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This episode of the outside podcast is brought to you by Arkansas, the natural state. The thing that separates an adventure from just a standard issue outing outside is surprise, and there may not be a more surprising outdoor locale than Arkansas. A temper climate means playing outside year round, and let me tell you, can you ever play from kayaking a two rivers park in Little Rock to the famed mountain biking in Bentonville or a float on the Cato River or the Buffalo National River, which, oh by the way, was America's first national river to trumping around Mount Nibo State Park for unbelievable views of the Arkansas River Valley. In the natural state, you're never far away from fun. Lakes, rivers, mountains, woods, trails, canoeing, boating, mountain biking, hiking, fishing, whatever you want, whatever your skill level. Your next surprise outside is in Arkansas. Plan your next adventure at Arkansas.com. This is the outside podcast with patio. Hey everybody, Fred Dryer here. I'm the features editor at Outside. You're listening to another long read on the outside podcast, where I read one of our classic long form stories about adventure, survival, true crime, and noteworthy people from the world of outdoor culture. Thank you so much for listening and subscribing to the outside podcast. Please rate and review us on the podcast platform of your choice. If your favorite way to read is with your ears, I encourage you to join Outside Plus. It gives you unlimited access to everything in the outside network, including more audio stories from outside backpacker climbing ski and more. Plus, you get mapping apps like trail forks, guide GPS, and map my fitness. Okay, last week we heard the opening half of In Search of Michelle Vanick. That's the 2025 outside long read about the 19 year search for a missing Denver mother of four who vanished on Mount of the Holy Cross in 2005. Today we have the conclusion of In Search of Michelle Vanick. I hope you enjoy it. Chapter five, the one rule that matters most. I know from experience as a VMRG mission coordinator that a decision to separate on the trail in the back country is one of the most common reasons rescuers get paged out to search for lost or missing hikers. Separating in the Alpine is even more fraught with risk. Perhaps the most dangerous situation is when parties split up. Mark Scott Nash writes in Colorado Fourteener Disasters, a compendium of fourteener climbs and hikes gone wrong. That over 44 pages chronicles the previously unsolved case of Michelle Vanick. A party of two may split up for whatever reason, including ambition. One climber wants to push on and the other wants to turn back. This is the worst possible condition because the weaker climber then finds himself in the situation of a solo climber, except that in his unplanned and the climber is likely not prepared for such a situation, which neatly describes the situation Michelle found herself in at 1.25 pm on September 24th, 2005. To my knowledge, Michelle is the only hiker who has ever died while attempting to summit Mount of the Holy Cross. So just how dangerous really is the decision to separate? I ask the one guy on the planet who should know, Robert J. Coster, a mission coordinator at the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, who created the International Search and Rescue Incident Database ISRID, a trove of information drawing on more than 145,000 SAR incidents reported worldwide since 2014. Coster's lost person behavior, a book and companion smartphone app, uses ISRID data to predict how subjects in 42 categories, climbers, hikers, skiers, people with dementia, etc., will behave when they go lost or missing in the wilderness or urban environments. Coster says that by adopting the principles and guidelines in his book, first published in 2008, and using his app, SAR managers have cut the time it takes to resolve a search mission in half. I zoom with Coster and ask if he has data to back the notion that separating on the trail is one of the most dangerous things hikers can do in the Alpine. He searches the ISRID database and finds 4,939 SAR incidents related to lost or missing hikers, parsing that 3,374 instances involved solo hikers or hikers who had separated from a group of two or more. 1,565 were hikers and groups of two or more who became lost and never separated from the group. He drills down further into that data and looks at outcomes of those 3,374 people who had been hiking solo or had separated from a group, 3,079, 91.3% were found alive and 295,8.7% were found deceased. And for the 1,565 group hikers who never separated, 1,532, 97.9% were