Lost in the Wilderness Part 2: Hikers Found Dead
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Hey strangers, here's part two of Lost in the Wilderness: Hikers Found Dead, originally aired January 20th, 2022. Do you long for solitude and fresh air? Just you, the sky above, the trail ahead, and no one else around?

Welcome to Strange and Unexplained with me, Daisy Egan. I am a writer and an actor who has said it before and will say it again, thinks the wilderness is for the birds. Literally. And the bears and scorpions and snakes and tigers and other things that will kill you. Stay home. Your couch won't kill you. Not on purpose, anyway. Besides that, even without all the animals that want to eat you, there are countless unknown things out there.

Last week, we covered vanishing hikers. This week, two stories of people who went into the great unknown and died. And to this day, how they died is also a great unknown. About 15 years ago, my partner Kurt went camping alone at the Hidden Valley Campgrounds at Joshua Tree. In the middle of the night, he awoke to footsteps approaching his tent. He listened. It was definitely walking on two legs. It was definitely a person.

Kurt called out, hello? And the footsteps stopped. But after a few moments, they started up again, getting closer to his tent. Kurt called out again and again, the footsteps stopped and then started back up, getting closer. Kurt, naked as a jaybird, scrambled to get his boots on, grabbed his knife, unzipped his tent and ran out wielding his knife. In my version, his manhood flaps about as he jumps up and down, whooping and hollering, trying to sound intimidating.

There was no one there. Whoever it was who had been mere feet from Kurt's tent had somehow vanished without making a sound as they ran away into the desert night. The next day, as Kurt headed back to L.A., he stopped at a local gas station. Behind the counter, there was a missing person flyer. A hiker had gone missing a couple weeks prior while camping nearby.

This episode isn't about ghosts. I've just been looking for an excuse to tell that story for 40 episodes.

We Americans love hiking. It's the fourth most popular outdoor activity after running, fishing, and biking. In 2018, more than 47 million of us went hiking. With nearly 200,000 miles of hiking trails, there is no shortage of wild places to explore on foot in this giant country.

Studies show that regular hiking can reduce the risk of mental health problems. Unless you die doing it. Fortunately, the chances of dying while hiking are about 1 in more than 15,000, or around 160 people per year. So the odds are in your favor. The wilderness is a landscape of unknowns, though. Animals, obstacles, challenges to survive. Part of the reason we hike is to face these things. For that small group of people who don't return,

These things can lead to tragic ends. On Monday, August 16th of 2021, a family's nanny showed up for work to find the house empty. Ellen Chung, her husband Jonathan Garish, their one-year-old daughter Miju, and their dog Oski weren't home. The family's truck was gone, too. The nanny, whose name isn't mentioned in any of the media reports on this story, alerted a family friend...

The friend knew the family had gone out for a hike the day before, but they should have been back, certainly by that morning. No one had called the nanny to let her know they wouldn't be home. So around 11 p.m. that evening, the friend called in a missing persons report. The family had just recently moved into the house in Mariposa, California, near the trailhead at Heights Cove Trail.

They were big outdoorsy types, with social media accounts documenting all their adventures. And having a baby didn't stop them. Strapped into the baby carrier, little Miju was an explorer in the making, learning to love the outdoors from a very early age. A sheriff's deputy somehow knew this about the family. I guess Mariposa is a small town. So on a hunch, he drove out to the trailhead where the gates to the National Forest were closed.

Arriving just around 2 a.m., he found the family's truck parked right there at the trailhead. The search began immediately on foot, searching through the rest of the night and adding a helicopter at daybreak. Their first clue was a single shoe and paw prints that would likely match the kind of dog the family had. At 11 a.m. the morning of Tuesday, August 17th, Ellen, Jonathan, Baby Miju, and Oski the dog

were all found dead, right there on the trail, only about a mile and a half from their truck. Jonathan was sitting up against a rock, presumably, his daughter and dog beside him. Ellen was just a little farther up the trail. Police said it looked like they'd been returning to their truck when whatever happened to them happened.

The trail they were on was around eight miles of moderately difficult terrain, which sounds like a massive schlep to me, but for Ellen and Jonathan, I'm sure it was nothing. Ellen and Jonathan were experienced hikers. They had hiked the Himalayas and ridden camels in the Gobi Desert. They knew what they were doing. A witness said they saw them driving toward the trail around 7.45 on the morning of Sunday the 15th. But by a little over 24 hours later, the whole family was dead.

