That was the last time they spoke. On August 16, Adams emailed a doctor at Snohomish County EMS to ask how long a young, healthy person like Sam could survive on the berries that blanket the western Cascades in late summer. Below the steep north face of Vesper Peak, the edge of a glacier formed a moat at the base of the cliff, its bottom impossible to reach beneath the ice.
On August 23, Deputy Teske was sitting with Kevin when word came that the county was officially suspending its search. They both cried. Three weeks later, Kevin stood in the Sunrise Mine Trail parking lot, shoving food into an army-style tan backpack. He took off up the trail toward Vesper, leading Cheryl Phillips, a dog handler from South Carolina, and her search dog Raven.
They were among the outside experts Kevin hired using money from the GoFundMe. He tackled the elevation gain like it was a stroll down Second Avenue; his weeks of searching Vesper had whittled his already slim frame down whippet-thin.
It was around day 50 of the search; Kevin would ultimately spend over on this mountain. It even had an iron box stove inside. This unofficial search began as soon as SAR pulled out. His advice? Follow mountain man Bud Carr. Being proficient in anything is militant. With his dark pointed goatee and survivalist rhetoric, Carr rubbed many the wrong way.
Online, critics pulled up evidence of past felonies—he helped burgle a gun store before Y2K, he admits, but found Buddhism in his four years in Missouri prison. In videos posted to his own YouTube channel, he is combative and confident about his mountain experience.
To Kevin, Carr was a generous stranger turned close friend, willing to take the Louisiana tenderfoot through the rugged terrain around Vesper Peak. They called it Operation Relentless Pursuit. In the Belltown apartment, they hung maps and scrawled Sharpie notes directly on the wall. They wrote operating plans, considered moon phases and water sources. Kevin asked his father, the command chief warrant officer in the Louisiana National Guard, to run the mountain camp.
Online criticism reached a fever pitch. The U. Approvals quickly followed. Up at camp, just below the stone summit pyramid, the buzz of Facebook was distant. Leave no trace? Life had narrowed to a singular purpose, to comb a few square miles of earth for a trace.
Off the mountain, Kevin had become the tragic fiance who refused to give up…or maybe the subject of wild speculation. At least, he says, the man was looking. The elder Dares prepared hot meals of rice and meat and anything else on hand, calling it all jambalaya.
Kevin, who used to wear jeans day hiking with Sam, learned how to use an ice ax. Carr belayed him down ropes into steep ravines.
One day Kevin watched Clay Olsen, one of the core searchers, trip holding an ice ax, missing his own forehead by inches. Raven the search dog and her handler spent 39 days on the mountain, 17 of them in a row. They were rarely alone. Volunteers brought up snacks, so many grocery store fried chickens that the team joked about the tidal wave of drumsticks. Though Snohomish County had officially suspended its operation, Sergeant Adams came back up to snorkel Lake Elan in a thick dry suit.
In October the occasional snow flurries turned to regular snowfall , and temperatures continued their plunge. Finally, in mid-October, Kevin and Bud Carr made the decision to pack up their camp and come down the mountain.
Kevin made several more solo trips through November That was day He looks drained. The staff checks on him every 10 minutes, more motherly than waiterly. The Find Sam Sayers Facebook group had grown to five figures, with posters trading conflicting theories and rumors. Kevin shut down the Facebook group and others sprung up in its wake. In regular live videos, she implied that the Sayers family was undergoing its own investigation; the Dares family interpreted cryptic statements as accusations against Kevin and sent a cease and desist letter.
Psychics and shamans relayed visions. Everyone had a theory. One witness claimed she saw Sam playing a TV show on her phone while hiking that day, an episode of The Bachelorette. Hearing that, Kevin can only give a scornful laugh. He began a Facebook group called The Truth of the Sam Sayers Case where followers could swap theories; one made a timeline that runs more than pages. People made YouTube videos. There are giant Reddit threads.
Amateur sleuths followed the case like the podcast Serial or a season of True Detective. Kevin and Sam on a Mt. Ellinor hike in the Olympics about a month before she went missing. By early March, just after Mardi Gras and three years after he met Sam, Kevin has regained some of the weight he shed on Vesper, a mustard button-up brings color back to his face. He gave up two things for Lent: social media and alcohol.
Not drinking makes nights harder. You owe me He calls it the rabbit hole, one that can swallow you. Only a fraction of missing persons cases are truly without a trace, truly unsolved. Someone told Kevin 3 percent. Sergeant Adams thinks Sam is somewhere on that mountain, not far from where she was last seen.
He points to the moats off the north side of the peak, where the steep bottom of the cliff meets the glacier. The trail register may be the last tangible piece of Sam on Vesper Peak, the last one you can physically touch, but there was one more sign of her.
That sunny August Wednesday, a hiker stopped a few hundred feet below the top, right above the meadow where Kevin would one day erect his camp. The hiker turns his camera in a blurry panorama, catching blue sky over boulder fields, the sharp peaks that circle Lake Elan.
A big open space where it looks like you can see everything. As the camera trains on Vesper Peak, a figure ascends the scramble route, passing other climbers at a determined pace. Sam has a hiking pole in each hand, head down as she earns the last of the 4,foot climb.
The camera moves on, and Sam continues ever upward. Sam's mother, Lisa Yax Sayers, declined to be interviewed for this story. Her online videos imply that the family is currently pursuing their own investigation into her daughter's disappearance. Editor's Note: This article was updated April 30 to correct cellular satellites to cellular sites.
Shutterstock by Andrew Bertino S ometime in the morning of a bluebird August day, a Seattle woman picked up a pencil and wrote her name on the register at a trailhead off the Mountain Loop Highway. Sam Sayers on an earlier Vesper hike. Image: Courtesy Kevin Dares. Kevin Dares with Sam at a New Orleans wedding in Supply bags meant to be left on Vesper for Sam.
A map of search zones on Vesper Peak. Filed under. Features , Longreads , Hiking , Cascades , Mountaineering. Show Comments. On Aug. The family has hired a team of investigators that has asked Lisa Sayers not share anything about what, if anything, they have gleaned. We still believe she is alive. In a long post on Facebook , Dares thanked the 15 people who attended — some who flew in to remember their friend.
We will forever carry Samantha within us and through every step we take. The opinions expressed in reader comments are those of the author only and do not reflect the opinions of The Seattle Times. Show caption. By Nicole Brodeur. But Sayers, 28, never made it home to her Belltown apartment.
Nicole Brodeur: nbrodeur seattletimes. Most Read Local Stories Storm rips through Western Washington, killing two and leaving more than , without power in Seattle and beyond Two people dead after tree falls on their car near Issaquah in Sunday's storm Cargo ship on fire off Victoria, B.
0コメント