I did my doctoral program in Southern California and visited a lot of the parks. Joshua Tree is one that, after my first visit, I didn’t visit alone or EVER in the summer, but it is beautiful to the point it would be tempting to do, even for “one last visit”. But it is a changing landscape of hills, canyons, riverbeds, caves, and alcoves large enough to hide a human from view. Solid canyon walls reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be loose agglomerations of huge rocks, hiding crevasses as large as living rooms. The National Park Service also warns that the landscape hides at least 120 abandoned mine shafts into which an unsuspecting hiker might stumble.
It’s easy to get lost even if you step off trail a few yards for a call of nature. An animal trail that resembles a new branch of the path might divert downhill to a stream, for example, before winding onward through a series of ravines, ending at a dry wash — but by then an hour or more has gone by, and the path forward is now nowhere to be seen. Sometimes simply turning around can be impossible, as the route back is camouflaged by rocks or brush. The hiker is lost.
I’m not feeling any conspiracy in this one and the wife may simply have had money or health issues that called her home. I’m thinking he set out as planned, ended up off the trail and wandered out of the range of the search or into some place where he is injured or deceased and not visible. The body under stress can do amazing things. There are actually many examples in search and rescue of people in extreme conditions of dehydration and exposure both acting bizarrely and undertaking physical feats that would seem to be beyond them. For example, in 2014, an off-duty firefighter went missing in Los Padres National Forest after he ran away from his campsite to chase a lost dog. Despite being barefoot, clad only in shorts and a T-shirt, his body was found two weeks later 1,200 feet above the campsite in rugged cliff type terrain. Not only could anybody fathom why he climbed so high, it was hard to believe that it was physically possible clothed as he was.
I’m still hoping for closure on this for his family