found alive while 33,2.1% were found deceased. Bottom line, hikers who separate from a group statistically are 4 times more likely to die than group hikers who become lost and never separate. Coastal estimates that each year more than 10,000 people go lost or missing in wilderness, urban and rural areas in the United States. He says journalists writing stories about backcountry safety often ask him if there's one major thing people can do to minimize their chances of having an emergency in the outdoors. No, but there are a whole bunch of things you need to be doing because nature is nature, he says. If you don't respect it, it's another part of that Swiss cheese model that will click into place. Coaster is curious about where and how VMRG found Michelle's belongings after so many years. On July 5th, 2021, Rob Werell, a ski and snowboard club bail coach, was climbing around the Angelica Cooleau, our boulder field with his son Cody, when Cody found a woman's Cerelle assistic hiking boot. After reading about the case in Colorado 14 or disasters that December, Werell realized that the boot Cody had found looked similar to what Michelle had been wearing in the photo Ryan took on Halo Ridge in 2005 and called authorities. That clue galvanized a new generation of VMRG volunteers to resume the search. Myself included, during the summer of 2023, I led two unsuccessful ground team and helicopter missions to the Alpine around and above Lake Patricia that were so physically taxing and emotionally vexing I vowed not to return unless additional evidence was found. After the winter snow on Holy Cross melted a year later, VMRG's Erica German combed through paper maps and field reports archived from the original search. Check this information with veteran rescuers who had searched for Michelle and built a digital star topo map layered with data from all eight operation periods in 2005 and subsequent search efforts. Recruiting other women and a few men on the team to join the effort and urging them to think like a mother desperate to return home to her family. Erica then led targeted forays around the basin using the process of elimination until only one plausible search area remained and made the find. Since he's been a volunteer member of the Blue Ridge Mountain Rescue Group for 44 years, I asked Coaster if he's come to any conclusions as a SAR responder about successful search and recovery operations versus no trace searches when a body's never found. I've always maintained that if you're doing a recovery, you're not saving the life of the person you're pulling out of the woods, but you are saving the life of the family he tells me. If the search remains a no trace search, so many of them aren't able to go on living and move forward and go through the grieving process, their life essentially gets put on hold. Chapter 6 19 Years in Purgatory Michelle Vannex Funeral at Littleton St. Francis Cabrini Catholic Church was filled to capacity, including Brooks Keith wearing a white clerical collar, searches from Vale Mountain Rescue Group in their red gourd-text team jackets, and scores of family and friends. Because there was no body, there was no casket, only flowers and photos. Michael Vannex eulogized his mother, but does not remember what he said. Michelle would say it would take somebody special to really fill this church, says Ben Vannex. With her funeral, it was standing room only and people outside. So she did that. Michael got up and spoke. I didn't speak. I was still in shock and holding onto my youngest. I was holding on to Haley the whole time. A week after the funeral, Ray Chini dialed the number of the cell phone Ryan had used on Holy Cross to report that Michelle was missing. I called him and said, "Ryan, I'd like to buy you a coffee," Ray says. "I'd like to talk to you about Michelle's last day with you." At Nervata Coffee Shop, Ray listened as Ryan struggling to maintain composure, recounted everything he remembered. From the moment they left Lakewood together in Michelle's Sequoia to when he returned to the trailhead alone, the meeting lasted nearly an hour. I don't think he maliciously did anything Ray concluded. I think there were circumstances he didn't control that he should have controlled because he was the guy that had kind of many mountains, so he knew the vulnerability of the human being in that kind of environment. Ben Vannex never talked to Ryan again, but he did see him from a distance one day at Denver International Airport. Three years after the tragedy, Ben was leaving Denver with his boys and other family members on a guy's only fishing trip to Canada. As Ben was loading his things into a scanner bin at