Very interesting article. Chances are that Paul will turn up eventually, if he's there...or in the nearby desert.
People Keep Finding Bodies in Joshua Tree
Of course, not all bodies end up in the desert through suspicious means. Like many parks these days, visitation in Joshua Tree is way up. More than 3 million people are expected to fight for its 3,000 parking spots and wander the trails this year—double the visitors from five years ago. Some blame the recent boom on the nearby Coachella music festival and the social media–induced “
loved to death” syndrome that’s plaguing
so many of our parks. (U2 certainly
deserves some blame as well.) Meanwhile, staffing in Joshua Tree has remained the same. About 110 paid employees watch over 1,200 square miles of land, some of the hottest in the United States, where it’s easy to become lost in the famous red-stone mounds that give Joshua Tree its Martian look. All those extra visitors mean more people who wander off the trail—and some of them die. In April, a 76-year-old man named David Sewell was lost for three days. Rescuers miraculously found him by
following the circling vultures overhead. When they spotted Sewell, he was on death’s edge, covered in dirt and curled around a rock.
Sewell was lucky. But as we’ve written here before, about 1,600 other people who’ve
gone missing on public land weren’t so fortunate. The thing that sets Joshua Tree and the Mojave apart from all the other places where people disappear, however, is the stunning regularity at which their bodies resurface.
