As someone who suffered a 20 ft fall causing a major compound fracture to leg and knee, I can say that you immediately become completely immobilized and can go into shock becoming unconscious fairly quickly. You lose blood internally at the site of the fracture so much so that your skin will actually blister and split to relieve the pressure. All can happen easily before you even begin experience the debilitating pain making it extremely difficult to focus on anything else. Thankfully I was on a job site and had help immediately. It's nothing like the movies where you can just crawl off or stumble away. Although every injury is different having its own complexity, If I had been out in the wilderness alone I believe I most certainly would have succumbed to my injury in a short period of time to to shock and blood loss.
I absolutely agree, I broke my leg really bad, open compund tib/fib, playing basketball, if that would've happened out in the wilderness alone I would've been absolutely screwed.
@@tylerdavis3 Thanks for your reply and good luck with your recovery. Stay active for best results. That's been the biggest challenge for me is trying do doing the things I used to do now with a bum leg. But I'm grateful as it could have been a lot worse.
@@leahwilton785 Thanks for your reply. Doing well considering the extent of my injuries. Although somewhat limited on my left leg, I'm grateful to have achieved results above what would be expected in recovery. Best wishes to you and yours.
I think every person and situation is different. I fell what was told to me to be about 30 yards and broke my wrist, had compression fractures in 3 vertebrae, and had a open compound fracture of my tibia. I hit the ground passed out for some time then managed to crawl 150 ft over train tracks, up a small hill and through a small creek until I reached a road and was able to find someone to call for help. The left side of my body was basically useless since both my leg and wrist were broken. I felt no pain until I knew the ambulance was on its way. I remember feeling the bone that was sticking out of my leg getting caught on rocks and vegatation while I was clawing my way up the hill with one side of my body and feeling a weird sensation in my wrist but absolutely no pain. The human will to survive is something most people never experience but it is really powerful.
Imagine being one of the people who are considered missing yet have actually started a new life of some sorts and finding videos theorizing on what actually happened to you.
People really overestimate people's ability to call for help. When i had my bike accident (with a pretty nasty concussion, head injury, and shock), my first thought was to get off the road to safety. Then i was just feeling so overwhelmed by the fact my hands were covered in blood, and it was falling into my eye. Im really proud that i was able to pull my phone out and unlock it, but in that state i wasnt able to form a coherent sentence so i was lucky enough to be able to hand it off to a bystander who was helping me. But when you have had a severe injury, especially a brain injury, you are going to just follow your first instinct. Im very glad I learned that i immediately seek safety and ask for help, but i dont think everyone would go there in that state.
A few years ago I was very sick and I stood up to go to the bathroom and I passed out and hit my head on the sink. I remember waking up, I remember touching my head and seeing it covered in blood in the mirror, and I remember thinking that I should get my mother because she will know what to do, and I vaguely remember walking out the front door of the motel we were living in. What I don't remember is walking over a mile from our motel to Pogeys, the restaurant she worked at or sitting down on her cars hood and falling asleep. When I fell I shattered my suparoribtal ridge and gave myself a massive concussion on my frontal lobe, the doctors Saud UT looked like a spidersweb
If you look at the topographical layer of the area, I think he probably took a right and kept following the creek towards Bald Mountain instead of to the lodge. He then kept going thinking he was going to eventually find the cabin, but instead became disoriented from the cold. If he fell and hit his head, but kept trying to walk in the direction he thought would take him out of the woods, he could have quickly begun to have hypothermia. At some point on the Bald Mountain ridge, he could have fallen a final time and basically slalomed all the way to where his body was found, below Boot Falls. Hitting trees or rocks on the way down would explain a lot of the other injuries. So here's the thing about "well prepared" and "experienced outdoorsmen" and "physically fit" people. No matter how prepared a person is, with a severe head injury, or hypothermia, or unconsciousness, no amount of experience or preparedness will do any good. There is a point where all of that is moot, and the person who forgets that nature will always get the best of them is bound to be eventually gotten the best of. His first mistake was going off alone, which is a pretty standard no-no. There was nothing supernatural about this, just egotistical behavior and an over-reliance on his abilities. Sad for his family.
I totally agree with the last point. People often use the "they knew what they were doing" thing to rule out human error but humans aren't robots. We make mistakes, even when we are well trained. And there are many known instances of people otherwise in their right minds hallucinating in dire circumstances. I don't think it's always reasonable to assume these missing people were acting logically at the time.
Also, the people who know more can sometimes get themselves in worse trouble. They think they know what they are doing and that they will be fine because they have the knowledge. Sometimes being good at something makes you more likely to hurt yourself, because you have the confidence of experience. But that confidence is not always well placed. We can often think we are better at something than we really are.
I lived in that area for a few years. Very odd things happen deep in the woods. I was snowmobiling in the mountains one time, had to hike a few miles to a summit, and when I returned to my snowmobile later, items had been moved to different locations but there were no animal or human tracks in the snow. It was creepy. I was miles away from anything with zero cell service (did have a beacon though.) Have heard many similar stories of the area.
Great content man! My only suggestion is you should include more visual aids for the subjects you are discussing, like a map, or maybe even a google earth view.
Agreed. I get lost with all the info and no visuals. A map with the trail, body/possessions found, photo o the person would help clarify all the info into a more cohesive and memorable tale.
Colorado resident here! You can feel the eyes on you when you’re in the woods. I always make sure to be gracious and say thank you for save passage in the woods when they go dead silent.
Did he have he’s split board with him? If yes, it opens a realm of possibilities. As a snowboarder myself I can tell how tempting it is to ride wild unknown places fast and how dangerous it can be. Split board is not carried in parts because it is easier that way, it splits in two so it can be used as skis to traverse flat terrain and even go uphill. Given some reports you used got this part wrong, they may not understand how snowboarding works. You can ride like 60mph down the slope, fail to notice there’s a drop in front of you, fly tens or hundreds of meters, land with severe but not fatal injuries, not notice them because of adrenaline rush and shock, walk or ride several miles in panic mode and only then realize how heavily injured you are. I’ve seen stuff like this happening, but I am afraid we will never know. Also board moving at speed leaves very few marks on deep snow.
@@SkyForceOne2 I feel like instead of going left up to hut, he accidentally went right and up (probably with skis on - hence no tracks). Then realised his mistake once up there and thought he'd board down to safety of the trail at the bottom. Had the fall and was immediately killed due to head trauma (let's not forget internal brain injuries from fall onto soft snow could be catastrophic- without leaving much external damage to helmet), or was severely injured and either unconscious or too delirious to call for help (bearing in mind the broken ribs - making it hard to breathe- and femur as well). ETA: boots and gloves torn off in fall and not found yet.
Theory: he got carried off by a thunderbird. Struggled to the point where he lost his shoes and dropped when he struggled out of his coat. They ought to check the trees for his shoes!
This is by far one of the strangest cases. In my mind the only explanation is that he was picked up by a tornado like micro burst wind phenomena and projected very high into the sky, which was followed by a long drop which killed him on impact.. This explains the no tracks, his injuries, no call for help, and how he could have been transported so far away. I've seen micro bursts in the woods and they can be very powerful and who knows what would happen if you got caught in one.
A microburst plucked a mature oak tree, estimated to weigh ten tons, out of the ground, and slammed it into another. I was looking out, could not open the door to call the guy mowing the lawn in. It was all in the blink of an eye. The guy was just feet away, and he was fine.
Dude takes off his helmet for a minute, a rock from above smacks him in the head, he puts the helmet back on and stumbles around in a daze from the hit. Winds up getting hypothermia and starting to undress before falling down a hill, eventually making his way via several falls to where he wound up and dies. Overthinking these kinds of stories really kills the idea of missing 411 (especially when mentions of cryptids and other supernatural things that have no evidence to back them up come up). I forget the guys name offhand, but I saw the story a few years ago about a guy who was an excellent outdoorsman who had been hiking on this particular mountain before and was familiar with it. He goes missing and search and rescue spend days looking for him in the place they thought he would be (based on where he said he would be). A helicopter, after several days, is in a totally different part of the mountain and finds the guy. He is injured pretty bad, broken leg and other broken bones from a fall IIRC, and he was barely able to move, but they got him out of there. He later recounted his tale about how he decided to check out a ridge on a whim that he hadn't been on before and slipped and fell down, finally landing on a ledge by sheer luck. He spent days hearing helicopters and knowing the searchers were in the wrong place but having no way to tell them. I'm sure if he hadn't been found he would have wound up as a missing 411 case with theories about how he was abducted or something because there was no tracks and he was "really experience" and was definitely on this particular trail. Honestly, as I have said in other comments (I've been enjoying your channel), most of these missing cases have mundane explanations if you just focus on the facts and infer things we know to be common. Things like Bigfoot, Wendigo and others have zero evidence for their existence and cannot be considered as an explanation when much more logical explanations exist. People make mistakes, take the wrong trail, mis-identify someone they saw on the trail, lie, are overconfident in their own abilities and all of those are more likely to be the cause of a missing person not being found than some supernatural explanation. Sorry for the long rant, I'm sure this comment will probably be buried in the hundreds of others on newer videos, but you do a great job with these. I disagree with conclusions, but there is nothing wrong with having a disagreement when things like this are open to interpretation since we don't have a way to know 100% for sure what happened.
