You're listening to the Mind Over Murder podcast. My name is Bill Thomas.
I'm a writer, consulting, producer, and now podcaster. I am now
trying to use my experience as the brother of a murder victim to help other
victims of violent crime. I'm working on a book on the unsolved Colonial Parkway
murders, and I'm the co administrator of the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook group together
with Kristin Dilly. My name is Kristin Dilly. I'm a writer, a
researcher, a teacher, and a victim's advocate, as well as the social
media manager and co administrator for the Colonial Parkway Murders Facebook page with my partner
in crime, Bill Thomas. Welcome to Mind Over Murder. I'm Kristin Dilly
and I'm Bill Thomas, and we're joined today by Andrea Lankford here to talk
to us about her book Trail of the Lost, The relentless search to bring
home the missing hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail. Andrea, thank you for
joining us today. We appreciate you being here. Yeah, I'm glad to
be here. Thanks thanks for having me. Go ahead and start by telling
our listeners about your new book and ultimately why you decided to write it.
Trail Loss came out last August twenty three. It is about three hikers who
went missing for the Pacific Crest Trail and my journey to try to figure out
why. I started writing the book in November twenty seventeen, and I embedded
myself with a group of amateur sleus searchers for five years. We did our
darnedest to try to solve this mystery. I'll also befitted the families of the
missing people, and so this book is a big journey of showing what the
things I learned and solved during that research tell us a little bit about what
happens when a hiker goes missing in a national park. Most of us go
to national parks, have a wonderful time. We might interact with the rangers
and other staff, but for the most part, except for maybe asking directions
or attending a workshop, most of our interactions with the National Park Service rangers
and staff are not emergencies. What happens when a hiker goes missing. Now,
when you're a park ranger, you usually refer to this as an overdue
hiker, and you can get reports to overdew hikers several times a day,
definitely several times a week if you work at a busy park like the Grand
Canyon or Dysemity. And usually what happened is a friend will say, hey,
hey, Joe went hiking into the Grand Canyon. He didn't show up
for work, or he didn't show up meet us for dinner tonight. And
when the ranger gets that type of report, we are trained to treat this
as an emergency because there's a good chance this hikers in trouble somewhere in the
wilderness and need your help right away. So the ranger starts to investigate and
ask questions, is maybe assign someone to be the an investigator. You also
will often send a hasty set, what you call a hasty team, and
a hast ty could be rangers on foot, or it could be jumping in
a helicopter and flying to where you think this person may be in trouble.
The other thing that ranger needs to do when they get an overde higer case
is contain the search area. And containing the search area can involve setting up
a roadlock or having somebody at the trailhead to make sure the person doesn't hike
out of the search area without you knowing it. So, Andrew, you've
said that overdue hikers happen on the daily. How many times? How many
occasions do we have in which people have gone missing and national parks and just
have not been found. Do we have a number on that? There is
a number that gets thrown around. It's probably an underestimate because the federal government
has not done a good job across your stations like your US Forest, your
National Park Service, your other wilderness lands of tracking this. But the number
that gets thrown around is sixteen hundred high akers have gone missing and stayed missing
international parks now the overdue hiker. One thing that's interesting is around ninety seven
percent of those cases are resolved within twenty four to forty eight hours versus usually
not alive. Sometimes the body is recovered, so it is rare, but
there's still a pretty big number. Sixteen hundred, even as an underestimate,
that's a pretty big number of assault cases. I know, it's hard to
generalize of the ninety seven percent, which is a pretty happy statistic of hikers
that are found. What are some typical reasons for why they were overdue if
what are the classic explanations, as I'm sure lots of different things happen,
but what are fairly typical things that happen to a hiker and then he or
she has later found. Yeah, it really runs the gam and the best
is they just overextended their self and they are just not out yet, there's
still walking, hiking, flimping maybe when they just haven't got out. Another
is they get lost and they're wondering around lost. Another they fallen or they
fall into hypothermia and they're either injured or they've passed away. And so usually
it's an environmental thing, an accident of some kind the scarier ones, or
every once in a while is foul ply. Also on occasion it's a voluntary
disappearance where they actually are either pretending to be missing, or they are contemplating
suicide, or they're not even in the area that you're searching them. They're
off having a vendor or something. That those voluntary disappearances do happen on occasion.
