the Olympic Park Bomber, 46-year-old Eric Rudolph, who hid for five years in the North Carolina woods, dumpster diving and swiping vegetables from gardens. Or fellow Utah fugitive Lance Leeroy Arellano, who disappeared into the desert in his silver Pontiac after shooting a state ranger in 2010.

Knapp didn’t have a known history of that kind of violence, but he commanded respect. “I could take every cop in Utah who’s comfortable on a pair of snowshoes up there right now and not find him,” U.S. Marshal Wingert told me last year. In a year and a half of tailing Knapp, Wingert became the Pat Garrett to his . “You give this guy a day and he’s 15 or 20 miles away. There’s people who can survive a night out—say they break a snowshoe binding or lose the track on a snowmobile,” Wingert said, “but to actually stay out there for months and months and years on end—this guy is as close to Jim Bridger as we’re ever gonna see.”

In summer, Knapp lived in his own homemade camps; over the years deputies found bivouacs, usually with a blue tarp, in the aspen trees, stocked with guns and, in one, a copy of Jon Krakauer’s . Several of his high camps were discovered by cougar hunters, who hunt in high, rocky terrain. As far up as 9,000 feet, they were relatively sophisticated shelters with framed doors and rocks and wood and earth.

In winter, the Mountain Man made himself at home. His usual mode of entry was to break a window or door pane, twist the lock, and let himself in. Sometimes he’d wipe his boots, sometimes he wouldn’t. He made soup from cans and helped himself to coffee. Knapp liked sardines, mayonnaise, and especially liquor: if there was a bottle of spirits, he might drink it and rend the place with bullet holes. He might replace the firewood he burned. Sometimes he did his dishes, but he never put them away. He liked to steal radios, listening on local AM stations to erroneous reports of his own whereabouts.

For much of that time, the Mountain Man behaved in a Robin Hood-esque manner. He took from the relatively wealthy cabin owners and gave to—well, he gave to himself, a poor guy living by his wits and fitness on the land. Then, in early 2012, when Knapp’s identity was verified by investigators and reported by local media, his reputation as a harmless survivalist began to slide. In the cabin of a former Las Vegas police officer, he made a crucifix with knives on the bed. At times he appeared angry at Mormons—he shot holes in a portrait of Joseph Smith and ripped up the . He cost one cabin owner thousands of dollars in smoke damage when he closed the flue before vamoosing. He traded guns with another—leaving his old .303 British and taking a sexier Remington. He crowbarred into a gun safe, laid all the arms on a table, and took none. In another cabin, he removed the grips from all the guns, but left them. He placed food cans behind kitchen drawers so they wouldn’t close. He defecated on a porch; he also shat in a pan and left it on somebody’s kitchen floor.

Authorities labeled him ‘armed and dangerous’ in January 2012, reporting that the Mountain Man had been leaving threatening notes in cabins or outside scrawled in the dirt. The tune was always the same: “Get off my mountain.”

FOR MOST OF THOSE SEVEN YEARS, lawmen were hunting a ghost. As early as 2007, they suspected that one man was breaking into properties over a big area, but damned if they knew who. “Even when we got a tip, we were always one week behind,” Kane County Chief Deputy Tracy Glover told me. The Mountain Man stuck to ridge tops, avoiding established trails. He walked on vegetation to avoid leaving an easy track. He slipped from heavy hunting boots into size-10 sneakers to minimize his footprints.

Up until last year, Knapp mainly roamed 1,000 square miles of southwestern Utah, from the Arizona border north into Zion National Park and onto Cedar Mountain above Cedar City. His habitat ranged from alpine forests to the sparsely populated desert. He was known to walk to town—St. George and Cedar City—and hang out with the homeless population and make phone calls to his mother in Moscow, Idaho, then head back into the wild.

Then investigators got a break in December 2011, when a motion-activated camera outside a cabin in Kane County captured the image of a man with neck and hand tattoos and a ginger goatee. The man wore forest-camo hunting outerwear that hung on him. A camo fleece beanie. A Remington 600 bolt-action rifle. A long hunting knife in a leather sheath. Purple aluminum snowshoes.

A month later, fingerprints obtained from a broken window pane in 2009 matched with then-44-year-old Troy James Knapp, five feet ten inches tall, approximately 150 pounds, with hazel eyes. This led the cops to mug shots taken in Inyo County, California, in 2000. Knapp’s hand and chain-link neck tattoos matched the Mountain Man’s.

