Jon Billman - The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North Americas Wildlands

You dream about missing persons, even though the nightmares dont belong to you.

Rational professionals Ive met in my researchlaw enforcement and search-and-rescue personneltend to believe that our world is still a big, wild, and remote place, and logic and reason are at the core of missing persons cases. A very difficult puzzle laid out on a massive table, but there are rules and clues, and the puzzle can be solved. I agree with them most of the time.

Ive been obsessed with writing about missing persons in wild places. In the April 2017 issue of Outside magazine, I wrote a feature about a college student, a runner missing in southern Colorado, that attempted to answer questions about who goes missing, why, how many are out there, and what the hell happens once youre gone. That story elicited more feedbackmuch of it polarizingthan anything Id ever written.

You cant discuss missing persons in the wild without broaching the subjects of conspiracy theories and the paranormal. Though many do, Im not advocating for Bigfoot as an explanation for any of these cases. Same goes for UFOs and portals to hidden dimensions. What I am insisting is that rhyme and reason so often fly out the window when someone vanishes in the wild. So many cases defy explanation, and often dumb luck is as useful a tool as a FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared Radar)equipped helicopter and a team of trained tracking dogs when someoneor a bodydoes get found.

In early April 2017, a young touring cyclist named Jacob Gray stepped off his bike and disappeared in the northern district of Olympic National Park in northwestern Washington. What ensued was a mystery that echoed other cases Id researched. What was different for me is that Randy Gray, Jacobs father, allowed me unlimited access into the courageous search to find his son. The feature I wrote on Jacob Gray for Bicycling magazine was the catalyst for meeting Jacobs family, but it soon became apparent that their generosity, and the huge, strange purgatorial underworld of the vanished, deserved a book.

The Outside story was a work of investigative journalism; Jacob and Randy Grays story is more personal to me than most of the reporting Ive done, and in more than a few places I fail at journalistic objectivity. I made four trips out west to rendezvous with Randy. He invited me to his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, on Christmas Day 2017, and we loaded up his Arctic Fox slide-in camper with food and gear and lit out in search of Jacob. We spent days and weeks together living out of the Arctic Fox, as well as a barn on the Olympic Peninsula of Washington used as a home base for Bigfoot researchers, a Native American reservation on the Strait of San Juan de Fuca, a cult compound in Canada, and an illegal wilderness tent site on a mountain in Olympic National Park. We napped on ferries, on beaches, and on Sitka spruce logs. We talked with heroin junkies living in Port Angeles, Washington, and on the fringes of Chilliwack, British Columbia. We went swimming in the Pacific Ocean and the Sol Duc River. We stumbled across three brand-new missing persons cases on Vancouver Island.

I couldnt help but become Randys friend. Its infectious when, sitting around the little galley table in the Arctic Fox, eating tacos, Randy would map plans to help the search for other missing persons, like Kris Fowler, who went missing on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2016. Or Randy would sketch designs for a new type of swiftwater rescue tool based on a type of lifeguard surfboard hed seen in Hawaii; some days the current and boulders in the Sol Duc River nearly beat him to death, and he designed a rescue boogie board to help mitigate that. He bought and installed a new toilet in the Bigfoot Barn because the old one wasnt flushing quite right, and it was the least he could do in exchange for free rent. He spent hours on his phone helping friends and family with their problems. All this positive energy while shouldering what many psychologists believe is the heaviest burden a human can bear.

I dont think I could rise to the occasion to find my missing son the way Randy Gray has, to be as open-minded and full of generosity, love, and optimism while bushwhacking through a dense level of hell.

The disappearance of Jacob Gray in the wild represents one of hundredsthousandsof persons who have vanished in remote places. Trying to find them often leads to a clusterfuck, and we dont even know how many of the vanished are out there. There are more every day.

Jon Billman

Marquette, Michigan

February 2020