I think of the proximity of the Grand Canyon National Park in Las Vegas,
having combined visits to those two areas in the same vacation, I think
that would be unusual, wouldn't it if someone said, Oh, I went
to the Grand Canyon, but in reality, I took a side trip to
Las Vegas and went on a vendor. Yes, I worked at Grand Canyon
about four years, and we would make jokes about people being in Vegas.
The rangers like, I don't think I ever had a case where they actually
weren't in the park, So that is rare. The interesting when I was
researching Trail the Lass, there seems and you'll hear families of the missing talk
about this, and it seems to be something more like the county agencies do
where they especially if a young male goes and missing, they just the comps
have a tendency to assume they're doing this on purpose, and that's very frustrating
for the family because the family will be like, oh, no, not
my son. He would be on he would call his mom, things like
that, and that bias I think could be a problem in my experience from
researching the book, when someone does go missing in the wilderness and you have
to send out a search team for them, whether that's in the Grand Canyon
or Yosemite. What are some of the issues that face NPS rangers and rescue
personnel when they're out looking for someone who's gotten missing. You've got vast wilderness,
treacherous areas. Often people go missing when the weather, when there's a
big storm, there's an avalanche situation on in Tahoe. I'll see it's Tahoe
right now. It's wide out and they've got people buried in the snow.
So not only is that just hard to search for people, it's also hazardous
for the searchers. You also have staffing most star agency search and rescue agencies,
and definitely the Natural Bark Service is understaffed. You also have triage issues
because let's say you've got three people buried in avalanche, and then you've got
five skiers who fell and broke bones over here, and so you have to
trioge how you're going to respond, like in the Mashazli situation. So those
are some biggies. Another is cooperation. Are sometimes these errors are in more
than one jurisdiction, So are the agencies cooperating with each other others to help
get these people found? You mean adjoining lands where you may be leaving a
national park and entering a state park or some other preserve. How does one
end up in one place versus another. Yes, it's that's exactly. One
of the issues that I write about travel loss is with one of the missing
hikers, Chris Fowler. He went missing in Washington State in the Pacific Crest
Trail. This is a long trail. Yeah, it's twenty five hundred plus
miles, and so it goes through numerous counties, three states, in two
countries and through hiker is out there for a week, months, and so
they're crossing jurisdictions on an alley basis sometimes. So in the Chris Fowler case,
what happened, it was real easy for the agencies to go, he's
on in my county, it's in your county, in that county's in that
county. And so the family was having to do a run around of your
run around with five different counties to try to get somewhere to initiate a search.
That was very frustrating to them. And I'll write about that a trail
the loss. Oh. I was absolutely appalled by that when I read that
section. That's unbelievable. Let's turn our attention very briefly to crime and national
parks, which is something that is a concern for both of us. So
what are the numbers like when we think about crime and national park? Is
that something that happens terribly often? What are the numbers for crime like in
national parks? Unfortunately we don't really know one. We've got jurisdictional issues.
You have some parks like you may the rangers have exclusive jurisdiction, and you
seemity you could probably go there and get pretty good numbers and what the crime
rates is, but other parts it shared with the county, and so a
lot of numbers could get lost in the system. So I'm going off of
experience, and so from my experensive ranger, it's definitely more than people think,
but it's probably less than in your home, like driving to your workplace
or going to the mall. Probably less than that, but it's more than
what you think. It's still it's a problem. Still there would want no
crime and no foul play in the national parks would be the pert preference.
Is there a database somewhere where all of these incidences of crime and national parks
is stored? If there is, I can't find it, and so I
don't. Like I said, you could probably call Yosemite and maybe they'd make
you have a what where you have to ask for information public information requests.
