The Search for a Vanished Hiker on the PCT

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The Southern California stretch of the PCT that sits between Warner Springs and the Anza Trailhead runs forty-one desolate miles between two rural highways, State Routes 79 and 74. Despite the long views of barren ridges, the meanderings through fields of strange boulders, and the occasional funky cactus, this isn’t the most scenic section, but it was a convenient place for a trail hopeful named Eric Trockman, who lived in nearby Temecula, to test out his equipment for three days before he began his PCT thru-hike for real. 

On February 20, 2015, four days after the contentious call between Chris and Min, Trockman hiked north from Warner Springs. Eighteen miles later, his calves feeling sore, he came across something “a little peculiar.” Another hiker’s stuff—a yellow and silver ground pad, a blue sleeping bag, a backpack, a tarp, and a pair of trekking poles—was lying next to the trail, as if the owner might return at any moment. Trockman assumed the hiker must be out looking for water or going to the bathroom or trying to find cell service. But, in case there was more to it than that, he snapped a picture of the gear with his phone. The photo recorded the time and date of this fateful encounter: February 20, 2015, at 2:15 p.m. 

After he got home, Trockman logged online and clicked his way to PCT Class of 2015, a Facebook group of about three thousand members that consisted of that year’s thru-hikers (and their fans). Trockman had posted a handful of tips in the past (even advising fellow hikers that “Loose stuff in the pack is annoying, get more Ziplocs/stuff sacks”), but he learned as much from the group as he shared with them. On the twenty-fifth, however, Trockman read an unsettling post that reminded him of the abandoned gear he’d seen a few days earlier. A 2015 PCT hiker had gone missing. The lost man was twenty-eight, the same age as Trockman, and he’d disappeared from the same section Eric had hiked—except Chris Sylvia had walked it in the opposite direction. Trockman shared his photo of the abandoned gear in the Facebook thread and provided his name and phone number to search and rescue, but no one interviewed him about what he’d seen until I called two years later. 

When I first spoke to Trockman over the phone, he told me he felt guilty about this. Perhaps he should have made more of a fuss when he first saw Chris Sylvia’s belongings. 

“Hikers find weird stuff all the time!” I reassured him. “You took a picture. That’s more than I might have done, and I’m a former law enforcement officer.”

A few weeks before I called Trockman, I came across a Reddit post published in February 2017 by Chris Sylvia’s oldest sibling. Still haunted by the TV series episode on Sylvia that never aired, I’d kept tabs on the case and was saddened to see that little progress— if any—had been made in finding the lost hiker. “This month my brother will have been missing for two years” is how Joshua Sylvia introduced a thread he had created on the second anniversary of his brother’s disappearance. In an attempt to stir up interest in the case, Joshua made himself available to answer any questions a would-be sleuth might have. “Hopefully the chance of him being a John Doe isn’t too high. I was able to track down his dental records. And DNA was taken from our mom.”

I winced. That’s so heartbreaking. Then, as I scrolled through the entire thread, I came across this comment: 

“I was contacted not long ago about a pilot that is being put together for A&E about missing hikers,” Sylvia’s brother informed the Redditors. “If all goes according to plan, my mother and I should be getting flown to California this summer.” 

Reading this stirred something in me. Joshua had misplaced his hope for resolution on Hollywood attention, but because I’d been involved in the project’s early development, I knew the television producers had since moved on. I surmised that no one had informed the family of this outcome, so a few days later, I contacted Joshua to let him know the show wasn’t happening. Then I called his mother, Nancy Warman, who thanked me for taking an interest in her son’s disappearance, and I made that promise to get her some answers.

Six weeks later, on November 6, 2017, I was at the Paradise Valley Café near Anza, California, waiting for Eric Trockman to join me for breakfast. He arrived looking every bit the part of a veteran PCT thru-hiker—wearing modern khaki attire, a neatly trimmed beard, and an agreeable disposition. After a brief greeting, I cut to the chase (“I want to know more about the gear!”) and shoved my coffee out of the way so I could spread out a topographical map on the table between us. Then I pointed to the Anza Trailhead on State Route 74, one mile east of us. From there, I moved my finger southbound along a dashed line representing the PCT. When I hit Chihuahua Valley Road, I stopped. “Is this where you found it?” 

“Yes,” Trockman confirmed. “About a four-minute walk south of that road.” 

After I finished my brandied French toast, we left the Paradise Valley Café and headed to the spot where Trockman last saw Chris Sylvia’s gear. Once we were in the vicinity, we consulted a color copy of the photo he’d taken that I’d printed out and brought along until we located a unique rock verifying the exact location. Across the trail, I noticed a small cross constructed from reclaimed wood and rusty nails. The unnamed rustic memorial had since collapsed. I picked it up and hammered it back into the ground with a stone. 