I think there was a slab avalanche. "Slabs can be small, on the scale of a yard or two, or extraordinarily large, reaching a mile or more in width, encompassing entire mountainsides." It would explain the injuries and why he was not found when the area was first searched, and they do get that type of avalanche in Colorado. Interestingly, there is a theory that a slab avalanche is what happened to the hikers in Dyatlov Pass
My thoughts exactly, even going back to Dyatlov pass. A lot of the same features, blunt force/fall trauma but no place to fall from, no prints in the snow, missing clothes.
ive regularly hiked that area, and SAR is busy busy up there even in summer. tourists see vail and think they can make it and end up lost, and people are rescued without clothes...usually due to hypoxia, hypothermia or HACE. A local of leadville died of hace last year... youre not immune just because youre acclimatized...also avalanches and cornices frequently cover tracks and trails
I have no explanation outside of the supernatural for how he got out that far without tracks or calling for help in the first place, but I wonder if it's possible that he was still alive and fell from the top of the frozen waterfall and down to the icy fall below? I always have a hard time imagining how far measurements would look like, so I don't know if it's feasible. But could he have tried to crawl (especially considering his broken femur) and eventually succumbed to his injuries? And I wonder about the helmet too. He was a doctor and would have probably been very confused given his head injuries, so part of me wonders if he put the helmet back on himself after the injury to try and protect his already damaged head. I really enjoy the mystery of these cases but the implications for what these people had to go through before they died is always so heart wrenching.
my guess (at the 15 minute mark) would be he continued on to the final destination without his friends (if he wasn’t willing to rest with them at the first rest stop, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine he would have continued past the second rest point without them either), decided to do some snowboarding while waiting for his buddies, boarded across the powder for a while and eventually lost control for whatever reason. this would explain the lack of tracks and the distance he was able to cover. i don’t have a map of the area to hand so i might be incorrect, but if he had lost control and ended up going over the edge of the falls at a high speed, that could explain why he was not directly under it and instead several hundred yards downstream, particularly if he had slid on the ice after impact. this could also explain his lack of boots- if they were strapped to the board as he struggled after losing control, either his flailing or the board catching on something as he tumbled likely would have yanked his feet out of the boots before it yanked the boots from the board (not a snowboarder so if this is wrong pls correct me!). this would explain why he didn’t reach out for help due to the suddenness of the accident as well. as the state of the helmet isn’t specified, i wouldn’t say it’s unreasonable to suspect the head injury was from this fall as well. of course, if the board was recovered at the scene, this theory would be moot, but i’m not sure whether it was or not (i might have missed that if it was mentioned!). just my personal theory- while i believe in some north american folklore such as wendigos and skinwalkers, this case seems to me to be more likely a case of an overconfident man taking risks on the mountain (going off alone is already ill-advised so i wouldn’t put it past him to take other risks). i invite discussion though! and i could very well be proven wrong by the end of the video LOL
I almost wonder if it was BECAUSE he was known as such an experiences hiker, and BECAUSE he had all the gear necessary to be fine in the situation, he almost felt as if he should be able to get out on his own, and he mentally kept convincing himself that he was experienced and didn't want help, and maybe some fear of embarrassment in there of needing rescued, to the point that he convinced himself he needed no help?
fun fact, sometimes in these popular skii places they’ll use explosives in areas they except to have an avalanche to intentionally set it off, so they can make sure it happens when no one’s there
I always wish we knew the specific nature of the injuries. Head trauma could be many things and the specific characteristics of the cranial fracturing could be very informative. It seems very common for non-homicide investigations to be pretty poor unfortunately. Also, as someone who has also broken a femur, LOL you're not going anywhere with that. You can't even drag yourself on the floor. Your muscles contract and spasm so hard because your body is trying to set the break, its galaxy levels of pain, absolutely otherworldly dimensions of torment.
My femur was literally snapped in half when I was 5. Apparently shock set in after a few minutes. Genuinely glad I have no memory of the event. Was in a half body cast for a total of 6 months. Doctors had to re-break it around the 2 month mark because it wasn’t healing properly. Sorry your mind remembers that kind of pain!
This is the 3rd or 4th I have listened to this video over the past year or so. It hit me maybe he had a bad snowboard wipeout and that's what caused the bad fall. He didn't have a helmits on and got bad head injury. Which caused him to be disoriented and not able to call for help.
I've been around Vail quite a few times and the snow there is often so light and dry the merest breath of wind picks up great swirls of it which make the sky almost as black as night. The instant the air stops moving the snow drops and the daylight is back. I can see easily that tracks could disappear in the matter of a minute. Hard to conceive if you haven't seen it but lack of tracks doesn't surprise me at all. If the doctor thought he could keep on trail during a whiteout he could have ended up anywhere walking around in the dark. My $.02 only.
Why is it never possible that search and rescue just didn't do their job properly. Human incompetence and neglect can explain a lot of things like this.
idk about this case specifically but when you look into a lot of these cases they had mass amounts of people on the ground from search and rescue to law enforcement to national guard to family and volunteers, and they will search areas multiple times only for the body to turn up there later, sometimes even years to decades later. I'm not saying human incompetence might not play a role in some of these cases but there's many where that doesnt seem to be the case and a very thorough search was conducted. Another weird issue is in like 97% of these cases dogs will not be able to find any kind of scent trail or it'll just stop somewhere with no explanation.
I suspect the SAR team weren’t anticipating him being over 12 miles walking distance away at a radically different elevation given the time between being reported missing and the search commencing. Most SAR teams are excellent in all truth
It's a point to be sure. Kind of defeats the purpose of search and rescue though. They're not just some agency plugging away at a job (although agencies are usually involved), their specific purpose is to save a life. Many are volunteers, there's no real motivation not to be thorough and every motivation to be.
It's not a matter of incompetence in this case and probably a vast majority of cases. Missing 411 people make a huge deal about saying "that area was searched before 👀" without really thinking about what that means. These are HUGE areas to search. No matter how many searchers you have, they're not going to cover this rough ground walking shoulder-to-shoulder. They're usually spread out, say 30 ft. apart and (hopefully) walking a straight line or grid. Also, in SAR mode, you're assuming the person is alive/conscious and wants to be found. So as they go along this dispersed grid, they're calling out to the person and listening for a response. So if someone is unconscious and unlucky enough to be in the middle of that 30 or 50 feet in rough terrain or under ground cover, you could easily have hundreds of people search that area even multiple times and miss them.
Just to add anything, these areas don’t have cell service even when they are labeled as such. I’ve hiked many (including this one) of these all around CO and i’ll say cell signal is absolute trash. 9/10 times when i’m supposed to have service I have none. Most of this done with an iphone 10 or better max/pro versions. Honestly i’d say the same for most trails I have hiked around america it would sit at 7/10 for reception.
Physical therapist here. His injuries are consistent with a fall, but it doesn't have to be from a big height. Here's my thoughts. You can walk on broken legs. I see it every day. The terrain was rugged, but he was in good physical condition. Also, a hiker climbed down Mount Everst with a broken back so he could hike with a broken leg. He went to the top and decided it would be fun to go off trail. In doing so, he tripped and landed on some rocks just right. Head injury, broken ribs, and broken femur. Decided he should have had his helmet on and put that on. Then, not thinking clearly because of his head injury thought, I have to get down the mountain and went for it. Eventually, dieing where they found him.
Really good no nonsense video, appreciate it a lot. This case has driven me mad for ages, it seems virtually impossible to come up with any rational theory, how the hell did he get there? How does this guy travel around never leaving a single trace? I heard his wife always made certain he avoided every risk possible, I'm sure he did too. That said tearing off ahead of his companions was clearly a bad idea,why the hurry? With all those means of raising the alarm I tend to think whatever happened must have happened pretty quickly, no chance to open his rucksack for his phone etc. Therefore it's hard to imagine him walking anywhere, never mind 14 miles of near impassable terrain. Surely something else had to be involved, something that targeted a lone traveller,or an event outside of normal human experience. Super odd. Great video
I'd have to assume that his head injury is at least partially responsible for that. If he were without his helmet on, and either fell or wiped out on his skis, cracked his head, and then wandered around concussed for a day... that might account for both the head injury and him being so far off course to begin with. Still doesn't explain the total lack of tracks, but... one piece at a time.
@@jaceelliott6317 That's an astute piece of thinking, he certainly could have removed his helmet for a time and suffered the injury then. Even now I still wonder what really happened that day, whatever it was his companions had no such misfortune. Very odd.