You could probably get some good numbers over park block yusemity, but over the
system as a whole that exists, I can't find it. Wow, You're
not the only National Park Service employee or former employee that we've ever talked to
who has brought this up. So this has come up several times. I
don't want to bog the podcast down with this too much, but I will
say some of the people that we've talked to have said they think that this
is deliberate on the part of the Park Service. That the Park Service wants
to sell us something which is the great outdoors and access to natural lands.
And I get it how wonderful national parks are. At the same time,
much like Disneyland or any other big operation, they don't want to focus on
the fact that occasionally it may be rare from an overall perspective, but sometimes
bad things do happen inside national parks. It seems like the Park Service doesn't
want to talk about it. I've gotten the same feeling when I was arranged
at Yosemite. They assigned me to go with a news crew, and I
was naive and I just showed them what was happening. We went into the
evidence, we looked at guns and drugs, and took them on actual crime
scenes. What I've heard is that the Concession wasn't too happy with the story
that came out because it was disturbing to the viewers. Oh my gosh,
there's a lot of crime going on Yosemite, and that we were told to
not talk about these things to the media anymore. We've also found in the
Colonial Parkway murders that we've gotten sometimes a distinct lack of cooperation in terms of
access. Even several years back, when we wanted to search for some missing
persons who was part of the Colonial Parkway murders, we actually asked the National
Park Service for permission to bring in cadaver dogs. And these are professionals and
they know how to conduct a search with a very low impact. Boy,
did they give us a tremendous amount of grief. It was one roadblock after
another, to the point where all of the families involved were so exasperated with
the National Park Service. I actually said, it feels like they're more concerned
about the blades of grass in the Colonial Parkway National Park than they would be
about the fact that we think several murders happened there and our loved ones are
still out there inside that national park and they are doing everything they can to
prevent us from looking for it. I think sometimes there's a very strong pr
focus on the part of the Park Service. Yeah, there's something there.
I don't understand it. It does exist outside the partures as well. This
is tangental to issues I discussed in trail loss. For example, drones can
be used to find to work cold cases. They could do a grid photograph
search, take photographs. Those photographs can be searched by humans that are called
squinters because they're staring at the computer screen searching images all day. And this
has been successful. But drones aren't allowed in the national park or wildness areas
or state parks. And there's other cases where even the FAA has been problems
with drone searchers in Texas for example, just being two. They need to
be, in my opinion, more flexible when it comes to human life,
and so we can let a blade of grass go on occasion. Totally agreed.
I want to pivot to this subject of trail of the lost which is
the missing hikers on the PCT. I think most people have probably heard of
the Appalachian Trail before, but there may not be people who are as familiar
with the Pacific Crest Trail. Can you give a brief overview for anybody who's
not familiar? What is the PCT? The Pacific Crest Trail runs through the
Pacific Coast states California, Oregon, Washington. It goes from the Mexico border
in California all the way up to the Canadian border in Washington. It's twenty
five hundred miles a little bit more nap and people do like it. Now,
you guys, if you're thinking, then you've read you might understand why
the numbers of people wanted to throw hide the trail, and that's people want
to go from A to B all the way to Canada to Mexico in one
season since the release of trail Strain's memoir Wild in the movie Starr Res Witherspoon
that came out in December twenty fourteen, So it was since that movie came
out the numbers of people wanted to do this of skyrocketed. They had to
issue a permit system to curtail the numbers each day, and it's also a
new kind of hikers are attracted to it. People who are seeking a new
life, the more seeking spiritual growth, like Cheryl Strait in her novel or
her memoir. Not necessarily you're hardy. I've climb Mount Everest and k two
type people are hiking it. There's potential there for problems because people were hitting
the trail a little bit naive, and the city of Christill is very rugged
and very remote. These are living the Sierra the North Cascades in Washington.