Our experience as thru-hikers led Trockman and me to the same conclusion. The Sylvia gear site was not a camping spot. With its lack of shade, rocky surface, and awkward angle, it wasn’t even a tempting location for a long break. What the site did offer, however, was an advantageous view of Chihuahua Valley Road. You could watch a vehicle coming from a mile or more away and have time to trot back to the trail before the car passed. Even so, this hitchhiking method would test one’s patience. We only saw one other car on that road the entire time we were there. 

We climbed a hill behind the gear site to check for cell service. To our east, the Anza-Borrego Desert stretched out below the PCT, which meandered high above ridges covered with shrubs typical of California chaparral, a semiarid landscape of chamise and manzanita that grow thick and scratchy but rarely higher than your head. At the top, we could see for miles in every direction. The PCT was identifiable as was Chihuahua Valley Road and other landmarks. 

Unable to find cell service, we reconnected with the trail and hiked south. A five-minute walk from the gear site brought us to a handmade sign welcoming hikers to a hostel known as Mike’s Place. Years ago, Mike Herrera bought a patch of land on an isolated ridge east of the PCT and built himself a man-cave getaway. A big fan of the trail and its hikers, Herrera invited the travelers to fill up their canteens from a water tank on his property. He also encouraged them to camp on his homesite. This act of charity had earned Mike the title of “trail angel”—a generous person who supports a thru-hiker’s journey in various ways, such as by giving them free rides, food, or lodging. Up to a hundred backpackers visited his hostel each day during peak hiking season. To handle the demand, Herrera had hired caretakers to live at his compound. His hospitality was genuine, but his hostel had a mixed reputation, causing some to avoid it. As one hiker told me, “I don’t stop at Mike’s; it’s too much of a party atmosphere.” 

At the sign, we turned off the PCT and continued to the compound past the metal water tank. Red plastic cups in the bushes hinted at the vibe—part desert rat, part rowdy frat house. On the back patio of the ranch-style home, the caretaker, a guy in his thirties with a shaved head and a bushy goatee, catered to three young women thru-hiking south. When Eric and I joined them, the caretaker greeted us. “What brings the two of you here?” 

It was apparent by our gear—or lack thereof—that we weren’t thru-hiking. 

“I’m looking into the case of the young man who went missing from the trail near here,” I answered. “Do you know anything about it?” 

“And what do you know about it?” The caretaker’s hostility made me flinch. 

“I’m working with the family, and I know his gear was found less than a ten-minute walk from here . . .” 

“He didn’t make it here.” 

The abrupt certainty of this statement made me apprehensive. To soften the tension, I introduced myself and mentioned Chris Sylvia’s family would be grateful for any help he could provide. The caretaker identified himself as Josh McCoy. When I asked to see the 2015 trail register (a logbook in which hikers write the dates they passed through a particular site), McCoy got up from his plastic chair, pulled a dusty composition notebook from an outdoor shelf, and handed it to me. 

“This register begins in April,” I said, flipping through the pages. “I need to see the one from February and March.” 

“Are any pages torn out of it?” Again, McCoy’s tone seemed to be accusing me of something.

Damn, this guy is as suspicious of me as I am of him. “No, it’s intact. There must be an earlier one.” 

McCoy denied there were any more trail registers for 2015. 

I doubted this, but prying information out of McCoy was like shucking oysters with a nail file. Everything came out in sharp bits. Apparently, Chris’s toiletries had not been in the pack. Mountain lions had been heard howling right around the same time he’d disappeared. Search and Rescue had based their operations at Mike’s Place. The scent dogs had searched everywhere. McCoy himself had checked every nook and cranny, but the only thing he’d found was a blue denim jacket with a fake wool liner. 

I made note of his description of the jacket, but I believed McCoy had more info to give. “You must know this area better than anyone,” I said. “Do you have a theory?” 

“Hmm…” Obviously, a scenario came to mind, but before he could utter it, McCoy pressed his lips together, effectively clamping his mouth shut. With body language so startlingly closed off, this guy seemed increasingly dubious. 

At that same moment, some new visitors arrived, and McCoy left us alone on the porch to greet them. While Trockman distracted the female thru-hikers with small talk, I walked over to where McCoy had retrieved the trail register, pulled out all the notebooks, and scanned the dates. I knew it! There was a register with entries dated in late February and early March 2015. I snapped pictures of those pages with my cell phone and quietly returned the notebooks to the shelf. 

We left soon after. 

On the drive back to Trockman’s car, I asked him what he thought about my exchange with the caretaker. 