There were no signs of foul play, no stab wounds or bullet holes. Some speculated that maybe they were hit by lightning. And I was actually surprised to learn that lightning strikes don't always leave behind an outward trace on the human body. You can get struck by lightning and basically get your insides zapped, but your outsides will not be damaged. I guess I watched too many Warner Brothers cartoons growing up.

But according to the National Weather Service, it's really super rare to die from a lightning strike. On average, only about 43 people per year actually die from getting hit by lightning. So the chances that an entire family and their dog all died from a lightning strike are slim. This was an honest-to-God mystery.

How in the world did these perfectly healthy, rugged outdoorsy types and their dog, for crying out loud, perish a mile and a half away from the trailhead before the heat of the day really set in? Once it became clear that they weren't murdered or struck by lightning, investigators turned to toxicology tests to determine if the family had ingested something or possibly breathed something in that killed them.

I went to Utah about a year and a half ago with my family, and there were warning signs on the National Forest website about avoiding swimming in or drinking the water in the part of the state park we were visiting. There's algae that grows in fresh water that can be deadly, but mostly for animals. Adults don't usually die from toxic algae blooms, mostly because adults know better than to ingest disgusting scum water. And dogs are just big, doofy fluffballs who just want pets and food.

It's hard to imagine Ellen and Jonathan drinking any water they didn't bring with them. An article in the Daily Beast said their water bladder was empty when they were found, but an article in the San Francisco Chronicle said there was a small amount of water left, and that's what was sent in for analysis. There is a risk of being poisoned by these algae blooms just from breathing them in. There were no toxins in the water or in their bodies, the report said.

The toxicology results came back and the algae bloom theory was ruled out. After releasing the results of the autopsies in dribs and drabs, finally on October 21st, Mariposa County Sheriff Jeremy Breeze announced the official cause of death, hypothermia and probably dehydration.

I'm sorry, what? Two experienced hikers, their baby and their dog died from heat exposure and dehydration on an eight mile hike? There was at least a little water left in their water container. If you were dying of thirst, wouldn't you, I don't know, finish the water you brought with you? And wouldn't these experienced hikers have brought enough water to make it the whole way? Especially with a baby?

Unless they were stopping a lot along the way, which seems unlikely given how quickly it would have gotten too hot, they could have easily covered about three miles per hour. They started out around eight in the morning when it was under 80 degrees, and a lot of the parts of the trail they had done were mostly downhill or flat. So they should have gotten to the place where their bodies were found around 10 a.m., at which point it was 95 degrees, which is hot, but not like you're going to die in five minutes hot.

Even if they had been dragging their feet, by noon it was still under 100 degrees. And again, these two people would have known better than to drag their feet on a hike like this. Officials cited the temperature of the day the family went hiking as topping off at 107 degrees. Sure, at 3 p.m. Doesn't it seem far-fetched that they would have been six miles into an eight-mile hike seven hours after starting out?

Jonathan had his cell phone on him, but officials said service was spotty in the area. Spotty, sure, but when you become acutely aware that you might be dying of heat exhaustion, wouldn't you be desperately trying to find the spot where you can get a signal?

Officials claim they haven't been able to get into Jonathan's phone to see if there were any attempts made at calling for rescue. In fact, when Sheriff Breeze made the official announcement with their cause of death, he was very clear that it would be the final announcement, despite the fact that we still don't know what was on that cell phone. I don't know, strangers. Something doesn't sit right with me on this one.

The toxicology report also supposedly came back clean for anything that might have indicated some kind of gas leak from an abandoned mine shaft, but I don't know. If you were the government and citizens died on government land from something you should have known about and done something about, you probably wouldn't be too quick to announce that. I would imagine you might end up with a pretty nasty lawsuit on your hands.

After all, if someone trips on a cracked sidewalk in front of my hypothetical house, they can sue me. I'm not saying this could be a government cover-up, but I'm not not saying this could be a government cover-up. Incidentally, if I don't come back next week, it's definitely not not a government cover-up. Just a quick note before we jump into this next story. As you all know by now, I'm no mathematician, and...