@gf301 I'd also postulate that there may well have been a substantial ice crust on the snow outside of the path. If that layer had gone through enough cycles of thawing and re freezing, it's entirely possible that he could have left no tracks under the tree cover, where there would be little, if any, snow accumulation on top of the refreeze. So maybe he hit his head, then wandered off the path in his disoriented state, or that he took a spill over the side and cracked his skull on a tree or rock on the way down. An injury like that would probably have left blood, which should have been noticed, but a few drops of blood could have gone unnoticed easily enough if they were looking for a body or traditional tracks. That injury would have also been likely to induce post traumatic meningitis, or swelling of the meninges and brain tissue, which would severely effect his mental functions and clarity- hence his failure to use any of his rescue equipment, and his very strange resting place. The only thing that doesn't jive there is that there's no blood trail leading from the ice fall- I'm very confident that the other injuries he sustained would have caused a non trivial amount of bleeding, especially the femur break, and there should have been blood traces in the snow between the fall site and his body. I suppose they could have been covered by the fresh snowfall, but somehow that feels wrong to me.
@@jaceelliott6317 This is the kind of informed critical thinking I like to see applied to all these cases. He had significant injuries,as to whether they were all from a fall or inflicted some other way will always be a major part of this mystery. I wonder if the police have theorised the same way you have, I'm not sure what they really think happened.
There's a case that Paulides discusses in a conference, about a man who was missing and then was found, in the middle of a highway, sustaining massive head trauma. The coroner concluded that he had fallen, but the case was that there was no bridge/tower/crane.. nothing. Apparently he fell from the sky..there was no other explanation
He had fallen elseway prior to the location of his death (CCTV of the area showed him struggling to walk by and this was just prior to his death) then he fell down to here he was found after walking further. It is believed that he was walking on a wall or had fallen down (whether pushed down or not is undetermined as he was drunk as a kite prior to his disappearance) foul play could be reasonably honestly but not at where he died but between that time he was caught on camera and his disappearance
A splitboard isn't in two pieces for carrying, but for cross-country skiing, too. The combo lets you go far off the regular trails (and get yourself in trouble?). There are different clip positions to mount boots in the different ways needed for each ski method. So, he should have had ski poles, too. Were they found and where were they?
Eh, the simplest answer is he fell, then tried to get somewhere safe but was disorientated, put his helmet back on, even saying he couldn't cause of his femur, its still doable. Disorientation also explains why he didn't call for help. A sad case, but that seems the easiest explanation without going into nonsense.
I just recently discovered your guys' channel a couple of days ago by randomly coming across one of the videos that you made with Wendigoon discussing/analyzing various biblical stories & how they relate/are relevant to strange historical events or mysteries unknown to/ inexplicable by modern mainstream science knowledge. I'm so glad i came across that video & I'm very eager to see what future content you guys have in store for us! (:
going through ur entire channel and man, ur content is so cool! watching this one in particular i have to say that i think its great u explain the folktales, traditions and culture of native americans/first nations or of the regions where these happen so us, who arent really familiar with any of it, get to have a better understanding of the paranormal explanations offered for missing 411 cases, this way we can consider whether or not it lines up with the folklore we know which is really cool! thanks for bringing such good content to this platform, u guys are really neat!
It blows my mind that so much stuff happens randomly in Co. it always seems so laid back and once you get out of Denver and in the mountains EVERYWHERE only feels like 20-30 minutes from EVERYWHERE else .. those mountains are pretty INSANE though.
Well.. I'd say they took the Booth Falls trail. McGrogan, as he was ahead and had time, went on to check on the Falls, fell down, got desoriented due to head injury, later succumbed to hypothermia with paradoxical undressing and just managed to crawl a few hundred feet instinctively, before passing out... As for the aerial search, yes, footprints in snow are really distinctive, but if he was crawling, the trail wouldn't catch the pilot's eye, I think. Plus any snowfall could mask it further...
I don't know how many fae stories there are in Colorado, but according to celtic mythology they're really commonly associated with things like causing people to get lost in swamps, woods and moors and then come out what feels like 30 minutes later, though 10 years will have passed outside where you were lost, which suggests that, if real, the fae are 4-dimensional and perfectly capable of messing with spacetime for the hell of it. They're also known to mess with human perception and mix up roads with rivers, causing you to try and either walk in things you shouldn't, or avoid the correct path altogether. The only real sticking point I can think of is that the Fae won't normally bother you unless you leave whatever path you're on. Granted it only has to be for a fraction of a second if you're walking in their woods, but you still have to actually leave the path. The question then becomes 'if you leave the path and the fae want to play a game with you, do you leave any footprints before they get a hold of you?'
16:00 idk man my uncle fell off his trailer one winter onto a stone wall and broke his femur. He managed to drag himself to the front door and knock to no avail. Then dragged himself up a walk way on a hill to the back door. This was at night in mid January. He was in his early-mid 50’s and he doesn’t carry a cellphone; no idea why.
See Foggy Dog below. I replied about a microburst I witnessed that pulled a ten ton oak out of the ground. I was looking straight at it, but it was so fast, I heard the impact first. There was a guy just feet away, who didn't have a scratch on him. (Yes, I had tried to open the door.) The power is unimaginable, and the focus so tight. Edit. Could a microburst not just pick him up and toss him out, but also account for head trauma inside an undamaged helmet? The air pressure would be very different, which was why I could not get that door open.
One nitpick I have is the assertion that he "had cell service". David Paulides stated that went he went there and had full bars on his own phone. My issue is that depends on the network. I have a great signal from Verizon in my apartment. If someone on the T-Mobile network comes over, their phone is a paperweight.
Maybe he made it to the lodge, climbed on it for some reason like he was going to scare his friends... fell.... and stumbled away in extreme pain and delirium due to a severe concussion.
Cheers guys from Ireland ... We have a species of leprechaun here that are mostly now living in normal habitation . They are called Tipperary people . They lived in the tip her hairy mountains .
I see you bring up being able to see places when people are out in the mountains and forests. One thing to remember is the possible weather during the time they were missing. If it was snowing and vail was 3-4 miles away you might not be able to see it. And in other cases it could rain or fog or mist. Always something to consider when it comes to visibility
He had a snowboard. He went riding through the powder, hit a tree, sustained mortal injuries and lost his boots as he rag-dolled to his final resting place.
@@chuckn4851 Impossible to say anything about that since we don't know the nature of the head injury nor whether the helmet really was undamaged or not.
The fall is not impossible. Looking at the terrain around Booth Falls, you can see that if he went to Eiseman Cabin, and turned to the right before going up to the hut, he could go up to the ridge. This explains why no one saw him there. He could have used the splitboard to move more quickly after leaving the trail (shown on google maps terminating on a ridge north of the hut) and if he was wearing new clothes as well and a new board, his lack of identifiable scent can also be explained away. He then has only 2 minor climbs to get to somewhere south of the rim above Booth Lake. Heading south on the ridge, there is a number of places on that ridge that could have led to a fall long enough to cause his injuries, including the loss of the boots etc. He probably was not wearing his helmet but had it handy, on completing the fall and knowing he had a broken leg (they are kind of obvious) and knowing he had hit his head he probably put his helmet on as quickly as he could, as a means to protect the damaged area, and this leads to his death. By putting on the helmet, if he had internal swelling from the fall, the helmet would constrict the swelling leading to a severe brain injury that could have killed him very quickly. Then as his blood pools into his lower body due to his resting location, all indications of this depart leaving only the prima facie evidence of head trauma that did not look fatal. 5 hours of snow and being outside the immediate search area could have led to his body being covered in snow well before the searches claim nearby. Wind and weather changes could explain why he then turns up later. Mind you, I am not a doctor, just a guy dealing with head trauma issues, from some falls. Thanks for the great content. Came here from the Unsubscribe vid you guys did and love how you look into these misadventures.