I’d been too direct in my questioning, he said, “but that guy was definitely hiding something.” 

Back at my rental cabin in Warner Springs, I mulled over the day’s events. Perhaps McCoy had sensed the authoritative park ranger that would forever be a part of me. That’s what the encounter with him had felt like—all those times I’d stood in front of some sketchy-looking dude who would rather chew nails than talk to a woman in uniform. But on the trail, perhaps more than anywhere, appearances can be deceiving. 

There’s a term seasoned trail experts use—“hiker trash”—that refers to how the uninitiated often confuse weather-beaten, disheveled, skinny-as-a-rail thru-hikers with more worrisome types like ne’er-do-wells, escaped convicts, and meth addicts. It’s a taxonomic challenge, not unlike separating a poisonous mushroom from a batch of edible ones, but as experienced hikers will tell you, tiny details can help you distinguish friend from foe on the trail. Here’s a hint: pay close attention to the things they carry. 

Needing an unbiased sounding board for my theories, I called my husband, a former Secret Service agent who was now a Special Agent in Charge for the United States Forest Service. I’d met Kent Delbon in 1993, back when we were both law enforcement rangers at Yosemite. Working together had stoked our early romance, but Kent was now holed up at our Denver apartment while I was out alone in the backiest-backwoods of Southern California. Always the more sensible one, Kent reminded me there was no cell service at Mike’s Place. “Returning to a remote locale to interrogate a potential suspect without backup could be dangerous,” he warned. 

“Like Clarice Starling down-in-the-basement dangerous?” I joked. 

“Exactly.” 

But my husband knew better than to talk me out of going back. I had promised Chris’s mother I’d get her some answers, and I couldn’t stand not knowing what made McCoy clam up. 

I sighed. “On this case, I need to think less like a cop and more like a hiker.” 

The next morning, I stopped at a local grocery store on the way to Mike’s Place, where I purchased a case of beer, some Red Bull, Oreo cookies, a huge jar of peanuts, and a bottle of Jack Daniels.

It was ten thirty a.m. when I arrived at the remote outpost and knocked on the back door. Twice. No answer. I peered through a dirty window and detected no movement within the shadowy interior, so I poked around the compound instead. About fifty yards from the house sat an ancient wood shack and two dilapidated RVs only a cold, wet thru-hiker or the Unabomber wouldn’t mind calling home. I explored the campers looking for clues, or some flash of insight, and found none. I walked around to the front of the main house. A wisp of smoke rose from a metal pipe on the roof. Someone was inside. As I stepped onto the porch, I spotted a dark figure moving on the other side of the screen door. 

“Josh?” I called out. “It’s Andrea, from yesterday. I brought some trail magic [free food] for the hikers.” 

“Hi, come on in.” McCoy pushed the door open with one hand. In the other, he held a steaming beverage. “Have a seat.” 

For a man cave in the desert, McCoy’s living space was cozy. Stuffing emerged from the arms of thrift store furniture positioned to face a window with a pleasing view of the chamise-studded ridgeline between Mike’s Place and the PCT. I sat down while my host threw a stick on a tiny fire burning inside a wood stove. 

“Can I make you a cup of tea?” he asked. 

“Sure. Hey, I’m sorry for bugging you, but I have a few more questions.” 

McCoy looked me in the eye. “I want to help,” he started, apologizing for yesterday. “I want the family to have closure, but I was worried our conversation would scare the lady hikers.” 

“No problem,” I said, softening. “I’m sorry, too. I should have picked a better time for us to talk.” 

McCoy’s little fire warmed the fall chill, and his manner toward me felt much more like that of a gracious host. In a sweet way. Not in an overly-charming-because-I’ve-got-to-win-you-over way. I felt completely safe and completely foolish for being suspicious of him. McCoy had a prickly side and, as I later learned, a deep-seated distrust of authority. But I now understood why many thru-hikers enjoyed this cluttered retreat managed by trail angels in the rough. 

Once the mood had eased a bit, I laid out on McCoy’s coffee table a trail map, some photographs, and my notebook. I then showed him a picture on my phone that I’d pulled off Chris Sylvia’s Facebook page. In it, Chris wore a brown fleece hoodie with fake wool lining. Was this the coat McCoy found at the bottom of a dry waterfall? 

“Nope, it was definitely a blue denim jacket.” 

Remembering our tense encounter the day before, I pressed McCoy to tell me why he was so certain Chris hadn’t stopped at Mike’s Place. He admitted that he couldn’t have known for sure if Chris visited in February 2015 because he didn’t start work at Mike’s until months later. 