a security checkpoint, with 12-year-old Grant in front of him and 19-year-old Michael behind, Ben looked at me. across the X-ray machine and saw Ryan standing on the other side of the conveyor. His stuff had just gone through, he was in front of the line, Ben says. He must have seen us first, but then I did make eye contact with him because he was putting his stuff back into his bag and he was doing it fairly rapidly. Seeing his father's face flush and his hands start shaking, Grant asked what was wrong and Ben turned to look at Michael. I said, you gotta get in front of me because if you don't, I am going to rush this and get into so much trouble because I will cross the TSA to get him. Ben says Michael did just that and he watched Ryan disappear into the crowd. He never saw Ryan again. I asked Ben what he would have done if Michael hadn't impeded him. It's probably not worth saying because it's not pleasant, he says. I mean, you can just let your imagination go and it's probably worse than what you're thinking. In 2009, friends set Ben up on a blind date with Amanda Kelly, a 36-year-old chiropractor and a mother of a four-year-old daughter and six-year-old son who was going through a divorce. They started dating and as it was with Michelle, Ben and Amanda's courtship lasted for years, marrying in 2021. Amanda, a self-described spiritual person who says Jesus is my man, never could grasp why her first marriage ended the way it did until she met Ben and his children. Then she had an epiphany. This is the family she was meant to be with. I wouldn't wish this situation on anybody. It's just, it's hard, she says, but it was not hard being a mom to Ben's kids, which is why a million times over, I would not change a thing. If he could for Amanda's sake, one thing Ben would change is to offload the anger and guilt he carries about not being able to save Michelle. So one day he sits down and writes Ryan the letter, absolving his former friend to a degree, but he has yet to mail it. I can understand why people end up asking for forgiveness or for giving people on their deathbed, says Ben. But at this point for me, where I'm at in my life and where I'm at with my children and where I'm at with Amanda, I don't feel the need to forgive him face-to-face. It's not gonna change my life at this point and it's also not gonna bring back Michelle. Bringing back Michelle was my job. Chapter seven, finding her way home. Randy Oates is never able to land on the rock pile and instead sets me, Anya, Zach, and Striker down in Marshland on the banks of Lake Patricia. Near where Cody Worell had found Michelle's crumbling boot in 2021. Then he flies off and 15 minutes later, returns with the rest of my search and recovery team. Jeff Ashby, a retired NASA astronaut, Heather Parker, a veteran army paratrooper, now a tower crane operator at a local construction company. And David Wiseman, an endurance athlete who works as an executive at a global consulting firm. Sheltered in a grove of conifers singing in the wind, we establish a base camp at the bottom of Angelica Coulouar, a granite cathedral with no roof and towering walls and a vast nave of boulders marching ever upward to the summit with its melted out crucifix. That October night, an aurora borealis dances above the north ridge of Holy Cross, a shimmering violet then green curtain of light blowing in the solar wind. We interpret it as an omen. Michelle telling us she's finally ready to go home. Later the next morning, after three hours of scrambling up the boulder field, my dog leaping from rock to unsteady rock, sometimes hoisted like a suitcase by his harness over yawning bottomless holes, I put Striker to work at the bottom of a steep rock drainage, 600 feet below the primary site where hydrological mapping data loaded into my garment shows the downhill path that run off and potentially evidence follows as the snowpack melts away each spring and summer. Immediately he starts sniffing the sediment, a natural catch basin at the shoots outfall. Striker's tail starts helicoptering, a signal to me he knows he's about to earn his paycheck. The precious tether ball tucked in my thigh pocket. My lab leaps up onto a grass bench and attempts to climb higher but can't. So there he sits, rigid and focusing a stair uphill. His trained final response, TFR to cadaver odor. Holy shit. Striker just gave me a TFR I announced into my radio. Zach free climbs up the drainage while I scramble around it with my dog. At the top, I joined Jeff Ashby, who's standing at the edge of a cliff assessing the primary search site. A few minutes later, Zach's voice crackles over the radio. I think I found a spine. Say