These are very rugged, dangerous areas. My boyfriend had done some hiking in
the Sierras when he was in high school and lived in California, and when
I told him about this section of the PCT, he was like, you
could not pay me enough money to try to hike that. He was like,
it's very rugged and very difficult, and he was teasing me. He
was like, we can go out there sometimes. I said, you know
what, No, I think I'm good. I think I'm good. Especially
having read this and looking at those photos, I got a sense of just
how terribly imposing the sounds. So what drew you to the stories of Chris
Sherpe Fowler, David O'Sullivan, and Christopher Sylvia. How did you have those
come onto your radar? So to speak? I heard about a case,
the Chris Sylvia case. He was twenty eight years old and he was hiking
the Pacific Christ Trail in twenty fifteen, and he vanished in February, and
the San Diego County that's in southern California, they searched hard for him.
They had dogs or patrol agents, you name it, where out there trying
to find him for five days, and then they eventually gave up. But
his gear was found on the Pacific Crist Trail. And his circumstances reminded me
of a case I had worked at the Grand Kenyon of another young man in
his twenties and I failed to find him. I was assigned as the search
coordinator, and I tried to coordinate the entire search effort. I didn't find
the guy, and that bothered me. I had to tell his husband that
we were winded. His father excuse me that we were winding down the search,
and it bothered me. Fears it haunted me. So the Chris Silvia
case reminded me of that case. So much. I just had a compassionate
impulse and I called his family and asked for their blessing to open a pro
bono investigation into that case. Now, from that case, I started to
learn about the I look for patterns. I investigated case, and I learned
there were two other young men who were missing for the Pacific christ Trail,
three young men, one each year, three years in a row. And
that struck me as uncanny. And so then I started to meet some of
these amateur sleuths, and I joined their effort and was just compelled to do
my best alongside them to try to solve this mystery. So I would say
for me that one of the most intriguing parts of the book was reading about
the people that you met online, some of you you eventually met in real
life, who were dedicated to searching for Chris, Scherpa and David. What
would you say were some of the highlights for you of working with online researchers
and what are some of the challenges as well that come along with that.
Yeah, that's an excellent question. What happened is I started joining the Facebook
missing hiker groups, and especially the Chris Fowler Missing Hiker group, and I
was watching all these amateur searchers, and by amateurs, I just mean they're
not professional searchers. They're professional people, a lot of them, but they
don't search for a living. And to me, these Facebook missing hiker groups
were joining those is like walking into the saloon in a while with anything goes.
You've got all kind of rowdy characters in there, bitter squabbles are likely
to break out at any time. It's a little rough and rowdy in there.
But every once in a while I'd see the saloon doors open at this
crazy Facebook place and a quiet hero would walk in, somebody that had pure
intentions, just wanted to help this family find their missing loved one. And
the first quiet I write about a lot of these quiet heroes, but the
first one that struck my interest was a woman named Kathy Tar. She was
near me and age. We were both in our mid fifties at the time,
and she was had searched, given up her summer to search for Chris
Fowler in Washington, and she announced on Facebook she was going to drive all
the way down to California to now initiate a search for David O'Sullivan, who
went missing about fifty two trail miles north of where Chris Silvia went missing in
southern California. She was going to be there searching for David Sullivan at the
same time I was going to be there searching for Chris Silvia. So I
begged her to meet me for dinner and we started talking, and you could
say once I met Kathy Tar, I was hooked. I wanted to learn.
I want to learn how to be missing and other families, but also
wanted to learn more about this Facebook missing hiker group phenomena. I wanted to
learn more about how the Internet is affecting hyperculture, and so that's where the
book was born. Now, I have a perception, and I'm probably wrong
here, that in a lot of our wilderness areas there's no cell service,
and so I was intrigued by this idea that there were Facebook missing hiker groups
and that they were using social media as a way of communicating what they were
up to, what they were hoping to do in terms of searching for missing
hikers. So social media actually has had a significant impact on, as you
put it, hiker culture. What are some of the ways things are changed
or impacted by new technology. So with the so in a study maybe in
a lot of ways. Right, we even know about the selfie phenomenon where
I call it the fatal selfie. Right, they're trying to get a sexy
selfie on the edge of the cliff and they saw fall. Yeah it's very
tragic. Yeah, it's very sad. But in this missing hiker world,
Facebook is both a blessing and a curse. It'll bring in false leads,
It'll bring in catfishers who are trying to get money out of the family.