Next, we talked theories. Maybe Chris walked off the trail despondent over his breakup with Elizabeth Henle. Or he skipped town and flew to Costa Rica. Perhaps, while looking for water or a cell signal, he got lost and fell or died of exposure—or, because his toiletries were rumored not to have been found in his pack, a mountain lion attacked him while he was relieving himself. Hey, maybe he joined a cult. Yeah, right. We both laughed at that idea. 

Then McCoy offered another idea, one so real and scary it had made him clamp his lips shut yesterday to avoid frightening the lady hikers. Now that it was only the two of us, McCoy confided in me. The sunny skies and isolation along this section of the PCT had attracted a specific category of entrepreneur: guys who grew illicit crops and had business practices that often turned violent. 

I assured McCoy I’d look into it. 

McCoy welcomed me to stay at Mike’s Place for as long as I liked, but I was eager to search some before it got dark. McCoy unloaded my bribe—trail magic—from my rental Jeep. “The hikers are going to love this.” He smiled, eyeing the beer. 

Back at the Sylvia gear site, I studied a ridge to the south—an enticement for further exploration. But once I stepped off trail to ascend the rocky slope, the thick brush fought back. I’ve endured enough cross-country travel through a variety of landscapes, vegetation, and weather conditions to have a sense of scale on the matter. Walking uphill through the scrub to peek under dozens of granite boulders ranked seven out of ten in terms of painful aggravation. What kind of person would spend more than fifteen minutes pushing through the brittle chamise and eye-poking shrubs to reach the top of this ridge? An escaped fugitive trying to avoid cops and hounds? Possibly. A suicidal person looking for a cliff? I doubted it. A bored young man wanting to pass time while waiting for a ride? No way. Pushing through the brush on these ridges was so horrendous I concluded that neither mountain lion nor maniac could drag a hiker’s body ten yards through this crap without leaving behind a boatload of evidence. 

I punished myself for over an hour before deciding to search elsewhere. I drove down and parked where a drainage hit the road. A mile walk up the dry creek brought me underneath the trail where Eric Trockman had spotted Chris’s gear. Drainages have a way of collecting our debris, but this one was nearly pristine. I saw no sign of human existence, other than a few rusty parts from an ancient power line and a shiny Mylar balloon that had floated in from who knows where. 

That evening, I returned to my one-room rental cabin in Warner Springs, poured myself a glass of California red purchased at the only store in town—a local quick mart/gas station—and opened my laptop.

Part of my process in attempting to track down Chris Sylvia was to study similar cases to try to find patterns and overlaps. The circumstances behind Louise Teagarden’s disappearance in the late 1950s and the delayed recovery of her remains seemed relevant because she also went missing from the PCT corridor, approximately ten trail miles north from where Chris began his hike. Although it took thirty years for hikers to stumble upon her body, I imagined I’d do a quicker job of finding Chris. During my time with the NPS, I had taken part in a variety of search operations—searches for lost hikers, downed aircraft, flash flood victims, swimmers who went underwater, homicidal fugitives from justice, and suicidal subjects. Some of these people were located days, weeks, or months after they disappeared. A few were found by accident. But every case I worked was eventually resolved. As a professional searcher, I was taught to view a missing hiker case as a “Classic Mystery” in which we must look for clues as earnestly as we search for our subject, because people do not disappear into thin air. Something is left behind—we sometimes just have to work harder to find it. 

Or so I believed. 

In Managing the Lost Person Incident, a reference text for search professionals published by the National Association for Search and Rescue (NASAR), a lost person is defined as “a known individual in an unknown location, whose safety may be threatened.” Typically, at the beginning of a search, a missing person’s identity is known, but their personality and habits might not be. That’s why, in a wellmanaged search effort, someone is assigned the role of “investigator” and the search investigator’s first duty is to interview friends, relatives, and peers of the lost person. 

While gathering information for a “subject profile,” the investigator develops a deeper understanding of the missing individual and, at least in theory, this helps us predict their behavior so that we can best determine where to search for them. While researching other missing hiker cases for clues that might help me find Chris, two disappearances grabbed my attention: Kris Fowler and David O’Sullivan, the other men who had vanished from the PCT shortly after Chris. As I dove into the reports of their last known whereabouts, the mysterious circumstances surrounding their cases took hold of me. 

It was nearly midnight by the time I closed my laptop and slid into the warm bed inside my Warner Springs cabin. Above me the blades of a ceiling fan whooshed, spinning round and round like my thoughts as I ruminated over all three of the PCT Missing. 

What on earth had they been doing? 

And what in the heck were they thinking before they went off everyone’s radar?

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Excerpted from TRAIL OF THE LOST: The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail by Andrea Lankford. Copyright © 2023. Available from Hachette Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc. 

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