again, break, you found what? A spine. On the radio, I ask Anya Minutes, who's exploring nearby caves with Dave Wiseman to vector over to Zach and inspect the find and verify that it's not from a big horned sheep like so many other bones we've found scattered around the basin. A moment later, a whoop of joy echoes from below. I'll take that as an A firm, I say. When Anya answers, I can tell she's smiling. Yes, it's definitely human. It's an intact, dissected segment of cervical and thoratic spine, vertebra C1 through T5, a robust source for DNA for forensic identification. That over time, had migrated down the drainage and into a cave like rocky alcove, sheltered from ultraviolet rays and weather. There, it remained preserved for nearly two decades as if waiting to be discovered. I reprise her howl, Jeff claps me on the back, shakes my hand and tells me we have more work to do. At the primary site, I wiggle my hips into a climbing harness and attempt to put striker on rope to check the 30 degree rock seam where Zach and Erica found Michelle's things. But striker refuses, something I've never seen him do before on a mission. After that harrowing hike up the Boulder Field, the nerve-wracking exposure of our search site has pushed even this steadfast high-drive purebred over threshold. Striker's done for the day. Honestly, if this good boy never finds another lost human thing in his life, I won't care. I explain the situation to my crew and a group decision is made to excavate the seam, betting that Michelle has been interred here over time by rockfall. I sit with striker on a sloped grassy shelf safely off to the side as the rest of my team goes to work. She showed us the lights last night, says Dave. This is going to be an amazing story to tell the family. Once a sizable section has been cleared of rockfall, Zach on hands and knees begins working his way up the seam, trailing the wet sediment, unearthing bits of rib bone, a partial right scapula, a fully intact right humerus, strands of blonde hair, and another fragment of temporal bone, this one from the left side of the skull. After each piece of evidence is documented with a photograph before it is packaged, I bring the find over to striker to sniff and verify with a sit. When he does Heather rewards him with a rockest game of tether ball tug, his rapturous barks bounced from wall to wall around the granite basin, then all is quiet. Near the top of the seam, Zach digs around with his trowel and finds what he thinks is a bit of string. What is it, I ask? Jeff, Dave, and Heather huddle around for a closer look. It's a part of a necklace or bracelet or something that says Jeff, Anya, precinct onto a safety line at Zach's side snaps a photo with her cell phone. Zach carefully coaxes the precious thing from the damp soil and drops it into Anya's open hand. Wow, ow, gas tether as everyone leans in. Ben, who's been monitoring our progress from a hospital bed in Denver while awaiting kidney stones surgery, texts a photo he took at a restaurant during a family vacation to California in June 2005. In it, Michelle poses with her oldest and youngest children, a grinning 16-year-old Michael, and a quizzical haily, a babe-turned toddler with a sippy cup. It's one of the last family photos she appears in before leaving to hike holy across. Michelle's happily leaning into her kids, beaming at her husband, and she's wearing that coral-beated necklace Ben bought her on the beach in St. Lucia. It's the same necklace that we're all staring at with wonder in awe that's in the palm of Anya's gloved hand. The next day, Ray, his wife Judy, Michelle's mom, Michael and his partner, now wife, Stephanie, are waiting for us outside the Holy Cross Ranger Station in mid-turn when we return from the field dirty, exhausted, and triumphant. As Anya arranges the evidence we've recovered on the open tailgate of a four-by-four rescue truck, Michelle's oldest son and both her parents gather around. Wearing night trial gloves, hair tied back with a necker chief and a long braid dangling over the shoulder of a tank top, Anya presents every find for Ray, Judy, Michael, and Stephanie to inspect, narrating the story that each bone tells. In other words, these bones we brought down from the mountain become a piece of a puzzle that even when partially assembled begin to reveal a picture of what likely happened on September 24th, 2005. And once a DNA match is made, they will finally definitively put Michelle to rest. After the show and tell has ended, we stand around in awkward silence. As an antidote, I let Striker out of the truck, and he bounds over to his new friends, barking, tail spinning, and begging for pets. Ray, grateful