strange and inexplicable injuries sustained in the snow can be attributed to a slab avalanche, they are small, often go unnoticed, but can be deadly. modern technology can calculate avalanche risks, and it’s common practice to detonate an explosive when the risk is high so that the avalanche can be controlled, but no system is perfect and so a small precarious snow slab could go unnoticed. as a Canadian who has done all sorts of snow sports and outdoor hiking, finding tracks in the snow is not as easy as it seems. In wooded areas, bushes and low hanging branches can easily hide a trail. the physics of snow also makes things difficult. snow is made of crystals, it appears white due to light refraction and is translucent. under diffused light or when hit from a certain angle a large area of snow can appear untouched when it’s actually been walked on. also, a ghost of wind can easily cover tracks or make snow accumulation fall from tree branches. it’s not inconceivable that tracks were never found even though they were there. as for walking on 8 feet of snow? not impossible either. depending how the weather has been, there can be solid layers of slow that could support the weight of an adult man. also keep p in mind this was a wooded area, meaning that the snow covered the lower parts of trees. branches can offer additional support, and even make it see like the snow is not that deep at all. this kind of terrain is extremely dangerous, as there’s no telling if your next step will be in a weak spot and cause you to fall 8ft down. an experienced outdoorsman would know this, but human error is always a possibility and he may not have noticed he was in dangerous terrain. sometimes overconfidence in your own skills can make you throw caution out the window. I think that what happened is that for some reason, he left the path. he became disoriented and maybe lost his own tracks. yes, this is possible, and the more you try to find your way back the more fresh tracks you leave and the more confusion it gets. he was carrying his helmet but did not have it on when he fell somewhere for some reason. fatal head injuries are not necessarily the most painful, they may even appear minor at first glance. for safety reasons, he still put his helmet on and carried on forward. at this point, it’s possible that he got on his snowboard and decided to just head down the mountain. feeling embarrassed by his faux-pas, he might not have wanted to tell his friends that going off alone had not been a great idea. feeling still safe and confident, he saw no need to use the beacon or to call for help. then, a second fall or a slab avalanche occurred, and he was ejected from his board while his boots stayed on it. its possible to walk on a broken leg. if the bone is fractured but has not moved out of place is might not even be that painful. for some reason, he felt like he could still make it alone. maybe the head trauma was catching up by then and feeling disoriented, confused, and scared, he didn’t even think to call to for help. as internal bleeding continued, he walked bear foot in the snow until he began experiencing hypothermia. one symptom of it is actually feeling very, very hot. once again, he would have known this, but would not have been in a state to think rationally. that would be when he got rid of the coat. he kept walking until his legs gave out and he died. alternatively, maybe he did not die where he was found, but someone else found him before the rescue, panicked, and just moved him to an area where he would hopefully be found soon. maybe that person was up to something shady, maybe they were just scared they would be suspected of murder because they say that the one who finds the body is always the first suspects. if they found him still in his boots, they have removed them to make the body lighter, or if they were still strapped in the snowboard. they may also have discarded the coat after, scared that they left evidence on it. is this something a rational person would do? absolutely not. but not everyone thinks like that, especially not when they’re panicking. it seems unlikely that it was murder, but even less likely that anything supernatural happened. there are reasonable explanations to this case. never underestimate what a forest or winter alone can do.
Ya know, the one thing I was thinking as soon as you described the body was Aliens. Maybe they dropped him off a little too high up, like a kid throwing a fish into the air after it's unhooked.
I have been binging you all night and the sun just came up ;) haha I don’t know how I found you. But bless me. Mmmmmmmm I love your content. You never say “ umm” and you are just pure entertainment with some amazing knowledge. Mind 🎉
People don't always immediately die from a fall and head injury. Its totally possible he fell somewhere else and the adrenaline allowed him to make it some distance before the pain from the broken femur set in and then he bleed to death from internal bleeding in the brain or somewhere else. I think this is a far more likely explanation than any sort of paranormal or foul play theory. I have heard of a murder case where a man was hit on the head and left for dead. He woke up and started getting ready for work like nothing had happened and in that process of getting ready for his day he died in his hallway from a brain bleed.
I think I know the case you're talking about. It was an ax murder where this guy tried killing both his parents. The mother survived. The father did what you said about not realising he was hurt. He even went outside to pick up the morning news paper.
I don't understand how he could get these injuries, just like he had fallen off a cliff that isn't there. That case is so strange that I believe in something supernatural. But it's hard for me to believe this too. Thank you for telling this strange story. Greetings from Norway, where we have endless mountains and forests, but I have not heard of any such cases here.
Personally I think people greatly overestimate the mental capacity of terrified people lost in the woods. They also greatly underestimate what the human body is capable of doing before it gives out when a do or die mentality takes over.
For a lot of these cases, I would focus on the details of the story and not take them for granted. What I remember, about another, unrelated case, was that the coroner gave misleading information--that made--the case seem _stranger_ and more bizarre than it really was. That being said, I think it's always helpful to keep open-minded, though, not jump to conclusions--but--this can be difficult, for people who are insecure, over uncertainty. I, myself, enjoy the sense of "mystery"--rather--than needing anything to be "solved", but in all of the cases I have reviewed, those classified under "missing 411" typically have not been given any _satisfying_ answer (even when the bodies or people are found). Anyways, cheers for thee engaging content. I have, almost, watched all of these :D Oh, and about the bear, thing... speaking of "misleading information"... I was told the reverse about black bears, from "hunters" on UA-cam--that--grizzlies are the least likely to attack! Lol, that's the internet for ya though; and yeah, I appreciate you saving the theories for the end and allowing people to think for themselves! That can, actually, be pretty hard to find these days. I am a UA-cam conneseuir of sorts, so I would know. :D
Something I've always found suspicious and frankly rather damning about this case is that there's never even a mention of blood around his body. If this man got hit hard enough to fracture his skull, ribs, and his femur... he'd be bleeding, and likely would be bleeding quite a bit. Assuming he went down at the ice fall, and then crawled his way over to his final resting position through sheer will, there'd most definitely be a bloodtrail in the snow, and probably a decent amount either soaked into his clothes or pooled in the snow around or under him. And yet... nobody covering this has yet mentioned any blood evidence.
Think about the cases where people can hear someone yelling for help but no one can find them. Giant birds of prey (that are said to not exist anymore) are sighted throughout distinct regions of the country. If they carry someone to a cliff face or treetop..
Theory: unknown dispute arises between the hikers, and he was struck in the head causing him to fall and sustain critical injuries. They cover him with snow, pretend to search for him until the search ends, allowing them to place him where he was found. The helmet could be a failed attempt to disguise the murder as a snowboard accident. Am I missing a clue that disproves this?
Just so you do know, you can still get a gnarly head injury with high quality helmets. There's a common problem with people that mountain bike where they take a hard wipeout or fall and they don't get medical attention because their helmets are okay and they just have a bit of a headache but they have fairly serious concussions. Idk if you read about how bad the head injury was, but if it wasn't a serious injury that could be seen on the outside, honestly even if you could but it wasn't a compound fracture or something, helmets don't protect as much as people think they do. Sure your head will be in one piece, but that might be just as bad
was mountain biking crested butte last summer with my son, who wears a dirtbike helmet. he went over the handlebars off a turn and flew about 25 feet and landed on his head. helmet wasnt cracked, just scraped, bike was a little bent. he got up and walked his bike down a little dizzy. before we got to the alpine first aid he was sluring his speech. ended up with a bad concussion and still has migraines and vertigo
Things happen to people which in the rare occasions defy all possible logic or laws of physics. There could be a very simple answer but due to environmental factors and the strange things nature can do it's hard to know how it happened. If murdered there would of been a trail and signs of a struggle etc etc. I do love these mysteries.
17:38 ngl when you said what got stolen from his body my first thought was a Roadman Sasquatch (Roadman = Eshay if in Australia or Trailer trash if American). They stole his gloves & his shoes just had my thought of "ayo badman run those pockets, man gimme them shoes! I'll shank you up bruv!"
I believe that Jim lost sight of the trail when it started to snow and kept hiking in white out conditions out of panic and fell off of a cliff because he couldn't see the edge. He didn't see Vale because of the snow. You can die of a fall a long time after the fall happened. There are cliffs everywhere there even though you say there aren't.
I love your vids, but I feel like saying "they were experienced hikers" doesn't completely hand wave simple, "stupid" mistakes. Experienced hikers make mistakes all the time. It is incredibly easy to get disoriented, no matter how experienced you are.
You forgot about thunderbirds my man. They’re said to be big enough to pick up a grizzly bear. Could explain the fall damage and explained trailess travel
i had a friend's dad go missing on a hike in phoenix, i dont remember what mountain it was, but he was later found off the trail dead of dehydration and heat stroke. keep in mind this wasnt a hard hike and was one that he had done several times before, as have i, and he lived in phoenix. everyone with a brain knows that in phoenix you dont go anywhere without water, let alone a hike. but for some reason he didnt have enough and had to turn back and leave his group because he apparently wasnt feeling well. although its fun and spooky to believe that the wendigo may have taken jim, bad things can happen at the most random times. what i believe is that he got to the top, maybe wanted to explore around a little, and wandered a little farther than he intended and got lost. knowing that he could see vail only a few miles away, he could have just tried to make his way down, and knowing he had all that gear and safety equipment thought he would be fine. then when that storm rolled in that dropped 8 feet of snow, he got hypothermia, started taking off his gear, and fell off those falls you mentioned. he may have still been alive after the fall, though highly unlikely, and due to some brain damage didn't know the extent of his injuries and didnt think to call for help and continued to wander around until he died. as for the tracks not being found, people can get unlucky. yes the searchers may have been highly trained and experienced, but things happen. again its fun to wonder and theorize, but i personally feel that sometimes the best explanation is the one that makes the most sense, even if it doesnt line up with what we know. because again, things can happen and people can get unlucky
Kinda pushing it but, it could’ve been a mental break where he tried to hide, fell, and then hypothermia why he took his clothes off. He may have left the trail and civilization intentionally and since he was an outdoorsman he would’ve been able to cover up his tracks presumably if he had a hallucination of being chased or something. You can randomly have a vivid hallucination and then never again
Also, if the tracks weren’t deep enough, they can be covered up with wind, and it’s definitely a windy area regardless of whether it was super windy or not mountains are always windy
Re: the helmet. Helmets can look pretty good while being completely compromised. I don't know if they'd still look fine after being impacted while compromised? But like, even if your helmet looks fine after an impact, you should replace it because it may not work anymore.