Knapp had been in trouble since his high-school-dropout days in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where in 1986 he was incarcerated for four years for breaking and entering and receiving stolen property. After that, he drifted, working odd jobs and living for a time with one girlfriend and then fathering a daughter with another in 1995. He was charged with harassment in Seattle in 1997 (that charge was eventually dismissed with prejudice). He lived briefly in Salt Lake City in 1999.

His stepdad, Bruce Knapp, a sportsman, had taught young Troy wilderness skills—hunting, trapping—and that became Knapp’s M.O. In September 2000, he began living the outlaw life in Inyo County, camping near the town of Bishop. There he was arrested on charges of felony burglary for stealing from the Inyo County Solid Waste facility and the Mount Whitney Fish Hatchery in Independence. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that Knapp stole a pair of boots from a game warden’s pickup near the hatchery, even as they were looking for him. A deputy’s report from 2000 quotes Knapp: “I did not want to hurt anyone.” Then, in 2004, after spending four years in jail, Knapp broke parole.

Southern Utah, his next stop, is a lot like : It is high alpine, but also full of slot canyons and rock chicanery and deserts side by side. One day it’s sunburn, the next, frostbite. In Inyo County, the Sierras quickly drop to Death Valley. And the county had its own backcountry badass: the Ballarat Bandit, George Robert Johnston, who eluded law enforcement for years while camping and squatting in remote southeastern California and western Nevada before he shot himself in the head with a .22 in July 2004.

Utah authorities thought they were hot on Knapp’s trail in late February 2012, when a resident shoveling snow spotted a camo-clad man with a large-caliber rifle slung over his shoulder. A two-day manhunt went down above Cedar City, including Iron County Sheriff’s deputies, Cedar City Police, and even the campus cops from . A helicopter scoured a ten-mile radius.

In the end, the manhunt only fueled the myth. Locals were left wondering how anyone could have eluded a helicopter with infrared technology and 30 men on foot.

By this time, I’d become obsessed with the Mountain Man myself. I grew up on stories of the Mad Trapper of Rat River, a legendary Canadian survivalist fugitive from the 1930s, and Claude Dallas, the poacher who evaded capture for over a year after killing two game wardens in 1981 on the Idaho–Nevada border. Fifteen years ago, my wife and I lived in a remote cabin in northern Utah, where we’d ski up to and peer into the fancy vacation cabins that hibernated over winter. What a resource, I thought, for a homeless person with just a little wilderness savvy. That’s where I’d head, I figured, if a private apocalypse got bad enough. I didn’t see it as survivalist prepping, rather temporary existing. You could escape the grid there, go analog, at least for a while.

So this past April, I traveled to Knapp country. At that point, I’d been tracking him—via wire stories and local knowledge—for nearly four months. I had a wall map full of enough Knapp-sighting pins it looked like a game of Battleship. One thing was for certain: the guy was in fighting shape. I watched him grow thinner from mug shot to moose camera to security surveillance digital images. But still he was capable of humping a heavy pack over mountains for twenty miles a day, many days in a row.

KANE COUNTY IS 4,000 square miles, the size of , but there are just over 7,000 people living there, half of them in the county seat of Kanab. The sheriff’s department boasts 13 sworn officers, not including the uniformed mannequins in the marked SUVs parked at the city limits of Mount Carmel and Orderville to discourage speeders. This part of the state has become Mexican cartel marijuana country, and I was reminded of what Marshal Wingert had told me before I arrived: “If we have trouble finding cartel-size grow operations in that country, imagine trying to find one camouflaged guy on foot who doesn’t want to be caught.”

The bull’s-eye of Knapp country seemed to be the Cedar Mountain area above Cedar City, where hundreds of seasonal cabins are tightly surrounded by Dixie National Forest land. The area includes 11,307-foot Brian Head Peak, the Brian Head ski resort, and Duck Creek, a little village where you can hire four-wheelers or snowmobiles and a guide.

Since the first WANTED posters went up in Duck Creek in January 2012, the Mountain Man had become something of a cross between Sasquatch and Jeremiah Johnson. Cougar hunters saw him walking a ridgetop before he vanished. A cowboy reported running into a “suspicious” mountain man packing his gear on a pair of mules. Strange campfires were seen on the mountain above Cedar City at night. Dozens of people saw the Mountain Man riding his mountain bike through town. Kids liked to spot him in trees. My favorite was a dog let outside at 4:30 every morning that returned at 6:30 reeking of campfire smoke.

