Unsolved Disappearances in National Parks 

Glen and Bessie Hyde were newlyweds attempting to set a record on a rafting trip in a homemade boat down the many rapids of the Grand Canyon in 1928—which would have made Bessie the first woman recorded to have made the run.

A month after they were last seen, their boat was found intact, with all of their supplies still in it.

What happened to the couple themselves? Nobody knows, although popular theories suggest that Bessie may have slain her new husband and escaped to start a new life.

In particular, some believe that Georgie Clark, the first woman to ever own a commercial rafting business on the Grand Canyon, was actually Bessie Hyde—a suspicion that seems to have been supported when friends found documents relating to the Hydes in her home after her death in 1992, including a marriage certificate which identified her as Bessie DeRoss.

In 1983, a family was enjoying Yosemite National Park when one of the children made a grisly discovery: a severed forearm and hand.

Despite an extensive sweep of the area, no other remains were found until several years later, when a skull turned up across the road. Even then, identification would wait decades, until the Park Service used a DNA profile to identify the remains as belonging to Patricia Hicks.

Why had no one reported her missing for all that time? Perhaps because she had fallen into the orbit of Donald Eugene Gibson, a cult leader from Merced, California who disappeared in 1981 after he was charged with dosing teenage boys with LSD and having sex with them.

It would be easy—and tempting—to tie the fate of Patricia Hicks to the absent cult leader, but the two appear unrelated.

Instead, authorities believe that Hicks might have been a victim of the notorious serial killer Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to as many as 600 murders, many of which he probably didn’t actually commit.

Since Lucas died in prison before the remains of Patricia Hicks were even identified, we’ll probably never know what really happened to her.

Four German tourists, two of them young children, were visiting California’s Death Valley in 1996 when they vanished without a trace, leaving behind only a rented minivan and a lot of questions.

They disappeared in the middle of July, the hottest part of the year in one of the hottest places on Earth, where temperatures routinely climb above 120 degrees.

Months later, their minivan was found in a roadless part of the park. It was stuck in the sand and its doors were locked, but of its former inhabitants there was no sign.

A massive search was initiated, with as many as 250 people scouring the inhospitable environs of Death Valley, but aside from a single beer bottle almost two miles from the minivan, no trace of the tourists could be found.

More than a decade later, two search-and-rescue members found what were probably the bones of the adult tourists, some eight miles from the location of the abandoned van. While other bones were found nearby, it was impossible to determine whether or not they belonged to the two young children—and equally impossible to ascertain precisely what had happened to the four of them so many years ago.

Sheila Kearns had been hired as a seasonal employee at the Paradise Inn in Washington’s Mount Rainier National Park. According to friends and coworkers, she was excited about having been asked to stay through the winter—but that was the last time anyone saw her alive.

When Kearns didn’t show up for work, her employer became concerned. Her belongings had already been moved into the inn’s employee housing unit, but Kearns herself was nowhere to be found.

A search began, but winters in the mountains can be harsh, and snow curtailed the search before any trace of Kearns could be found.

It wasn’t until the following spring that bones were discovered scattered across a 300-yard area at a campground about a mile from the inn.

What happened to Sheila Kearns in the time in-between? To this day, we still don’t have any leads.

“Do not go back there. If you find that cave entrance, don’t go in, you won’t get out.”

That was an ominous comment left on a video posted by veteran hiker Kenny Veach in 2014. Earlier, Veach had made a post claiming to have found a “hidden cave” while hiking near Nellis Air Force Base.

“The entrance to the cave was shaped like a perfect capital M,” Veach wrote. “I always enter every cave I find, but as I began to enter this particular cave, my whole body began to vibrate. The closer I got to the cave entrance, the worse the vibrating became. Suddenly I became very scared and high-tailed it out of there.”

Despite that one ominous warning, most internet commentors encouraged Veach to try to find the cave a second time. He made at least one trip out in search of what became known as “M Cave,” recording part of the excursion and posting the video online, but he came back empty-handed.

On a subsequent trip, Kenny Veach disappeared—and was never seen again. His cell phone was found near a vertical mine shaft, but Veach himself was gone.

What became of him? No one knows, though a woman claiming to be his girlfriend later posted a response to his earlier M Cave videos, saying that she believed that he had gone into the desert to take his own life.

As for M Cave itself? It has never been found—if it ever existed at all.