It'll all these fights. People will get on there and argue, people will
say negative things, but it also will bring positive It'll bring support, it'll
bring awareness, It'll bring in good leads. And in my book, Facebook
proves to be a very powerful investigative tool that I couldn't imagine using when I
was looking for my missing hiker, the Grand Kenyon in nineteen ninety five,
a clue is found via Facebook. Morgan Clemens for the Amateur Searcher and Kathy
tar that I write about, they prove that a witness statement is false using
Facebook, it just flows lit off. There's just all good and negative things
happening in both hiker world and the missing person world via social media, and
as I was reading this, I was definitely seen some of the same things
that you do in your Missing hikersocial media groups. We have the same sorts
of dynamics on the pages that we run for the Colonial Parkway murders case.
So this was all looking very familiar at certain points. And we two have
our quiet heroes, we have our ravel rousers, and we do get the
people who are like I have this big, extravagant lead, but it pans
out to nothing. So this was a very interesting book for me to read
and compare the two experiences. You're listening to Mind over Murder. We'll be
right back after this word from our sponsors. We're back here at mindover Murder.
You had talked a couple of minutes ago about drone technology, and that
was one of the things that I was most interested in hearing you talk about
here. How has technology like drones helped search and rescue teams and rangers in
locating missing people in hard to search areas. Earlier on I talked about your
hasty search, right, this is when you just shoot out a helicopter,
or you shoot out some runners, some humans or some dogs maybe to go
find this missing person, and they are using drones in that way and to
find people in real time. And this can work well if you've got a
person going waving their arms on a mountaintop and the drone can find them,
or when they use infra red thermal imagery and so they can find a live
person because they're warmer than the environment. Where my book focuses on it is
with cold case drone searching, and so with a cold case drone search this
is very esoteric at this point, but I also feel very promising, and
they are only a handful or less of teams trying to improve this technique.
And so with a cold case drone grit search is you send a very good,
high quality drone with a drone pilot that's an extremely good problem solver,
and they've got a search area mapped out in GPS. They do it on
the computer software and the drone flys a grid like a lawnmower, back and
forth, and the drone is taking photographs along that grid. You will come
back with thousands of photographs. Now they have software that searches, but today
it's just not as good as what humans can do. This is very tedious.
If I mentioned already. They call these humans that view these images squinters,
squinting at their computer screen so much winters, and they're very dedicated.
Yeah, the squinters are very dedicated, hardworking people, and so they're searching
these images looking for clothing, equipment, gear, even bones. There's a
little bit of a spoiler, but in the book this ends up working.
They find missing people using this drone COQ strone image search technique one group Western
State's Area Search in cooperation with the Follower Solar Foundation, which we'll probably talk
about later. They have found four people who's in this technique since two thousand
and nineteen. I was talking to my boyfriend Mark about that very thing,
and he said, thousands of photographs, that's crazy. And then he said
that sounds like that would be the kind of thing that we should be training
AI for, because wouldn't that be a much better use of AI's time rather
than you know, generating memes or giving high school students essays on demand.
Couldn't we be training AI how to identify these sorts of things in photos.
