Joe Keller had just joined the foggy stratum of the hundreds or maybe thousands of people whove gone missing on our federal public lands. Thing is, nobody knows how many. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, calls unidentified remains and missing persons the nations silent mass disaster, estimating that on any given day there are between 80,000 and 90,000 people ac*tively listed with law enforcement as missing. The majority of those, of course, disappear in populated areas.
What I wanted to know was how many people are missing in our wild places, the roughly 640 million acres of federal landsincluding national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management prop*erty. Cases like 51-year-old Dale Stehling, who, in 2013, vanished from a short petroglyph-viewing trail near the gift shop at Colorados Mesa Verde National Park. Morgan Heimer, a 22-year-old rafting guide, who was wearing a professional-grade personal flotation device when he disappeared in 2015 in Grand Canyon National Park during a hike after setting up camp. Ohioan Kris Fowler, who vanished from the Pa*cific Crest Trail last fall. At least two people have recently gone missing outside the national forest where I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There are scores more stories like this.