I am proud to say that I have personally seen the vampires on Ventura Boulevard. As for this story, it's certainly a strange one. The best I can come up with is that his death was caused by an unusual freak accident that we are never going to know.
Hiking as fast as they were at that elevation- was he experiencing high altitude affects? I know it made me try to sleep on lava rock at 10,500 feet and I wanted to take all my protective clothing off. I was vomiting too and reluctant to go down the mountain. I just wanted people to leave me alone to rest. Luckily my friends forced me to hike down while I still could. Could he have been disoriented and took off his helmet and shoes, fell, was conscious for a bit, put on helmet because he was not able to think but it was a natural reaction?
I've heard you and MrBallen cover this. Neither has mentioned estimatef time of death. Coroner's always do that.... so do they belive he died immediately or later?.If he died immediately that explains him not calling etc....
Perhaps the body was too decayed to determine a set time of death, or the fact that it was found in winter made it harder for the coroners to use bugs and bacteria to get a date
I'm gonna free fall out into nothin'
Gonna leave this world for awhile
Same
Between the two of you I'm going to get an aneurysm.
@@MichaelDeNicola Louie, Louie by Motorhead is always my first choice.
Well then your just doing it wrong! You shouldn’t even be able to find yourself if you do it right!!!…. Lol
Wow! I guessed right!
As someone who suffered a 20 ft fall causing a major compound fracture to leg and knee, I can say that you immediately become completely immobilized and can go into shock becoming unconscious fairly quickly. You lose blood internally at the site of the fracture so much so that your skin will actually blister and split to relieve the pressure. All can happen easily before you even begin experience the debilitating pain making it extremely difficult to focus on anything else. Thankfully I was on a job site and had help immediately. It's nothing like the movies where you can just crawl off or stumble away. Although every injury is different having its own complexity, If I had been out in the wilderness alone I believe I most certainly would have succumbed to my injury in a short period of time to to shock and blood loss.
I hope you have healed fully- thanks for sharing your insight
I absolutely agree, I broke my leg really bad, open compund tib/fib, playing basketball, if that would've happened out in the wilderness alone I would've been absolutely screwed.
@@tylerdavis3 Thanks for your reply and good luck with your recovery. Stay active for best results. That's been the biggest challenge for me is trying do doing the things I used to do now with a bum leg. But I'm grateful as it could have been a lot worse.
@@leahwilton785 Thanks for your reply. Doing well considering the extent of my injuries. Although somewhat limited on my left leg, I'm grateful to have achieved results above what would be expected in recovery. Best wishes to you and yours.
I think every person and situation is different. I fell what was told to me to be about 30 yards and broke my wrist, had compression fractures in 3 vertebrae, and had a open compound fracture of my tibia. I hit the ground passed out for some time then managed to crawl 150 ft over train tracks, up a small hill and through a small creek until I reached a road and was able to find someone to call for help. The left side of my body was basically useless since both my leg and wrist were broken. I felt no pain until I knew the ambulance was on its way. I remember feeling the bone that was sticking out of my leg getting caught on rocks and vegatation while I was clawing my way up the hill with one side of my body and feeling a weird sensation in my wrist but absolutely no pain. The human will to survive is something most people never experience but it is really powerful.
Imagine being one of the people who are considered missing yet have actually started a new life of some sorts and finding videos theorizing on what actually happened to you.
Good, let’s keep it that way “ *sips wine*
I hope that's what occured with snakebit mckgee 🐍
You're one of em arent you ?! Admit it !
I’d chuckle to myself as I sip me coffee
@@onearmedwolf6512 It's obvious he's the Lindbergh baby,
People really overestimate people's ability to call for help.
When i had my bike accident (with a pretty nasty concussion, head injury, and shock), my first thought was to get off the road to safety. Then i was just feeling so overwhelmed by the fact my hands were covered in blood, and it was falling into my eye.
Im really proud that i was able to pull my phone out and unlock it, but in that state i wasnt able to form a coherent sentence so i was lucky enough to be able to hand it off to a bystander who was helping me.
But when you have had a severe injury, especially a brain injury, you are going to just follow your first instinct. Im very glad I learned that i immediately seek safety and ask for help, but i dont think everyone would go there in that state.
He didn't have an accident
A lot of injuries that turn septic will steal your breath away. I literally couldnt speak more than 3 whispered words in my 999 call before gasping.
A few years ago I was very sick and I stood up to go to the bathroom and I passed out and hit my head on the sink.
I remember waking up, I remember touching my head and seeing it covered in blood in the mirror, and I remember thinking that I should get my mother because she will know what to do, and I vaguely remember walking out the front door of the motel we were living in.
What I don't remember is walking over a mile from our motel to Pogeys, the restaurant she worked at or sitting down on her cars hood and falling asleep.
When I fell I shattered my suparoribtal ridge and gave myself a massive concussion on my frontal lobe, the doctors Saud UT looked like a spidersweb
@@coledibiase5971 did no passer-by stop you? Jfc if I saw a person with a bloody head injury, I would intervene
I am SO glad I saw you on Wendigoon's 411 video! I subscribed yesterday and am currently marathoning all your videos. You do great work, Man!
Thank you!
hahaha same here! so glad for all these videos
Oh same! Saw that video of Wendigoon's and immediately got hooked on you man! Great contact!!
Same 😂😂
Ive done the same for past month! Cuz of the same reason
If you look at the topographical layer of the area, I think he probably took a right and kept following the creek towards Bald Mountain instead of to the lodge. He then kept going thinking he was going to eventually find the cabin, but instead became disoriented from the cold. If he fell and hit his head, but kept trying to walk in the direction he thought would take him out of the woods, he could have quickly begun to have hypothermia. At some point on the Bald Mountain ridge, he could have fallen a final time and basically slalomed all the way to where his body was found, below Boot Falls. Hitting trees or rocks on the way down would explain a lot of the other injuries.
So here's the thing about "well prepared" and "experienced outdoorsmen" and "physically fit" people. No matter how prepared a person is, with a severe head injury, or hypothermia, or unconsciousness, no amount of experience or preparedness will do any good. There is a point where all of that is moot, and the person who forgets that nature will always get the best of them is bound to be eventually gotten the best of. His first mistake was going off alone, which is a pretty standard no-no. There was nothing supernatural about this, just egotistical behavior and an over-reliance on his abilities. Sad for his family.
Right. I figured his friends killed him and hide body then went back and moved it
@@Onwaxwings Seriously doubt it.
I totally agree with the last point. People often use the "they knew what they were doing" thing to rule out human error but humans aren't robots. We make mistakes, even when we are well trained. And there are many known instances of people otherwise in their right minds hallucinating in dire circumstances. I don't think it's always reasonable to assume these missing people were acting logically at the time.
Also, the people who know more can sometimes get themselves in worse trouble. They think they know what they are doing and that they will be fine because they have the knowledge. Sometimes being good at something makes you more likely to hurt yourself, because you have the confidence of experience. But that confidence is not always well placed. We can often think we are better at something than we really are.
Why not use the radio?
I lived in that area for a few years. Very odd things happen deep in the woods. I was snowmobiling in the mountains one time, had to hike a few miles to a summit, and when I returned to my snowmobile later, items had been moved to different locations but there were no animal or human tracks in the snow. It was creepy. I was miles away from anything with zero cell service (did have a beacon though.) Have heard many similar stories of the area.
What ind of illegal stuff goes doesn in the area?
Ravens? They like certain objects.
Great content man! My only suggestion is you should include more visual aids for the subjects you are discussing, like a map, or maybe even a google earth view.
Man, would be great to have a map to follow along with while you narrate. Great channel.
Agreed. I get lost with all the info and no visuals. A map with the trail, body/possessions found, photo o the person would help clarify all the info into a more cohesive and memorable tale.
I draw along with the narrative over a print out of the area
@@JFive1776 Some people got a bit of an ego and want their face to be on screen all the time
@@EndOfSmallSanctuary97 That could be it...or they don't know how to edit in more difficult aspects to their videos or don't have time to.
Just wishing less face time more illustrations
Colorado resident here! You can feel the eyes on you when you’re in the woods. I always make sure to be gracious and say thank you for save passage in the woods when they go dead silent.
Did he have he’s split board with him? If yes, it opens a realm of possibilities. As a snowboarder myself I can tell how tempting it is to ride wild unknown places fast and how dangerous it can be. Split board is not carried in parts because it is easier that way, it splits in two so it can be used as skis to traverse flat terrain and even go uphill. Given some reports you used got this part wrong, they may not understand how snowboarding works. You can ride like 60mph down the slope, fail to notice there’s a drop in front of you, fly tens or hundreds of meters, land with severe but not fatal injuries, not notice them because of adrenaline rush and shock, walk or ride several miles in panic mode and only then realize how heavily injured you are. I’ve seen stuff like this happening, but I am afraid we will never know. Also board moving at speed leaves very few marks on deep snow.
yeah but boots and gloves... and why would he just randomly ski down, when they agreed to meet up higher up?