Ahead, you'll hear me chalk up the numbers of years between 1999 and 2003 as a decade. That's not a decade. That's four years. Apologies. I don't know how that got in there. I got carried away, I suppose. It's very strange and unexplained. So if you're a regular listener of this podcast, you likely have watched Missing 411 and know all about little Jared Atadero.

Alan Atadero was a single dad with two kids, six-year-old Jocelyn and three-year-old Jared.

He co-owned Pugera River Resort in Colorado with his brother. From what I gather, the resort was, and still is, a tent, cabin, and RV spot with ample outdoor activities. Horseback riding, fishing and hunting, ATV riding, and of course, hiking. Now, this is not my idea of a resort. When I think of resort, I think of a day spa and food prepared by a gourmet chef. You know, fancy cookies in my hotel, that kind of thing.

But for the outdoorsy type, I guess resort means backbreaking labor and the elements followed by sleeping on the ground to each their own. On Saturday, October 2nd, 1999, Allen's children asked to tag along with a Christian singles group that Allen was a member of as they went to visit a fish hatchery.

Initially, Alan was like, "Ugh, I don't know," which is completely understandable. I'd also be reluctant to send my two itty-bitties anywhere with a group of Christian singles. Nothing against Christians or single people. This just seems like an odd babysitting opportunity. Anyway, Alan agreed to send his kids when the adults in charge promised they were just going to the hatchery and would be back after that.

However, despite this assurance, after the hatchery, 11 adults in the group decided to go on a hike and brought the two children with them. And this is an especially strange and unexplained detail of this story for several reasons. One, you fucking told this man you were taking his children to the fish hatchery and back.

That's what you should have done. Two, why didn't the kids go back with the people who didn't go on the hike? And three, this was an 11-mile hike. One way. 11 miles. That means it's more than 20 miles round trip. That's not a spur-of-the-moment day hike. Jared was three years old. Who takes a three-year-old on an 11-mile hike? I guarantee you not one of those singles carried the kid.

I mean, sure, these kids grew up in the area and were probably very outdoorsy, but still, 11 miles is about 10 and a half miles too many for any three-year-old. And 100%, you know, the six-year-old started complaining about 50 feet into the hike that her legs were breaking and she was gonna die if she had to walk another step. I know. I had a six-year-old once. For a whole year. The whole thing is a huge question mark.

Also, for some reason, the next part of the story is unclear, even though there were at least 11 witnesses, but it's believed the group split up into two, with one group hiking at a faster clip than the other. Despite the 11 witnesses, when two fishermen later reported seeing Jared on the trail along the river and speaking to him briefly, no one knew if Jared was between the two groups or out in front of the faster group.

you would think that at least one of the 11 adults in charge of the toddler would have been at least vigilant enough to know where the toddler was. You are not allowed to take someone's child on an unplanned 11-mile hike and then just sort of not know where the kid is. Come on. Now look, most likely the group wasn't planning on hiking the entire 11 miles there and back because that would have been, as stated earlier, completely insane...

But again, it doesn't seem like any of the adults in the group were able to articulate after the fact what the plan was. I'm sorry, but were these people high? Was there a halfway point where they were planning on turning around? The fishermen, who are believed to be the last people to see him, said Jared was walking up the trail. Alone. Shortly after this sighting, some people in the group, including Jared's older sister Jocelyn, said they heard a scream. Later, her father said...

I asked her, what kind of scream was it? Like somebody getting attacked or somebody playing with someone? She said it sounded like a playful scream, like somebody was going up to tag him. So the group realized Jared, the most vulnerable member of the group, the one that absolutely should not have even been there, was gone and had possibly screamed somewhere. Awesome.

They searched for Jared for an hour, and then, after an hour of searching, two members went back to tell Alan they'd lost his son. Nope. Sorry. You don't wait an hour to let a missing child's parent know their child is missing. With 11 fucking people in the group, you send one or two back with the six-year-old, who also should not have been there, immediately, and leave the others to search.

But an hour after Jared had possibly screamed out and was missing, two people went back to tell Alan, and here's how the conversation went. They said, you need to sit down. Something happened to Jared. I asked them, what happened to Jared? Thinking he fell down and got hurt. They said, he's okay. We just can't find him. Excuse me? He's okay? According to who, Bob?