In Duck Creek, a sledhead at a snowmobile shop told me that I needed to find Rosey Canyon, up the North Fork of the Virgin River, because that’s where I’d find a guy named Ken Moffett, the caretaker for several cabins. Back in February, he said, Moffett had tracked the Mountain Man in the snow, on foot, for seven miles. This would make Moffett, at the time, the guy with the closest encounter with Knapp. “But honk your horn at the mouth of the canyon,” I was warned, “otherwise he might think you’re the Mountain Man and shoot ya.”

The road led through Springdale, the gateway village to Zion National Park. At a bar and restaurant called The Spotted Dog, I met two cabin owners, Robert “Roberto” Dennis, 40, and his sister Wendy Dennis, 41. Like many of the locals, they were curious and a little anxious and wanted to check the family hunting cabin to see if anyone had broken in. “We keep guns up there,” Wendy told me. “They’re our shitguns, but still.”

We climbed into Roberto’s 1994 GMC pickup. Wendy took the jump seat; Duke, the Lab-pit mix, got the middle, where he slobbered on my maps. Southern Utes do not leave home without some kind of firearm, but Roberto packed light—a toy-size .22 caliber short-barrel Beretta he called a hooker gun. We were headed 25 miles higher up, toward Cedar Mountain. It was drier than a Mormon wedding and the truck left a veil of dust.

Roberto and Wendy had found something odd in the forest the hunting season before: a Hefty bag hanging in a 40-foot ponderosa pine. They thought it was trash, but the bag contained a knit beanie. Felt boot liners. A camo sleeping bag. A pair of nearly-new size-10 sneakers. Matches and chainsaw sharpeners. This didn’t say hunter or Boy Scout. It said transient—alpine homeless. But why up here, so far from Interstate 15?

Many of the cabins we passed were homogenous: attractive, clean, and new. The Dennis cabin was different, a cobbled utilitarian compound with a generator shed where they hang the venison and an antique propane refrigerator that sealed the silverware and some warm Budweisers from the mice.

Something had been inside the Dennis cabin for certain, but it wasn’t human. There were rifle cartridges and Tammy Wynette eight-track-tape cartridges strung from hell to breakfast. Turds the size of licorice snaps were strewn all over the kitchen table, like a taunt. Wendy located a dusty green bottle of JĂ€germeister. “Gotta take a shot at the cabin,” she said and did. The mood was one of light relief, but mostly disappointment—disappointment that a varmint had ransacked the place, but also that the infamous Mountain Man had skipped it for a stay-over.

We got back in the truck and turned upcountry to Rosey Canyon, driving 15 more miles, over dirty snow drifts and through braided streams, until we came upon a man standing in the middle of the two-track road.

“Are you Moffett?” I said through the truck window.

“Yes I am,” he said.

Moffett, 61, was clean-shaven with long gray hair. “We’ve had a problem now for seven years,” he said. His encounter had taken place six weeks prior, in mid-February, a week before Knapp was fingered by name. “I caught these weird tracks,” Moffett said. “This guy was sneakin’ around bushes,” he said as he pointed up the road toward the neighbor’s place. “Sure enough,” Moffett said, “there’s these tracks going around all their windows.”

Moffett had hopped on his four-wheeler and motored up the road. “Went up to check on the Stuckers’ place,” he said. He’d walked the property and circled back. Then Moffett told us the strange thing. “I noticed there were carefully placed snowshoe tracks on top of my boot tracks.” The mountain man had sent Moffett a message in the snow.

Moffett is the kind of Abbey-esque new-western character who might have appreciated Knapp’s gift at surviving solo, but he too had tired of the Mountain Man’s antics. “Give him a can of soup, who cares,” Moffett said. “But I think he’s getting more and more disturbed. He’s progressively upped the ante here. It’s like he’s getting paranoid now. I don’t wanna walk up on him and I don’t want one of my neighbors getting shot.”

THAT’S WHAT IT SEEMED LIKE was going to happen, as Knapp got angrier and messier. After he was ID’d, he left several seemingly drunken notes, including this one from a cabin in Kane County: “Hey sheriff; fuck you! Gonna put you in the ground! It’s better, these times, to be a ditch digger, septic cleaner than a pig.”

Authorities were unsure, however, how violent Knapp was. Marshal Wingert told me about a homeless man in , along the Virgin River, who in 2010 said that he was brutally beaten by Knapp with a rock over some camping gear. The man declined to press charges.