for the distraction, rubs my lab behind his ears and tells me how much Michelle loves dogs, Striker grunts, wanting this to never end. When we zoom later, I ask Ray when it was that he finally accepted that his daughter was never coming home. Surely I assumed it must have been when Tim Cochran suspended the search jelly 20 years ago, or maybe after her funeral. Ray ponders the question, I briefly wonder why he's not answering. Then I see that he can't. Through the ether, he's looking me dead in the eye, and he's weeping. It seems like forever before Ray speaks. But when he summons words, he says, I guess the day I met you, Ray composes himself, the grief rapidly draining to wherever it lives. He tells me that seeing everything my team had found laid out on the tailgate of the VMRG's pickup truck, all that was left of the vibrant human being who was his daughter, the mother of his grandchildren, was almost too sad to bear. But he says, "We also knew this was a very important moment for us." I ask him to elaborate. I call it a period on the end of a sentence, he says. From that point on, we could move forward to total acceptance of what transpired. Do we know what happened with her as to why she got to where she was? No. We'll never know that. But there are clues. The bones we collected are sent to the Human Identification Laboratory of Colorado in Fort Collins, then to Colorado Bureau of Investigation in Denver, a positive DNA match is made. In March, Ben and Hailey Vanneck meet with Sergeant Jeff Walts at the Eagle County Sheriff's Office. He usheres the father and daughter into a room where almost everything Zach, Erica, and my team collected off the mountain minus the bones has been prepared for them to inspect. Hailey was only interested in one thing, the necklace. She just wanted to see it to hold it in her own hand. I thought, wow, this was truly what my mom was wearing when it happened, recalls Hailey now 21, a senior at Lake Woods, Colorado Christian University who says she has no conscious memories of her mother. It definitely flooded me with emotion. I could feel the weight of it and I was just trying to comprehend it all. Ben and Hailey take home the necklace and the thumb drive loaded with digital images Sergeant Walts was able to extract from the SD card in Michelle's camera. Before they leave, Sheriff James Van Beek, who cuts a classic Western Sheriff profile in Blue Jeans cowboy boots and tops out at 610 when he's wearing his stetson, escorts Ben and Hailey into his office. From a wall, the sheriff removes and arms outstretched sized topographic map of Mount of the Holy Cross, a master search map Tim Cochrane used to track personnel in the field in September and October 2005. His predecessor, Joe Hoye, had it framed and hung it facing his desk as a daily reminder that the search for Michelle, though suspended, was not over. When Van Beek was elected to the office in 2014, he left it in place. When he gives that frame map to Ben, it's a symbolic gesture that says, after 19 years, ECSO case number 2005-001969 is finally closed. It wasn't a burdens as Van Beek, but it was something that was always there to sit on and say, "Here's the task that needs to be done. There's something that has to be accomplished." The map now hangs in a condo, the family keeps in the mountains. The coral necklace, which Ben plans to have restored and made into necklaces for each of his daughters, is locked in a safe in Ben's office. And Michelle's ashes from the bones we recovered, they'll be scattered somewhere on the Mount of the Holy Cross. But Grant now 30 also has mixed some of it into ink and has a Columbine, Michelle's favorite flower tattooed on his left forearm with the coordinates of her final resting place on Holy Cross. All of the vanicmen have crosses tattooed on their left and her ankles. Ben had his done on their anniversary following Michelle's death, and more recently with ash-mixed ink, added a backdrop of the Holy Cross summit to his left ankle and the lat long of the Holy Cross recovery site to his other. When Michael turned 18 a year after his mother's death, he had her and his initials inked on his shoulder, Allie now 27 and Haley have love wrist tattoos in their mother's handwriting from a letter Michelle wrote to their father signed love always. In Ben's safe, there's also the thumb drive with images from the digital camera Michelle had zipped in her jacket pocket on the day she died. The final four include one portrait of Ryan smiling with an open pack of goo in his gloved hand near the top of the notch mountain switchbacks and three scenic shots, including a panorama of the snow-dusted Holy Cross