Dozens of friends, family members and volunteers are scouring rugged mountains in southwestern Colorado for a trail runner who has been missing for six days.
Meanwhile, official search efforts have been called off for 28-year-old Ian O’Brien, a native of Roxbury, New York who most recently moved to Page, Arizona.
O’Brien’s parents and longtime girlfriend are among dozens camping out in the San Juan Mountains northwest of Durango as they continued their exhaustive search Friday.
O’Brien’s last known location was at the summit of Hesperus Mountain, a 13,200-foot peak nestled in the La Plata Mountains. An experienced backpacker and ultramarathoner, O’Brien ran up the mountain on June 24, summiting in the evening and firing off a selfie to his girlfriend.
Soon after that his cellphone and GPS tracker went dead, and he hasn’t been heard from since. The local sheriff says that not a single trace of him has been found.
The search
Crews began looking for O’Brien almost as soon as he went missing and threw every resource they had at the effort, Montezuma County Sheriff Steve Nowlin told USA TODAY on Thursday.
Efforts included drones, K-9s, all-terrain vehicles and multiple helicopters, including Air Force Black Hawks. That’s on top of dozens of boots on the ground searching Hesperus Mountain on every side.
“Nothing has been found. No evidence of anything,” Nowlin said. “We don’t know where he went after he was on the summit.”
An experienced trail runner who had been on the same route many times, O’Brien only had enough gear for a day trip: shorts, a tank top, his cellphone, a GPS device, and a daypack with snack bars, water, and his epilepsy medication.
It’s possible that O’Brien had an epileptic attack and became disoriented and confused, his family says, but Nowlin is still baffled about why crews haven’t found a single sign of where he went after summiting Hesperus.
“We know he was there, we know how he got there, but we don’t see anything, we can’t find anything,” Nowlin said. “We checked everything we could. Of course you can’t search every square foot but we came pretty close.”
With zero trace of O’Brien and limited resources, Nowlin said the official search was called off on Wednesday night. A few individual volunteers with local search-and-rescue agencies are continuing to help, but tools like helicopters and K-9s aren’t part of that.
What now?
Dozens of friends and family from across the country remain at the mountain, committed to staying until O’Brien is found, his sister, Kelsey O’Brien Rodriguez told USA TODAY.
Rodriguez said that “it is alarming and frustrating” that the official search was called off after four and a half days of looking, especially given her brother’s extensive experience in the outdoors.
As a professional guide with a lot of backcountry experience, Rodriguez said her brother has what it takes to survive in the wilderness, though he had no overnight gear with him.
The area has been getting into the upper 30s and lower 40s overnight.
“Ian grew up in the Catskills, he grew up on a dirt road in the country, surrounded by state land and acreage,” she said. “We grew up hunting, we grew up backpacking, hiking. He’s been a long-distance hiker since college.”
In addition to continuing their search, O’Brien’s family are running a website dedicated to helping spread the word about their efforts and have started a GoFundMe to help pay for the efforts to continue. It had raised more than $40,000 by Thursday night.
The family is asking anyone with extensive backpacking experience, search-and-rescue skills and knowledge of the area to help them look for O’Brien.
The missing
Though it’s infrequent, people do go missing without a trace in the mountains.
Last August in California’s Eastern Sierra, an experienced mountaineer named Quang Thân disappeared on a peak called Split Mountain. The 66-year-old had been hiking with two friends who lost sight of him for about 20 minutes while they summitted and he stayed behind; when they returned, he was gone.
After 10 days of a search that included helicopters, infrared, drones and K9 teams, the efforts were called off.
Thân has never been found.
Closer to where O’Brien went missing just last October, a 29-year-old trail runner named David Lunde went missing after a long run in the San Juan National Forest. An exhaustive search effort turned up no sign of him, and he has also not been found.
No matter the gear, no matter the experience, anybody can disappear in the wilderness, Dave Fox, a district ranger at Sequoia National Park who led the search efforts for Thân, told USA TODAY in September.
“We do not put handrails in our mountains,” Fox said. “It is wilderness, it can be treacherous. There’s no guaranteed level of safety and any person can go missing.”
Fox learned that in 1996, when one of his fellow rangers went missing while on a routine patrol. Fox joined in the two-week search for the ranger, a backcountry veteran named Randy Morgenson. Though the search is considered one of the most extensive in national park history, it turned up nothing and had to be called off.
No one knew what happened to Morgenson until five years later, when a trail worker found him in a stream drainage. It’s believed he fell to his death as he was attempting to cross the stream.
Hope
Friends and family are determined to find “our goofy, tall, hairy, loveable, talented, big-hearted cousin, son, brother, uncle, friend, teacher and grandson,” his cousin, Elizabeth Gleason said.
Rodriguez said her brother has “the biggest heart” and is “the funniest guy.”
“He’s everyone’s favorite,” she said.
He frequently travels with a rubber chicken that he uses in wilderness therapy to get people to laugh and open up. He’s always looking for a new adventure, whether solo, with his girlfriend or with friends.
He once rode a bike all the way from Page, Arizona 260 miles to Durango.
Lately, he and his girlfriend, Beth Henshaw, are always looking for an excuse to go exploring in their adventure van, which they named Trisha. They don’t punch timeclocks and are allergic to desk work.
“He’s slept under the stars more than he has in a bed,” Rodriguez said. “They’re funny, silly, genuine, honest people who are living their lives the way that they imagined.”