@@SkyForceOne2 I feel like instead of going left up to hut, he accidentally went right and up (probably with skis on - hence no tracks). Then realised his mistake once up there and thought he'd board down to safety of the trail at the bottom. Had the fall and was immediately killed due to head trauma (let's not forget internal brain injuries from fall onto soft snow could be catastrophic- without leaving much external damage to helmet), or was severely injured and either unconscious or too delirious to call for help (bearing in mind the broken ribs - making it hard to breathe- and femur as well). ETA: boots and gloves torn off in fall and not found yet.
Theory: he got carried off by a thunderbird. Struggled to the point where he lost his shoes and dropped when he struggled out of his coat. They ought to check the trees for his shoes!
Makes more sense than anything else I could come up with tbh
I’m glad someone wise was thinking thunder bird
I used to have a thunderbird but it never hurt me except when it came time to fill it up, dang that thing was a gas guzzler!!!
Well thunderbirds are traditionally native Alaskan creatures
Mine was made by Ford
This is by far one of the strangest cases. In my mind the only explanation is that he was picked up by a tornado like micro burst wind phenomena and projected very high into the sky, which was followed by a long drop which killed him on impact.. This explains the no tracks, his injuries, no call for help, and how he could have been transported so far away. I've seen micro bursts in the woods and they can be very powerful and who knows what would happen if you got caught in one.
A microburst plucked a mature oak tree, estimated to weigh ten tons, out of the ground, and slammed it into another. I was looking out, could not open the door to call the guy mowing the lawn in. It was all in the blink of an eye. The guy was just feet away, and he was fine.
Dude takes off his helmet for a minute, a rock from above smacks him in the head, he puts the helmet back on and stumbles around in a daze from the hit. Winds up getting hypothermia and starting to undress before falling down a hill, eventually making his way via several falls to where he wound up and dies. Overthinking these kinds of stories really kills the idea of missing 411 (especially when mentions of cryptids and other supernatural things that have no evidence to back them up come up).
I forget the guys name offhand, but I saw the story a few years ago about a guy who was an excellent outdoorsman who had been hiking on this particular mountain before and was familiar with it. He goes missing and search and rescue spend days looking for him in the place they thought he would be (based on where he said he would be). A helicopter, after several days, is in a totally different part of the mountain and finds the guy. He is injured pretty bad, broken leg and other broken bones from a fall IIRC, and he was barely able to move, but they got him out of there. He later recounted his tale about how he decided to check out a ridge on a whim that he hadn't been on before and slipped and fell down, finally landing on a ledge by sheer luck. He spent days hearing helicopters and knowing the searchers were in the wrong place but having no way to tell them. I'm sure if he hadn't been found he would have wound up as a missing 411 case with theories about how he was abducted or something because there was no tracks and he was "really experience" and was definitely on this particular trail.
Honestly, as I have said in other comments (I've been enjoying your channel), most of these missing cases have mundane explanations if you just focus on the facts and infer things we know to be common. Things like Bigfoot, Wendigo and others have zero evidence for their existence and cannot be considered as an explanation when much more logical explanations exist. People make mistakes, take the wrong trail, mis-identify someone they saw on the trail, lie, are overconfident in their own abilities and all of those are more likely to be the cause of a missing person not being found than some supernatural explanation.
Sorry for the long rant, I'm sure this comment will probably be buried in the hundreds of others on newer videos, but you do a great job with these. I disagree with conclusions, but there is nothing wrong with having a disagreement when things like this are open to interpretation since we don't have a way to know 100% for sure what happened.
I think there was a slab avalanche. "Slabs can be small, on the scale of a yard or two, or extraordinarily large, reaching a mile or more in width, encompassing entire mountainsides." It would explain the injuries and why he was not found when the area was first searched, and they do get that type of avalanche in Colorado. Interestingly, there is a theory that a slab avalanche is what happened to the hikers in Dyatlov Pass
My thoughts exactly, even going back to Dyatlov pass. A lot of the same features, blunt force/fall trauma but no place to fall from, no prints in the snow, missing clothes.
Sasquatch
The free fall guitar bit made me so unexpectedly happy since that was the first song I learned to play when I got my first guitar 😭
ive regularly hiked that area, and SAR is busy busy up there even in summer. tourists see vail and think they can make it and end up lost, and people are rescued without clothes...usually due to hypoxia, hypothermia or HACE. A local of leadville died of hace last year... youre not immune just because youre acclimatized...also avalanches and cornices frequently cover tracks and trails
I have no explanation outside of the supernatural for how he got out that far without tracks or calling for help in the first place, but I wonder if it's possible that he was still alive and fell from the top of the frozen waterfall and down to the icy fall below? I always have a hard time imagining how far measurements would look like, so I don't know if it's feasible. But could he have tried to crawl (especially considering his broken femur) and eventually succumbed to his injuries? And I wonder about the helmet too. He was a doctor and would have probably been very confused given his head injuries, so part of me wonders if he put the helmet back on himself after the injury to try and protect his already damaged head. I really enjoy the mystery of these cases but the implications for what these people had to go through before they died is always so heart wrenching.
Those were my exact thoughts too, concerning his injuries and the position of his body
my guess (at the 15 minute mark) would be he continued on to the final destination without his friends (if he wasn’t willing to rest with them at the first rest stop, it isn’t unreasonable to imagine he would have continued past the second rest point without them either), decided to do some snowboarding while waiting for his buddies, boarded across the powder for a while and eventually lost control for whatever reason. this would explain the lack of tracks and the distance he was able to cover. i don’t have a map of the area to hand so i might be incorrect, but if he had lost control and ended up going over the edge of the falls at a high speed, that could explain why he was not directly under it and instead several hundred yards downstream, particularly if he had slid on the ice after impact. this could also explain his lack of boots- if they were strapped to the board as he struggled after losing control, either his flailing or the board catching on something as he tumbled likely would have yanked his feet out of the boots before it yanked the boots from the board (not a snowboarder so if this is wrong pls correct me!). this would explain why he didn’t reach out for help due to the suddenness of the accident as well. as the state of the helmet isn’t specified, i wouldn’t say it’s unreasonable to suspect the head injury was from this fall as well. of course, if the board was recovered at the scene, this theory would be moot, but i’m not sure whether it was or not (i might have missed that if it was mentioned!). just my personal theory- while i believe in some north american folklore such as wendigos and skinwalkers, this case seems to me to be more likely a case of an overconfident man taking risks on the mountain (going off alone is already ill-advised so i wouldn’t put it past him to take other risks). i invite discussion though! and i could very well be proven wrong by the end of the video LOL
I almost wonder if it was BECAUSE he was known as such an experiences hiker, and BECAUSE he had all the gear necessary to be fine in the situation, he almost felt as if he should be able to get out on his own, and he mentally kept convincing himself that he was experienced and didn't want help, and maybe some fear of embarrassment in there of needing rescued, to the point that he convinced himself he needed no help?
Huh? That makes absolutely no sense
@@truthalways in other words, his ego was too big
fun fact, sometimes in these popular skii places they’ll use explosives in areas they except to have an avalanche to intentionally set it off, so they can make sure it happens when no one’s there
Also howitzer cannons
Video quality is getting better every upload! Great job man, you guys are killing it!
Love these format of videos bro. Subscriber count is growing! You guys are crushing it
I always wish we knew the specific nature of the injuries. Head trauma could be many things and the specific characteristics of the cranial fracturing could be very informative. It seems very common for non-homicide investigations to be pretty poor unfortunately. Also, as someone who has also broken a femur, LOL you're not going anywhere with that. You can't even drag yourself on the floor. Your muscles contract and spasm so hard because your body is trying to set the break, its galaxy levels of pain, absolutely otherworldly dimensions of torment.
Why do you think the SCP foundation uses the “Femur-Breaker” 😂 it’s the most painful bone to break
My femur was literally snapped in half when I was 5. Apparently shock set in after a few minutes. Genuinely glad I have no memory of the event. Was in a half body cast for a total of 6 months. Doctors had to re-break it around the 2 month mark because it wasn’t healing properly. Sorry your mind remembers that kind of pain!
This is the 3rd or 4th I have listened to this video over the past year or so. It hit me maybe he had a bad snowboard wipeout and that's what caused the bad fall. He didn't have a helmits on and got bad head injury. Which caused him to be disoriented and not able to call for help.
I've been around Vail quite a few times and the snow there is often so light and dry the merest breath of wind picks up great swirls of it which make the sky almost as black as night. The instant the air stops moving the snow drops and the daylight is back. I can see easily that tracks could disappear in the matter of a minute. Hard to conceive if you haven't seen it but lack of tracks doesn't surprise me at all. If the doctor thought he could keep on trail during a whiteout he could have ended up anywhere walking around in the dark. My $.02 only.
