Trail of the Lost: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail

[rachelmanija]

Park ranger and search & rescue leader Andrea Lankford gets interested in three seemingly unrelated disappearances of hikers on the PCH, and launches a multi-year effort to find them.

This is conceptually very up my alley and is an interesting topic, but I didn't love the book. Some of the details were intriguing, but Lankford's style bugged me. It's a bit melodramatic and promises things that are not quite delivered. For instance, early on she makes a big point of "ARE these cases unrelated? Isn't it suspicious that three unmarried young men vanished on the PCH, exactly one per year?"

No. No, it isn't. Hiking the PCH is an extremely strenuous, time-consuming, and male-dominated hobby involving being gone for up to six months. It self-selects for people who are young, unmarried, and male. That's not victimology, that's statistics. Also, there are others who vanish on the trail but eventually get found in very non-suspicious circumstances, and it's not uncommon for people to die on this fairly dangerous hike, so... no! It's not weird that some bodies don't get found.

Lankford makes a big deal of there being criminal activities and cults in the area, but the cult turns out to be pretty benign and not kidnapping anyone, and the big crime she uncovers is mushroom poaching. There's interesting stuff going on - her effort helps to uncover two other missing people, one dead and one mentally ill - but it feels like she wants to write a true crime book when there's nothing suggesting there ever was a crime. She also comes across a bit self-congratulatory.

The book is also not very well-organized. I kept losing track of which hiker they were doing what to find.

In the end, they don't find any evidence of what happened to any of those guys, two of whom almost certainly died in an accident. (The third probably did too, but there's a chance he killed himself - a possibility Lankford doesn't raise, but it occurred to me.) There's a lot of wilderness out there. It's impressive that most of the vanished people are eventually found, not evidence of weirdness or criminality that some aren't.

I file this with The Cold Vanish as a "missing persons in the wilderness" book that could have been better.

Comments

[ioplokon]

Yeah, my mom's friend disappeared in Death Valley & will likely never be found. We'll also probably never know if it was misadventure (possible), suicide (most likely, though no one really suspected he might do that), or faking his death (theoretically possible but not really likely; I think the only reason anyone entertains this is bc it's nice to think maybe he's alive). I think people are really uncomfortable with the kind of uncertainty that comes from that stuff.

I guess it's cool Lankford helped find some people tho.

[rachelmanija]

That's so sad. And yeah, uncertainty is really hard to live with.

[ioplokon]

Yeah. I guess the way I look at it now is, whether misadventure or the other thing, he really loved hiking and the desert so, idk, he was somewhere he wanted to be at the end. (Obviously this doesn't stand up to scrutiny of what the physical experience of that was but, idk. It's something...)