Trail Of The Lost
Andrea Lankford
Hachette
2023, 352p
Read via my local library
Blurb {from the publisher/Goodreads.com}: From a former law enforcement park ranger and investigator, this female-driven true crime adventure follows the author’s quest to find missing hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail by pairing up with an eclectic group of unlikely allies.
As a park ranger with the National Park Service’s law enforcement team, Andrea Lankford led search and rescue missions in some of the most beautiful (and dangerous) landscapes across America, from Yosemite to the Grand Canyon. But though she had the support of the agency, Andrea grew frustrated with the service’s bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, and left the force after twelve years. Two decades later, however, she stumbles across a mystery that pulls her right back where she left – three young men have vanished from the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile trek made famous by Cheryl Strayed’s Wild , and no one has been able to find them. It’s bugging the hell out of her.
Andrea’s concern soon leads her to a wild environment unlike any she’s ever ventured into – missing person Facebook groups. Andrea launches an investigation, joining forces with an eclectic team of amateurs who are determined to solve the cases: a mother of the missing, a retired pharmacy manager, and a mapmaker who monitors terrorist activity for the government. Together, they track the activities of kidnappers and murderers, investigate a cult, rescue a psychic in peril, cross paths with an unconventional scientist, and reunite an international fugitive with his family. Searching for the missing is a brutal psychological and physical test with the highest stakes, but eventually their hardships begin to bear strange fruits—ones that lead them to places and people they never saw coming.
I can’t remember where I first saw this. Maybe it was when it was nominated in the Goodreads Choice Awards. But I have read Wild by Cheryl Strayed and seen the movie. I’m kind of interesting in people who are long distance hikers even though I could never do that myself. I’m just not a hiking kind of girl. Short hikes? Yes, absolutely. But I need indoor plumbing, thank you. And knowing I’ll be returning to a real bed at the end of the day.
This is about the uglier side of long distance hiking, the dangerous side of the Pacific Crest Trail, a hiking trail that runs 2600ish miles through three states from the US southern border with Mexico, through California, Oregon and Washington to its northern border with Canada. This is about the people who set out on a hike, be it a thru-hike, where they hike the whole trail, or just a portion of it, and never return. This book specifically focuses on three people, all men, who have never been found. In some cases, there hasn’t even really been a trace of them – no gear, nothing. In the third instance, gear belonging to the missing man was found abandoned. But in all three cases there’s been very little to go on and extensive private searches as well as some professional searches as well, have turned up basically nothing. This book is written by a former park ranger who helped coordinate search and rescue as part of her role, although she left that job and retrained as a nurse. She is still ‘connected’ to hiking though and has herself, hiked the Appalachian trail, the US’ other great trail on the eastern side of the country that stretches through many states. She was struck by some of these cases and offered assistance in search efforts and ground research.
I am at the moment, watching a couple of people documenting their own hiking of the PCT, which has become common in recent years. Youtube is a platform that makes it very easy to create short videos and in one I’m watching a woman who was a “SOBO” (south-bound, starting at Canada and hiking down) hiker post the videos from her 2023 hike. In the other series I’m following a man who is a NOBO (you guess it – northbound) hiker who is basically uploading his videos in as close to real time as it gets, editing and uploading at various points on the trail. He started maybe a month or six weeks or so ago. The SOBO hiker started later, hiking out of Canada in the summer so that by the time she gets to colder weather, she’s hopefully well into southern California where it’s warmer. If you’re NOBO, you want to start in the cooler months because it’s obviously hot down along the Mexican border and be hitting the Canada border in summer. The PCT has become so popular in recent years that you need a permit to hike it in its entirety and the department responsible issues about 55 permits per day, staggering starts. You’re given your start date and I don’t believe it can be altered. The idea is to “take nothing but photos, leave nothing but footprints” but obviously, this is not always the case.
The three cases are all interesting in that there’s so little to go in so many ways. I know this is remote territory and that it’s easy to get lost and the like and there are examples of how people have gone missing and searches have come within like, 50-100m of them and not found them the first time. There are examples here of using drone and aerial photography to search from above, in rough terrain and when there is simply too large a search area to be practical and it’s a technology that does seem under utilised as a method and flying drones in National Parks is illegal in the US as well, which also doesn’t help. Another large problem with reporting people missing is that often, the police are uninterested and tend to regard hikers, be they casual or dedicated thru-hikers, in less than ideal ways, like itinerant people, assuming they are disappearing on purpose and aren’t interested in speaking to their families. And that does happen, but even when presented with evidence to the contrary about people, the pattern in this is that largely they were uninterested until research done by parents/family/dedicated volunteers turned up something or multiple things, police had missed. Jurisdiction is also often an issue, with the trail being so long, going through so many different counties and states etc. It’s very complex, which is why it seems, there is such a dedicated team of volunteers who turn up to help when people do go missing and aren’t found immediately. And so much of it is done by the family – one of the men who went missing, his stepmother has spent years searching, going through social media tips and possible sightings, working tirelessly to try and find him so that they might have closure.
This was so interesting but I won’t lie – it’s also very deflating. Time and time again there are hopes raised by a story that seems credible of a sighting somewhere only for it not to pan out. It’s time and effort and so many tears. It’s uncertainty because without a body, there’s still hope, even when it’s been years and that hope is futile, really. But it’s still there, because you don’t have the definitive to say otherwise. The not knowing must be awful. There are also parts in here where it’s quite obvious that grieving parents are being targeted by either charlatans or trolls – people who want to profit by telling them they can find their loved one via some new and improved sort of way or by people who want to tell them that whatever they’re doing is wrong. If you’re looking for them, you’re “smothering them” and you’re probably the reason they vanished in the first place or if you’re not and trying to wait and see, do you even care about them? As much as social media can be a very valuable tool in something like this, to get word out, organise searches etc, it can also be the opposite.
I found this fascinating. Not sure I’ll say I enjoyed it exactly because it’s quite grim subject matter. It raises a lot of issues not just about hiking but about people disappearing in general and how difficult it can be to get taken seriously by authorities and how when someone is hiking, it can be quite a while before people realise that someone is missing. This is probably less likely now, a lot of hikers wear GPS trackers but there are some that don’t want that sort of exposure. It means that the key window of searching is often missed significantly.
I did feel somewhat flat after finishing though. I can’t imagine how the loved ones must feel.
8/10
Book #103 of 2024
It’s a bit cheeky but I’m going to count this one towards my 2024 Nonfiction Reader Challenge, hosted by Shelleyrae @ Book’d Out. I’m going to use it for True Crime which….look, it is not strictly a fully true crime novel but it contains a lot of elements of true crime and a lot of investigation. It does showcase some criminal cases, where people on the PCT have been targeted. But I am twisting this a bit, to suit myself. This is book 4 (of 6) of my challenge.
Categories:
HistoryMemoir/BiographyTrue CrimeScience
Health
Food
Culture
Transportation
The Future
Pets
Architecture
Published in 2024
All The Books I Can Read 
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