Why is it never possible that search and rescue just didn't do their job properly. Human incompetence and neglect can explain a lot of things like this.
idk about this case specifically but when you look into a lot of these cases they had mass amounts of people on the ground from search and rescue to law enforcement to national guard to family and volunteers, and they will search areas multiple times only for the body to turn up there later, sometimes even years to decades later. I'm not saying human incompetence might not play a role in some of these cases but there's many where that doesnt seem to be the case and a very thorough search was conducted. Another weird issue is in like 97% of these cases dogs will not be able to find any kind of scent trail or it'll just stop somewhere with no explanation.
I suspect the SAR team weren’t anticipating him being over 12 miles walking distance away at a radically different elevation given the time between being reported missing and the search commencing. Most SAR teams are excellent in all truth
It's a point to be sure. Kind of defeats the purpose of search and rescue though. They're not just some agency plugging away at a job (although agencies are usually involved), their specific purpose is to save a life. Many are volunteers, there's no real motivation not to be thorough and every motivation to be.
Over 500,000 times a year? Not possible.
It's not a matter of incompetence in this case and probably a vast majority of cases. Missing 411 people make a huge deal about saying "that area was searched before 👀" without really thinking about what that means.
These are HUGE areas to search. No matter how many searchers you have, they're not going to cover this rough ground walking shoulder-to-shoulder. They're usually spread out, say 30 ft. apart and (hopefully) walking a straight line or grid.
Also, in SAR mode, you're assuming the person is alive/conscious and wants to be found. So as they go along this dispersed grid, they're calling out to the person and listening for a response.
So if someone is unconscious and unlucky enough to be in the middle of that 30 or 50 feet in rough terrain or under ground cover, you could easily have hundreds of people search that area even multiple times and miss them.
Just to add anything, these areas don’t have cell service even when they are labeled as such. I’ve hiked many (including this one) of these all around CO and i’ll say cell signal is absolute trash. 9/10 times when i’m supposed to have service I have none. Most of this done with an iphone 10 or better max/pro versions. Honestly i’d say the same for most trails I have hiked around america it would sit at 7/10 for reception.
I'm slightly worried about how much I want to go hiking now, thanks 😂👍
God I’m going through your entire 411 playlist. Your content is so good!
I hace been looking for more channels that cover 411 cases and not just the well known ones. Love your channel
Steve Stockton Utube
Physical therapist here. His injuries are consistent with a fall, but it doesn't have to be from a big height. Here's my thoughts. You can walk on broken legs. I see it every day. The terrain was rugged, but he was in good physical condition. Also, a hiker climbed down Mount Everst with a broken back so he could hike with a broken leg. He went to the top and decided it would be fun to go off trail. In doing so, he tripped and landed on some rocks just right. Head injury, broken ribs, and broken femur. Decided he should have had his helmet on and put that on. Then, not thinking clearly because of his head injury thought, I have to get down the mountain and went for it. Eventually, dieing where they found him.
Really good no nonsense video, appreciate it a lot. This case has driven me mad for ages, it seems virtually impossible to come up with any rational theory, how the hell did he get there? How does this guy travel around never leaving a single trace? I heard his wife always made certain he avoided every risk possible, I'm sure he did too. That said tearing off ahead of his companions was clearly a bad idea,why the hurry? With all those means of raising the alarm I tend to think whatever happened must have happened pretty quickly, no chance to open his rucksack for his phone etc. Therefore it's hard to imagine him walking anywhere, never mind 14 miles of near impassable terrain. Surely something else had to be involved, something that targeted a lone traveller,or an event outside of normal human experience. Super odd. Great video
I wonder why he was in such a hurry to leave without the others? Was he trying to make time for some other hike? Sorry for the friends and family.
I'd have to assume that his head injury is at least partially responsible for that. If he were without his helmet on, and either fell or wiped out on his skis, cracked his head, and then wandered around concussed for a day... that might account for both the head injury and him being so far off course to begin with. Still doesn't explain the total lack of tracks, but... one piece at a time.
@@jaceelliott6317 That's an astute piece of thinking, he certainly could have removed his helmet for a time and suffered the injury then. Even now I still wonder what really happened that day, whatever it was his companions had no such misfortune. Very odd.
@gf301 I'd also postulate that there may well have been a substantial ice crust on the snow outside of the path. If that layer had gone through enough cycles of thawing and re freezing, it's entirely possible that he could have left no tracks under the tree cover, where there would be little, if any, snow accumulation on top of the refreeze. So maybe he hit his head, then wandered off the path in his disoriented state, or that he took a spill over the side and cracked his skull on a tree or rock on the way down. An injury like that would probably have left blood, which should have been noticed, but a few drops of blood could have gone unnoticed easily enough if they were looking for a body or traditional tracks. That injury would have also been likely to induce post traumatic meningitis, or swelling of the meninges and brain tissue, which would severely effect his mental functions and clarity- hence his failure to use any of his rescue equipment, and his very strange resting place. The only thing that doesn't jive there is that there's no blood trail leading from the ice fall- I'm very confident that the other injuries he sustained would have caused a non trivial amount of bleeding, especially the femur break, and there should have been blood traces in the snow between the fall site and his body. I suppose they could have been covered by the fresh snowfall, but somehow that feels wrong to me.
@@jaceelliott6317 This is the kind of informed critical thinking I like to see applied to all these cases.
He had significant injuries,as to whether they were all from a fall or inflicted some other way will always be a major part of this mystery.
I wonder if the police have theorised the same way you have, I'm not sure what they really think happened.
ive missed this channel, glad to be back
This is so well done, you’ve earned my subscription
There's a case that Paulides discusses in a conference, about a man who was missing and then was found, in the middle of a highway, sustaining massive head trauma. The coroner concluded that he had fallen, but the case was that there was no bridge/tower/crane.. nothing. Apparently he fell from the sky..there was no other explanation
He had fallen elseway prior to the location of his death (CCTV of the area showed him struggling to walk by and this was just prior to his death) then he fell down to here he was found after walking further. It is believed that he was walking on a wall or had fallen down (whether pushed down or not is undetermined as he was drunk as a kite prior to his disappearance) foul play could be reasonably honestly but not at where he died but between that time he was caught on camera and his disappearance
@@victory8928 Yes, don't you remember his name??
Just discovered your channel and love it. Good job, good story telling!
A splitboard isn't in two pieces for carrying, but for cross-country skiing, too. The combo lets you go far off the regular trails (and get yourself in trouble?). There are different clip positions to mount boots in the different ways needed for each ski method.
So, he should have had ski poles, too. Were they found and where were they?
Eh, the simplest answer is he fell, then tried to get somewhere safe but was disorientated, put his helmet back on, even saying he couldn't cause of his femur, its still doable. Disorientation also explains why he didn't call for help. A sad case, but that seems the easiest explanation without going into nonsense.
Oooo, a Local Missing 411 video. Good thing I saw this since I’m planning to do a bit of backpacking in White River this summer.
I just recently discovered your guys' channel a couple of days ago by randomly coming across one of the videos that you made with Wendigoon discussing/analyzing various biblical stories & how they relate/are relevant to strange historical events or mysteries unknown to/ inexplicable by modern mainstream science knowledge.
I'm so glad i came across that video & I'm very eager to see what future content you guys have in store for us! (:
going through ur entire channel and man, ur content is so cool! watching this one in particular i have to say that i think its great u explain the folktales, traditions and culture of native americans/first nations or of the regions where these happen so us, who arent really familiar with any of it, get to have a better understanding of the paranormal explanations offered for missing 411 cases, this way we can consider whether or not it lines up with the folklore we know which is really cool! thanks for bringing such good content to this platform, u guys are really neat!
It blows my mind that so much stuff happens randomly in Co. it always seems so laid back and once you get out of Denver and in the mountains EVERYWHERE only feels like 20-30 minutes from EVERYWHERE else .. those mountains are pretty INSANE though.
Well.. I'd say they took the Booth Falls trail. McGrogan, as he was ahead and had time, went on to check on the Falls, fell down, got desoriented due to head injury, later succumbed to hypothermia with paradoxical undressing and just managed to crawl a few hundred feet instinctively, before passing out...
As for the aerial search, yes, footprints in snow are really distinctive, but if he was crawling, the trail wouldn't catch the pilot's eye, I think. Plus any snowfall could mask it further...
Thanks man. Finally, someone with some rationality. 👊
He was found a 12 mile walking distance away. 4.5 if you could fly…
Also, you’re not doing any paradoxical undressing with a broken femur and broken ribs.
@@scottbarnett3566 I´d consider that your point of view, rather than a proven fact ;)
I don't know how many fae stories there are in Colorado, but according to celtic mythology they're really commonly associated with things like causing people to get lost in swamps, woods and moors and then come out what feels like 30 minutes later, though 10 years will have passed outside where you were lost, which suggests that, if real, the fae are 4-dimensional and perfectly capable of messing with spacetime for the hell of it.
They're also known to mess with human perception and mix up roads with rivers, causing you to try and either walk in things you shouldn't, or avoid the correct path altogether.