Knapp’s time on Cedar Mountain also coincided with a strange, cold-case homicide straight out of a Coen brothers’ movie. In 2007, during hunting season, the partially buried body of 69-year-old Kennard Martin Honore of San Clemente, California—who’d leased a cabin from the Forest Service—was found in the cinder pits near Navajo Lake, west of Duck Creek. Honore had died from a single gunshot wound from a small-caliber rifle and been hastily buried. Kane County deputies could find no motive and no sign of robbery. There were a lot of hunters in the area, so it could have been a stray round. But the small caliber doesn’t make sense for deer, and the quick gravework doesn’t make stray-shot sense. No evidence connects Knapp to the case except that he is believed to have been in the area at the time. Still, Wingert told me, “It’s kind of an unusual coincidence.”

Last April, I spoke to criminal psychologist Eric Hickey, dean of the California School of Forensic Studies at Alliant International University in Fresno. “The isolation is probably costing him,” said Hickey, who worked as a consultant on the Unabomber case. I told him about how Knapp’s bad behavior had seemed to escalate, about his threatening note to the sheriff and the pan of scat in the kitchen. “Most people are not good at being isolated like that. He’s acting out. I suspect he has no control.” Hickey said the scat in the pan was a signal. “This is a signature.”

Ìę“The truth is,” said Hickey, “if law enforcement decides to go after him, they can track him. I guarantee, if he hurts somebody they’ll go after him.” But he didn’t, and Knapp’s trail was cold all last summer.

Then, in October, he resurfaced. Knapp had moved north—almost 120 miles north. He was seen near Fish Lake Reservoir, a high-alpine lake on the Fishlake National Forest in southern Sevier County, and again north of there in Sanpete County, which borders on the Wasatch Front, the mountain playground for Salt Lake City. Gaunt and clean-shaven, he appeared on another security camera, this time at night, waving his arms to feel out an alarm; he broke in, but took nothing. Then, in November, an elk hunter reported seeing Knapp in Sevier County. That sighting mustered a 40-officer cabin-to-cabin manhunt that again turned up goose eggs. What followed was a long, cold winter of no news until the horn-hunting Fullers encountered the Mountain Man on the Dairy Trail.

KNAPP IS LUCKY HE WASN’T GUNNED DOWN in the shadow of the Wasatch Plateau when he opened fire at the helicopter, an outcome detective Conover attributes to “dumb luck.”

Shooting at a law-enforcement helicopter certainly amplified his woes. Now, in addition to the six felonies and five misdemeanors he was charged with on April 4 in Sanpete County—including assorted counts of burglary, theft, criminal mischief, and unauthorized use of a firearm—he could face charges of assault on law-enforcement officers and discharging a weapon at an aircraft. “The cabin burglaries,” Wingert said, “will turn out to be the least of his worries.”

But Knapp seemed at peace with his capture. In wire photos he appeared relieved, even grinning slightly at times. He told deputies he was tired of the elements—that he was getting older and the winters were getting colder—and that he didn’t hate people, but he didn’t especially like them either. He mentioned Robin Hood by name, pointing out that he’d simply tapped resources—food, firewood, guns—that weren’t being used.

Sanpete County authorities got him a shower, a new striped jumpsuit, and some pizza, then got out the maps and let Knapp draw lines between all the places he’s been. When you haven’t talked to many people for nearly seven years, apparently it builds up. Knapp didn’t appear concerned about lawyering up; he sang to officers like a proud jailbird.

Troy James Knapp had a closet full of baggage, I know, and I wish he was more Robin Hood and less just hood. I wish he’d only left thank-you notes instead of threats, and never shat in a pan. But his capture last week made me a little sad. Utah needs, as the Grateful Dead song goes, its friends of the devil spending the night in a cave—or cabin—up in the hills.

Some of the lawmen who participated in the manhunt don’t think Knapp was trying to hit the chopper with his rifle—just deter it. Why do you say that, I asked detective Conover. Because that’s what he told us, he said. I get the sense that they enjoyed talking with the Mountain Man, too—that though he’d become southern Utah’s public enemy number one, part of them admired something in his pluck.

“It’s a good thing you got me when you did,” Knapp told the men on the ground. “I was gonna move tomorrow.”

Ìę

Correspondent Jon Billman () is the author of the short-story collection When We Were Wolves. He has written about diamond mining, the Great Divide Race, and the search for Steve Fossett’s plane for șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű.

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