Yes, I believe so. I believe the AI at this point has some
limitations. There's been a study it shows it today with the software that humans
could do it better or quicker with assimilated death scene is what I'm going to
say, is like bones of clothing. But there's promise, and I've talked
to deep learning experts about this. They feel as this is a solvable problem,
but the AI has to look at thousands, ten thousand images to learn
that, whereas a human beings teach them this is what a femur looks like,
much quicker. But there's hope that we will eventually get there. Was
it going to be one year, two year, ten years, I don't
know, but I do think there's hope that we could train at AI can
learn itself how to find clues during a cold case. Dro grid search one
thing I was surprised by and I learned that in your book. I didn't
realize drones could be programmed to fly a grid pattern, which I know is
that's searching one oh one. I didn't realize that technology existed. It just
never occurred to me. I've seen drones, but I'm always seeing locally here
a person flying a drone using a handheld controller, so it's almost it felt
to me like those radio controlled airplanes that we'd play with when we were It's
much more sophisticated and expensive, but that's what it felt like. I didn't
realize that the drone could go up there and fly itself back and forth and
do a grid pattern and then come back to you with result. I didn't
realize how sophisticated they've become. Yes, And it's obviously it's getting almost maybe
exponentially sophisticated over time. Like I said, we only have a few people
working on this technique. I'm hopeful we'll have more, maybe a bigger companies
doing this that can put more resources to it, or the government. But
I've worked with the drone pilots. My husband is trying to do it,
and I worked a case with him, and it's tedious for them as well
as winters. It's a hard job. It's also for the drone pilot to
establish their grid in the software and then to go out in the field and
have the drone fly the grid and hopefully safely for the drone. If we
lose a drone, it's not the end of the world. It's safer than
losing a person and the aircraft, right, But they can fully do that.
It's like self driving cars. We're there, you just tell the drone
where to go, it'll go and as long as it doesn't hit an obstacle
or bad weather or something, it'll do its job for you. That does
seem like a significant time saver. In other words, you can see the
potential exists for drone search to be something that would be incredibly beneficial in some
of these situations you're describing. Yes, it's potentially a game changer, both
for the hasty, immediately life saving searches and then also the cold case.
These teams could do this very safely and if they have the time, because
it's not an urgent thing, an agency can assign a team to do this
to try in an attempt to sell the cold case. Now, you need
certain environments. If you're in a Everglades swamp where there's just a big overstory
and you can't see down below, that's not going to be a great case
for a drone. Desert environments are awesome because it's just cactus and you can
see real easily on the spare sparsely visitated terrain is I think potentially fall zones
below locks screen slopes in the mountains also might be a great place for these
drove good searches. Was there any other technology that you came across that you're
particularly excited about as like a new innovation in search and rescue efforts? Or
are drones really that's the cool that's where all the cool kids are looking these
days. Ours are more cool kids looking into this drobe thing. It's I
think it's so tedious. Maybe you need the nerdy the uncool ones working on
it because they have the dedication to be obsessive and nerdy about it. But
the other cool thing are the GPS units. So you've got your garment,
your spot and these other emergency GPS locator devices. Those are going to get
better and better, equality they're heavy. Right now, Apple Phone is getting
a GPS track, or I think it said the fourteens have it already.
So air tags, those Apple tags, I see. We're going to soon
get to a point where you can have one of those in your backpack or
in your jacket and it's just easily defined it the airplane could fly over,
get a signal and find you. I think we're not far from that,
so it just be a matter of does every hiker have one on their person
or not? As it's possible. People will still get in trouble, they're
still going to fall, they're still going to maybe die and get lost.
But if they have one of these locator devices on them that we will find
them, we'll have fewer unsolved cases when we do have this technology. Do
you think it's something that everyone is going to be open to having on them
or are there going to be hiking purists who are like, I'm not hiking
with a cell phone, I'm not hiking with an air tag. We were
always going to have some outliers. But I think if the tag, the
GPS tag, let's call it that, if it's lightweight enough, inconvenient,
and inexpensive, I think most of your hikers will not have a problem carrying
on this, especially when they're familiar with the hardship that will occur to their
family if they're not found. Yeah, when you're a hiker, I'm guilty
of that a little bit. I'm like, hey, don't search for me.
That's where I want to be. Leave me out there. But as
being related to someone with the unsolved case, it's one of the worst things
that can happen to a family member or loved one is to not know and
to not have the answers that you want, and it's called ambiguous loss.
Especially with a missing person, you have no idea what happened to them or
where they are, and so this is very hard for them. You do
not want to do this to your family. If you need any motivation to
have one of these gpassuits, that should be it. Yeah, ask your
mom if you went missing. It almost feels like a spiritual quest or something.