summit Michelle took on the Northridge Trail. In the lower right corner of the frame, there's a cornice. Though he is not certain, Ben wonders if Michelle may have done exactly as Ryan instructed and contoured around the summit to their meetup point, stepped onto the cornice to look over the edge, broke through and fell to her death. Although many questions remain, the few answers the vanics have, however tenuous, serve as an antidote to the anguish of never knowing. But most people call closure, I call peace, Ben says. Now we know that's the place where she died, and that's where she was resting. Chapter 9 on the Halo Ridge On August 4th, after weeks of emails and voicemails went unanswered, I pressed the bell on the door cam at Ryan Johnson's home in a final attempt to give him a chance to verify or offer his version of the story. A moment later, the inner door opens, "I explain my business to Ryan, who tells me from the other side of the glass pane, voice breaking, eye is haunted. This is tragic, and all it does is stir up a lot of bad memories. I really can't talk about it. It's just a tragic thing." Seeking to find more answers for Ben and his family, a week later, I assembled one last team to make plans to hike the Halo route exactly as Ryan and Michelle did. A stickler for detail, I even decided to hike in out of the box boots, only minor solomans instead of cerels. In addition to me and striker, my crew includes four others. There's Erica German, a 36-year-old 13-year VMRG veteran and rafting guide and ski shot manager, who received the team's 2024 Mountain Goat Award for the five above Triland excursions she made on Holy Cross last summer in her quest to find Michelle. There's also Scott Beebe, a 66-year-old 14-year VMRG rescue-level member who has summited Holy Cross 15 times and leads summertime pilgrimages to the notch mountain overlook, has pastor of Vale's Mount of the Holy Cross Lutheran Church. To challenge our pace on the trail, Erica also invited her friend, Shea Small, a 28-year-old snowmobiling and rafting guide who summited Holy Cross via the standard route for the first time the previous weekend and was hungry for more birth. And I invited my 24-year-old daughter, Luca, a full-bright Germany English language teaching assistant who has summited 2014ers, Grayson Torres and who is training for the Chicago Marathon. On the morning of August 11, we park at the Half Moon campground at Justice Michelle and Ryan did arriving at 6.30am, taking the last two parking spots. Almost everybody who has planned a summit today already is on trail, most heading up the standard route up and over Half Moon pass. With timestamped images from Michelle's camera, Ben texted me on my phone, a timeline of Ryan and Michelle's hike photocopied from Colorado 14 or Disasters and GPS waypoints loaded in my garment, I lead my group up the Fall Creek Trail, departing as Ryan and Michelle did at 7am. Together we walk in Ryan and Michelle's bootsteps, following their route up notch mountain, then scrambling up and over three ever-taller talus mountains from Halo Ridge to Holy Cross Ridge. Ground truthing their journey to better understand what we think happened to Michelle on September 24th, 2005. I had no idea how perfectly I would manage to recreate the tortured physical conditions in state of mind that Michelle must have found herself in on that day. When we finally stand on the end of Holy Cross Ridge, at the place just below the mountain summit where Michelle separated from Ryan at 1.25pm, two decades ago, I'm feeling my age. I want nothing more than to just be done with this death march. Like Michelle, I had been moving without a break while struggling to catch up with faster and more agile hiking partners. As I also have my dog, I have burned through the six liters of water I have carried thus far. Yet I am still beyond thirsty because the merciless high altitude sun has been sucking moisture from my pores. I am so tired I could fall asleep on the trail hammered balls of my feet that hurt much more than they should because they've been breaking in stiff boots. On this mission, I will walk 48,000 steps, burn 3,600 calories and shed nearly 5 pounds. According to his GPS collar, striker also logged nearly 7,000 vertical feet of elevation gain and lost over 15.3 miles on the trail, doubling back to check on my whereabouts. As I was suffering on Halo Ridge, as encouragement, my daughter told me the route seemed more physically demanding than running a sub four hour marathon. Yes, the summit beckons, it's calling me over my right shoulder, but I literally cannot go there, getting to 14,000 in five feet would require moving another 405 