Alan jumped in his truck and raced for the trailhead, screaming that they'd lost his baby, thumping his chest in self-reproach. Look, I once lost sight of my kid Monty at Coney Island when he was maybe two or three. I looked, and he wasn't there. All of my insides shriveled up, and my blood turned to ice, and my world was over. My brain was already trying to figure out how to live the rest of my life without him. And then...

There he was. A group of people passed, and he was just on the other side of them. He was missing for maybe 10 seconds, and my life had already ended. So the absolute panic and dread that Alan must have been dealing with, I'm sure felt life-ending.

Alan got to the trail and just started running up it, calling for Jared, but he quickly realized there was no way he would find his child by himself, so he ran back to the trailhead to alert authorities. Thankfully, his resort manager already had. According to a piece about this case in strangeoutdoors.com, here's what the search and rescue team had to contend with.

The Big South Trail is an 11-mile trail located at 8,440 feet in the rugged Comanche Peak Wilderness, Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest, eventually crossing into Rocky Mountain National Park. It is a 723,000 acreage or 1,131 square mile forest.

The highest point in the park is Gray's Peak at 14,278 feet and it has three other 14k peaks. There are also 12 other peaks over 13k feet in the forest.

The park has a reputation of extreme weather events due to the complex interactions of elevations, slopes, and exposure to different air masses converging in the park, with cold Arctic air coming down from the north meeting with warm, moist air from the Gulf of Mexico at the front range. This can lead to snow events measured in feet of snow at times. Rainfall is consistently between 2 inches in the winter months, peaking at about 4.5 inches in spring.

The terrain is similar to Rocky Mountain National Park. There are prairie dogs, antelope, deer, elk, bobcat, moose, squirrels, bighorn sheep, mountain goats, black bears, mountain lions, and pika, just to name a few in the area. So, this wasn't Central Park. You know what I mean? ♪

To make the search and rescue attempt even more complicated, on the first full day of the search, Sunday, October 3rd, a search helicopter carrying five people crashed into the side of the mountain. I remember saying to Jocelyn, look, there's the helicopter. They're going to find your brother. And we watched it fly over us. And crash into the mountainside. So much for that.

The five people on board survived, but sustained massive injuries, and of course, the media began to swarm the area. It just so happened that national media outlets were already in the area because the verdict in the three-year-old case of the death of JonBenet Ramsey was coming in at this time. So, once the helicopter crashed, word got out that there was a new, blitzy tragedy for the media to feed off of, and off they went, trampling into the woods, making things even harder for the search and rescue attempts.

On October 8th, less than a week after Jared disappeared, despite 200 searchers, a dozen dog teams, divers, professional trackers, and a search plane without a single clue being uncovered, the search was called off. Alan Atadera was understandably furious and despondent. He had become convinced his son was abducted. He felt the search had been a disaster. Later, he said...

It became a tornado, hurricane, biggest storm in all of our lives. I was critical of them at the time because when you were in a survival situation, you want everything that can be done to be done. And at times I thought there was so much more they could have done. Honestly, no matter what the search and rescue effort had been, as the parent of a missing toddler, I'm sure there could never have been enough to satisfy him. Short of finding his son alive, how could there be?

All 11 hikers and the two fishermen were held for questioning, but none of them were seen as suspects. And Alan had cause for feeling the investigation was weak. The helicopter that crashed into the mountainside? I'm no helicopter pilot, nor have I ever been in a helicopter because no thank you, but it seems to me the crash was preventable.

The helicopter crashed because it couldn't handle the conditions on the mountain, combined with the amount of fuel it took. I'm not the smartest lightbulb in the tackle box, but it seems to me those are variables that could have been foreseen. To make matters worse, according to the Larimer County Sheriff's Department, if the helicopter hadn't crashed, they likely would have found Jared that very day. Thanks, Sheriff. Not helpful now.

And I can hear you now, those of you who have never heard this story, how could they possibly know that if they called the search off after not finding Jared? Listen, take a deep breath and stop yelling at me. I'm about to tell you. On June 4th, 2003, a decade after Jared disappeared into the wilds of Colorado, two hikers hiking off trail about 500 vertical feet up the mountain at the Big South Trail found a toddler-sized white tennis shoe.