And look, there's a lot of people that are out in the woods,
that are out there for renewal and relaxation. Then they might actually say
what you said, Andrew, which is, hey, look if I get
I was where I wanted to be, and it's all good. Their moms
and dads, brothers and sisters, their husbands, wives, partners might not
feel the same way, particularly as the days and weeks, and in our
example, months and years go by. It's hard. Yeah, at the
other end of that go ahead, yes, And with a missing person there's
the emotional thing, which is the worst of course, but there's also legal
and financial problems because the person can't be declared dead. And so if you're
a bread winner, that which has happened, and so your spouse can't get
access to your insurance to take care of your kids because you're just missing.
So it's a huge problem to have a family member that's missing on several different
levels. Yeah, I was thinking about that while you were using that example.
I thought you're right. If someone went out, Let's say, and
they're the breadwinner and they've got a half a million dollar insurance policy, heaven
forbid something happens to them. They want to make sure their spouse and kids
are provided for. And a lot of times people have a twenty five year
old son now who's in law school. When he was a little bit younger,
my ex wife and I would talk about, oh, we want to
make sure that Chris has enough money to go to school or do whatever he
wants to do. So there's always this provide for your family motivation, which
I think is valid. And yet if you go missing, you're absolutely right.
The insurance company's not going to pay off. They're going to say,
Joe or Jane could come through the door tomorrow and he or she'll be fine,
or maybe they're in hiding or whatever. There's a lot of bizarre stories
out there. I want to shift back to Chris David and sherpa for a
second. And I hope this doesn't come across as an indelicate question, but
I think we can be frank about it with regard to the missing men,
is the goal now one of recovery or is it still a rescue operation?
Do you think it's possible for any of the men to have survived for this
long in the woods and it's just a matter of finding them. From a
professional searcher point of view, yes, it would definitely be recovery, and
it's been that for a long time. A professional searcher starts to think recovery
pretty quickly. But there's something called the survival rule of threes. You can
live three minutes without oxygen and three d days without water, and three weeks
without food, and then shelter can be as short ast three hours if it's
freezing out or you're underwater and where it's cold. This becomes recovery situation fairly
quickly. Now with these cases, though, the hard part is, especially
when you don't have answers and you don't have a body, is that could
they possibly be voluntarily MiB seen, you know, without spooning it too much.
One of the hyders in particular, there's some circumstances that suggest that it's
possible that this is someone who just went voluntarily missing. You know, you're
familiar with Chris McCandless in Alaska into the wild people go. Did they go
m candless? Did they burn all their possessions and just go off and live
under another name? It does happen. I do think that's the one of
the least likely. There's a low percentage that happened, but it does remain
an intriguing possibility for me. For one of them missing, I was going
to ask, do you think that is what happened to Chris. I don't
have affirm this happened to any of them. Also, Chris Fowler and Davane
ol Sullivan, there was snowy conditions and cold conditions that lead me to think
that was more likely an environmental accident occurred in their case. With Chris,
Sylvia, I'm very much more perplexed. Are there a lot of people hiking
alone in America's wilderness? Yes, I hike alone, and I'm going to
getst a solo hiking, But then you'll hear you are slightly more at risk
if you're a solo hiker you're slightly more at risk of trouble or to die
out there. Interesting enough, these statistics are a little bit older. But
a solo male is less likely to survive a perilous counter and outdoors than a
solo female. So that's counterintuitive to a lot of people. So yes,
there is more risk. But if you're a person who joys sold to solo
hiking, it's a risk worth taking. Now you can mitigate that risk by
planning better and then maybe not doing the hardest core mountain climbing thing alone,
but go down to your local park for a few miles alone. That's see
what I mean, it's nuanced. But yeah, a lot of people hikers
love to go hike alone, all of them, but there are thousands,
if not me, as they did. When you hike the at were you
by yourself or did you have a companion with you? I was a solo
hike of the I bought the trail. I did that in nineteen ninety nine
for cell phone smartphones, and I wanted to hike it alone. Now,
these longestance trails are a very social experience, though there's a trail culture.