vertical feet. Off in the distance, maybe a quarter mile away, I can see the pillowy white cornice where the North Ridge trail begins. It's along the same contour at 13,600 feet where I'm standing, going up, not an option. Turning back, no fucking way, but putting one boot in front of the other to get to that cornice. Now that I think I can do. Dr. Beebe, who is eight years my senior, looks as gassed as me. Like Ryan and Michelle, we agree to split our group. The women will proceed to the summit, snap a selfie, and stay for five minutes like Ryan did. While Scott and I, like Michelle, will hike across the talist slope. Then we'll meet up on the North Ridge Trail. Contouring, side-hilling over 30 degree loose rock takes us 25 minutes. The women descend from the summit to the start of the North Ridge Trail Cornice 20 minutes later. On September 24th, 2005, Michelle would have arrived here at around 1.50 pm. On my phone, I opened the digital image of the summit from Michelle's camera. It's timestamped 2.53 am on 9.205. One thing we've learned from this ground-truthing exercise. The clock on Michelle's camera appears to have been off by 13 hours. If we're correct, Michelle would have snapped that photo at 1.53 pm. Narako walks down the trail and stops at a uniquely shaped boulder that appears off to the side of the picture Michelle took. She pivots to face the summit and takes a photo with her cell phone camera. It exactly matches Michelle's photo on my phone. So now we know Michelle Vannack was standing at this very spot at 1.53 pm on September 24th, 2005. Six minutes after Ryan began his descent from the summit, according to the established timeline. I drop a waypoint on my GPS. We follow Erica further down the trail to a natural cut in the cornice and otherwise almost continuous band of snow clinging to the north ridge. From the waypoint where I'm standing, according to my GPS, far below us is another waypoint, the place where Erica and Zach found Michelle's hydration pack. Rather than fall through the cornice, it seems more likely that Michelle walked right through it. After contouring around the summit to the north ridge trail, just as Ryan told her to do, head towards that location, then just start on down the trail and I'll catch up with you. Michelle had 20 minutes to kill. So after standing around, shivering, sweat soaked in the cold late September wind, still following Ryan's instructions, Michelle continued down the trail and stopped where she saw this break in the cornice. Here, and we will never know why she did this, Michelle turned east towards Angelica Coulouar, left the trail and walked downhill past the cornice and through another gate-like opening in the rocks further below. Lower and lower, she continued until eventually she became clipped out, a perilous condition in high-consequence terrain where a hiker suddenly discovers that it's impossible to move either up or down. At an impest, she took one last photo on the afternoon of September 24th, 2005, at 2.13 pm. It's looking up a vertical rock seam. We know exactly where this is because the seam is clearly visible in the video and drone footage VMRG rescuers captured on September 19th, 2024 during an evidence search of the cliffs above the Vannac recovery site. Michelle probably called out for help, but at 2.13 pm, Ryan likely had already passed the gap in the cornice and was further down the Northridge trail, hoping he would catch up with her. He wouldn't hear anybody, Erica says, and nobody would hear her. It's just so odd, says Pastor Beebe standing besides Erica at the break in the cornice. He gazes down Angelica Coulouar at Lake Patricia where striker and I camped with VMRG's search and recovery team last October and wonders. Did the promise of that oasis compel Michelle in the dehydrated delirium of acute mountain sickness to leave the safety of the established trail and seek water? Everything else had gone just fine. It was scripted. Obviously, they were strong hikers, he says. After snapping that last photo, trapped down below, Michelle zipped the camera into her jacket pocket and made a desperate final move. She likely tried to traverse and fell to her death. From our interpretation of the camera's time stamps and the time it took my team to follow Michelle's boot steps, this is what we conclude. After separating, Ryan and Michelle probably missed each other on the Northridge trail by mere minutes, but that's all it takes. Thanks so much for listening to this week's long read on the outside podcast. For our podcast listeners, we have a special offer. For 25% off, head to outside.watch/listen to learn more. It's outside.watch/listen. Thanks so much.