Then they found the other shoe, a brown fleece jacket, blue sweatpants turned inside out with one pant leg mostly missing, having almost likely been scavenged by birds for their nests. The next day, searchers found the rest of Jared's clothes scattered around a 25-foot area near campsite number two, which ran along the trail where Jared was last seen chatting with the fishermen, right before he disappeared. After another 11-day search, searchers found a molar and a skullcap.

DNA tests came back conclusive. The remains belonged to Jared Atadero, missing for 10 years. Back during the initial search, on-foot searchers wouldn't have been able to reach that elevation, though that begs the question, how did these two off-trail hikers reach it? And that, strangers, is what the helicopter would have been for. The helicopter search was taking place to search the areas inaccessible by foot.

though it's unclear why the search plane wouldn't have located him in the days following the helicopter crash. Anyway, given that so much of Jared's clothes were found within 25 feet of an official campsite, why wasn't that campsite searched at the time? And again, why would a campsite be so impossible for people to reach on foot? What is the point of a campsite if you can only reach it by helicopter?

In the six days of the initial search after Jared went missing, how did this entire campsite go unsearched? Despite these questions, Jared's official cause of death on his death certificate was listed as unknown probable mountain lion attack. But Jared's father, Alan, had some notes.

First and foremost, Jared's shoes, when they were found nearly 10 years after Jared's disappearance, were unnervingly clean. Alan said that Jared never tied his shoes, which I'm going to refrain from commenting on because this man has been through enough, and wonders how it's possible his shoes managed to stay on his feet if he was dragged 500 feet up a mountain.

His shoes wouldn't have been anywhere near his body. And two, if the shoes did manage to stay on his feet, let's say maybe one of the singles in charge of him had the forethought to tie his shoes, but then not monitor his movements, wouldn't they be scuffed and dirty? And had he been attacked by a mountain lion, wouldn't there be like one or two drops of blood on them, at least? Also, what mountain lion undresses its prey before eating it?

Allen brought his concerns and his son's clothes to some mountain lion experts who agreed. Given the lack of major damage to Jared's sweater around the neck and stomach, the two places mountain lions tend to go for in an attack, it doesn't seem likely he was attacked by a mountain lion. Even weirder, according to Allen, Jared's clothes, including his shoes, which he said looked pristine, didn't show the appropriate wear and tear of 10 years of exposure to the elements.

At the very least, one would assume a pair of white shoes would be pretty weather-worn after a decade lying out in mountain conditions. So, what does Alan think happened to his three-year-old son?

Well, according to his book Missing When the Sun, S-O-N, Sets, self-published in 2008 and again in 2015, Allen believes Jared was abducted by a park ranger who was possibly either an occultist or an operative for the government involved in a child's sex trafficking ring, taken to and murdered across the state in Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado, and then brought back to the area from which he was abducted.

He believes that the DNA results were fabricated, though why they would return Jared's remains and fabricate the DNA results, I don't know, and that Jared's clothes were initially found inside out, which he believes indicates a molestation, and then turned right side out and folded in time for the police photos to be taken. I mean, okay. Far be it from me to tell a grieving parent how to cope. If this theory somehow makes Alan feel comforted, go with it, I guess.

As for me, I don't know. It is hard to imagine a three-year-old climbing 500 feet on his own up a mountain. And it's hard to imagine how his shoes would have ended up there without some damage. And it's hard to imagine why his clothes weren't blood-soaked if a mountain lion got to him. And it's hard to understand how searchers missed an entire campsite near the last place Jared was seen. The whole thing is weird from start to finish.

The truth is these mysteries, like so many on Strange and Unexplained, may always remain that way. We may never know the truth about Jared or the Chung-Jerish family. Their deaths continue to be shrouded in confusion because going into the wilderness to be alone is by definition a mostly solitary endeavor. The only witnesses are the victims and whatever or whoever befell them.

The wilderness is home to wild things. And you, strangers, know that animals are not the only wild beasts out there. And sure, predators can get us anywhere, I guess, but I'm taking my chances on my couch. Next time on Strange and Unexplained, part one of one of our most popular two-part episodes, A Decade of Terror.

This episode was originally produced by Becca DiGregorio and Natalie Grillo, with research by Jess McKillop, editing by Eve Kerrigan, and sound engineering by Jennifer Swatek. Our voice actors for this episode were Luther Creek and Ryan Garcia.