Then there's also what they call the Trammelie, the trail family and people will
look out for you and more on you, so you don't Today you're probably
not as alone as you want to be. You want to be more alone
than you are because there's more crowds on the trails. Do you want to
fess up as to what your trail name was? Yes, it was Tennessee
Walker, Tennessee Walker. Yeah. I don't know if you guys are hearing
an accent. Now that's Tennessee. That sounds like a brand of alcohol bottle,
it does. I think there's a horse from the horse Tennessee walking horses,
and even the whiskey I think is named for the Tennessee Horse walking horses.
By the way, we failed to ask you. I know you have
very proud history with the Park Service. Tell us your history about where you
started with the Park Service and some of the places you served. Yeah.
So, I always wanted to work in the outdoors and I loved animals.
So I got a degree four street from the University of Tennessee. Pretty quickly
got a job as a law enforcement park ranger at Cape Patrish National Seashore in
North Carolina. I wrote a book about this called Ranger confidential around my experience
for the Park Service. From Cape Patteris, I went to Zion National Park
in Utah, then Yosemite National Park in California, and then I ended my
career at Green Kyne National Park in Arizona. All of these places are so
stone cold beautiful. As you described each one. Briefly, I thought,
oh, I'd want to be there, and then you move on to the
next one. I'd be like, oh no, I want to be there
too. This had to be pretty amazing. It was. I fell in
love with it really quickly. You know. I was idealistic about the job.
But what happens. I was a protection ranger, and that's to protect
the park from the people, protect the people from the park, and protect
the people from each other. Park rangers store every which way, trying to
protect everything things that sometimes they want to kill each other. You are caught
in the middle. I was a protection ranger, is often always does wildwide
fire, structural far ems. I was a medic and search and rescue as
we've talked about. So there's a lot of heavy duties on one set of
shoulder for the park ranger. Gee, if I'm going to go hiking,
I'm going to ask you if I can go with you, because I feel
a lot safer all the way around. There's a lot of experience there.
Before we go, I want you to talk to us a little bit about
the work that the Fouler O'Sullivan Foundation is doing and how we can assist you
and how our listeners can assist you in that work. Yeah, that's one
of the happy endings in Treble Loss is. A foundation is created by Kathy
Tarr, one of these quiet heroes, and it's all the Fouler of Sullivan
Foundation, named after Chris Speller and David O'Sullivan. This foundation is dedicated to
helping families of missing hikers and preventing hikers from going missing in the first place.
They have a program where you can donate a GPS unit and they will
give that in a lottery system to Drewiker so that a throker that couldn't afford
one can have one of these while they hike. They also initiate searches.
They've found several people on their searches and they're searching for people today using this
drone technique we talked about. They have trained pilots, said they've trained to
do this and so yeah, go check them out. That's on fof found
fofound dot com. So excellent. And so what's next for you in terms
of projects? This is a this is a beautiful book, very ambitious.
Are you jumping right into something else or are you taking time to pursue other
projects. I'm taking time off. That was it. I've worked really hard
on that book. I had some my own adversity in the book, which
I write about, and so I still help out with the Foundation from time
to time, and I've searched for missing people for come to time. But
I'm also taking a break to rest and recover myself for now. So does
that mean you go for walks in the woods. I go for walks alone
in the woods. Yes. The book is Trail of the Lost, the
relentless search to bring home the missing hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail. Andrea,
where can everybody find your book? It's pretty much everywhere. Definitely Amazon,
your local book favorite bookstore, you should be able to find it.
Definitely. You can you order it for sure. Thank you so much for
joining us, Andrea. We love the book and we appreciate you taking the
time to talk to us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Oh,
thank good work. We will try. That is going to do it for
this episode of mind Never Murder. Thank you so much for listening. We'll
see you next time. Mind Over Murder is a production of Absolute Zero and
Another Dog Productions. Our executive producers are Bill Thomas and Kristin Dilley. Our
logo art is by Pamela Arnois. Our theme music is by Kevin mcleoud.
Mind Over Murder is distributed in partnership with crawl Space Media. You can follow
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Over Murder.