Okay, one more story.

Many years ago, when I lived in a yurt village in Wyoming, the mother of one of the other yurt dwellers “disappeared off the face of this earth.”

She had been camping with others, in I think it was the Trinity Mountains of California. It was morning. The group was dismantling camp, getting ready to leave. As I recall, she went for a short walk, or wandered off somehow, and was never seen again, not even her body found, despite an extensive search.

That story stuck with me. Though I hike regularly in the wild, and have done so all my life, these kinds of stories are sometimes very very real and unexplained. Of course when you put 1100 people gone dead or missing in 100 years in national parks next to statistics documenting the “medical errors” and “hospital infections” caused by U.S. industrial medicine, killing 440,000 people each year, this wilderness mystery feels like an eensy bitsy flicker in the oncoming glare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogGHP2_wcBY

The Secret Vanishings in America’s National Parks

Puzzling Unexplained Disappearances In Our National Parks Can ‘Missing 411’ Shed More Light On The Story?