The only real sticking point I can think of is that the Fae won't normally bother you unless you leave whatever path you're on. Granted it only has to be for a fraction of a second if you're walking in their woods, but you still have to actually leave the path. The question then becomes 'if you leave the path and the fae want to play a game with you, do you leave any footprints before they get a hold of you?'
16:00 idk man my uncle fell off his trailer one winter onto a stone wall and broke his femur. He managed to drag himself to the front door and knock to no avail. Then dragged himself up a walk way on a hill to the back door. This was at night in mid January. He was in his early-mid 50’s and he doesn’t carry a cellphone; no idea why.
I knew it was Free falling when you first played that tune lol
See Foggy Dog below. I replied about a microburst I witnessed that pulled a ten ton oak out of the ground. I was looking straight at it, but it was so fast, I heard the impact first. There was a guy just feet away, who didn't have a scratch on him. (Yes, I had tried to open the door.) The power is unimaginable, and the focus so tight.
Edit. Could a microburst not just pick him up and toss him out, but also account for head trauma inside an undamaged helmet? The air pressure would be very different, which was why I could not get that door open.
A lot of these cases remind me of the book algernon blackwood wrote about the wendigo.
These creatures really are scary.
One nitpick I have is the assertion that he "had cell service". David Paulides stated that went he went there and had full bars on his own phone. My issue is that depends on the network. I have a great signal from Verizon in my apartment. If someone on the T-Mobile network comes over, their phone is a paperweight.
Maybe he made it to the lodge, climbed on it for some reason like he was going to scare his friends... fell.... and stumbled away in extreme pain and delirium due to a severe concussion.
Cheers guys from Ireland ...
We have a species of leprechaun here that are mostly now living in normal habitation .
They are called Tipperary people .
They lived in the tip her hairy mountains .
I see you bring up being able to see places when people are out in the mountains and forests. One thing to remember is the possible weather during the time they were missing. If it was snowing and vail was 3-4 miles away you might not be able to see it. And in other cases it could rain or fog or mist. Always something to consider when it comes to visibility
He had a snowboard. He went riding through the powder, hit a tree, sustained mortal injuries and lost his boots as he rag-dolled to his final resting place.
That definitely is plausible, but still is odd
And the head injury underneath the undamaged helmet?
@@chuckn4851 Impossible to say anything about that since we don't know the nature of the head injury nor whether the helmet really was undamaged or not.
He was killed for sure in my mind. Just a elaborate coverup, then they went back and planted his body.
He was found 12 miles away!
The fall is not impossible. Looking at the terrain around Booth Falls, you can see that if he went to Eiseman Cabin, and turned to the right before going up to the hut, he could go up to the ridge. This explains why no one saw him there. He could have used the splitboard to move more quickly after leaving the trail (shown on google maps terminating on a ridge north of the hut) and if he was wearing new clothes as well and a new board, his lack of identifiable scent can also be explained away. He then has only 2 minor climbs to get to somewhere south of the rim above Booth Lake. Heading south on the ridge, there is a number of places on that ridge that could have led to a fall long enough to cause his injuries, including the loss of the boots etc. He probably was not wearing his helmet but had it handy, on completing the fall and knowing he had a broken leg (they are kind of obvious) and knowing he had hit his head he probably put his helmet on as quickly as he could, as a means to protect the damaged area, and this leads to his death. By putting on the helmet, if he had internal swelling from the fall, the helmet would constrict the swelling leading to a severe brain injury that could have killed him very quickly. Then as his blood pools into his lower body due to his resting location, all indications of this depart leaving only the prima facie evidence of head trauma that did not look fatal. 5 hours of snow and being outside the immediate search area could have led to his body being covered in snow well before the searches claim nearby. Wind and weather changes could explain why he then turns up later.
Mind you, I am not a doctor, just a guy dealing with head trauma issues, from some falls. Thanks for the great content. Came here from the Unsubscribe vid you guys did and love how you look into these misadventures.
strange and inexplicable injuries sustained in the snow can be attributed to a slab avalanche, they are small, often go unnoticed, but can be deadly. modern technology can calculate avalanche risks, and it’s common practice to detonate an explosive when the risk is high so that the avalanche can be controlled, but no system is perfect and so a small precarious snow slab could go unnoticed.
as a Canadian who has done all sorts of snow sports and outdoor hiking, finding tracks in the snow is not as easy as it seems. In wooded areas, bushes and low hanging branches can easily hide a trail. the physics of snow also makes things difficult. snow is made of crystals, it appears white due to light refraction and is translucent. under diffused light or when hit from a certain angle a large area of snow can appear untouched when it’s actually been walked on. also, a ghost of wind can easily cover tracks or make snow accumulation fall from tree branches. it’s not inconceivable that tracks were never found even though they were there.
as for walking on 8 feet of snow? not impossible either. depending how the weather has been, there can be solid layers of slow that could support the weight of an adult man. also keep p in mind this was a wooded area, meaning that the snow covered the lower parts of trees. branches can offer additional support, and even make it see like the snow is not that deep at all. this kind of terrain is extremely dangerous, as there’s no telling if your next step will be in a weak spot and cause you to fall 8ft down. an experienced outdoorsman would know this, but human error is always a possibility and he may not have noticed he was in dangerous terrain. sometimes overconfidence in your own skills can make you throw caution out the window.
I think that what happened is that for some reason, he left the path. he became disoriented and maybe lost his own tracks. yes, this is possible, and the more you try to find your way back the more fresh tracks you leave and the more confusion it gets. he was carrying his helmet but did not have it on when he fell somewhere for some reason. fatal head injuries are not necessarily the most painful, they may even appear minor at first glance. for safety reasons, he still put his helmet on and carried on forward. at this point, it’s possible that he got on his snowboard and decided to just head down the mountain.
feeling embarrassed by his faux-pas, he might not have wanted to tell his friends that going off alone had not been a great idea. feeling still safe and confident, he saw no need to use the beacon or to call for help.
then, a second fall or a slab avalanche occurred, and he was ejected from his board while his boots stayed on it. its possible to walk on a broken leg. if the bone is fractured but has not moved out of place is might not even be that painful. for some reason, he felt like he could still make it alone. maybe the head trauma was catching up by then and feeling disoriented, confused, and scared, he didn’t even think to call to for help. as internal bleeding continued, he walked bear foot in the snow until he began experiencing hypothermia. one symptom of it is actually feeling very, very hot. once again, he would have known this, but would not have been in a state to think rationally. that would be when he got rid of the coat. he kept walking until his legs gave out and he died.
alternatively, maybe he did not die where he was found, but someone else found him before the rescue, panicked, and just moved him to an area where he would hopefully be found soon. maybe that person was up to something shady, maybe they were just scared they would be suspected of murder because they say that the one who finds the body is always the first suspects. if they found him still in his boots, they have removed them to make the body lighter, or if they were still strapped in the snowboard. they may also have discarded the coat after, scared that they left evidence on it. is this something a rational person would do? absolutely not. but not everyone thinks like that, especially not when they’re panicking.
it seems unlikely that it was murder, but even less likely that anything supernatural happened. there are reasonable explanations to this case. never underestimate what a forest or winter alone can do.
Watching March 14, 2023. Love your channel! New subscriber here, glad I found you 😊
14:28 the fact that I was sarcastically thinking Thunderbird when you said that. Now I am not so sure.
Ya know, the one thing I was thinking as soon as you described the body was Aliens. Maybe they dropped him off a little too high up, like a kid throwing a fish into the air after it's unhooked.
Just discovered your channel. Really great story telling skills! I wish you'd work in some more visual aids while you talk.
I have been binging you all night and the sun just came up ;) haha
I don’t know how I found you. But bless me. Mmmmmmmm I love your content. You never say “ umm” and you are just pure entertainment with some amazing knowledge.
Mind 🎉
People don't always immediately die from a fall and head injury. Its totally possible he fell somewhere else and the adrenaline allowed him to make it some distance before the pain from the broken femur set in and then he bleed to death from internal bleeding in the brain or somewhere else. I think this is a far more likely explanation than any sort of paranormal or foul play theory.
I have heard of a murder case where a man was hit on the head and left for dead. He woke up and started getting ready for work like nothing had happened and in that process of getting ready for his day he died in his hallway from a brain bleed.
I think I know the case you're talking about. It was an ax murder where this guy tried killing both his parents. The mother survived. The father did what you said about not realising he was hurt. He even went outside to pick up the morning news paper.
Could just be a tragic snowboarding accident. How far away was he from the board? Was it split or put together?
But wouldnt he have left very obvious snowboard tracks?
@@RxYouth I'd expect the snowboard tracks to be quite shallow and quickly covered by the heavy snowfall.
I don't understand how he could get these injuries, just like he had fallen off a cliff that isn't there. That case is so strange that I believe in something supernatural. But it's hard for me to believe this too. Thank you for telling this strange story. Greetings from Norway, where we have endless mountains and forests, but I have not heard of any such cases here.
whirlwind maybe. happened to me, it threw me over a hill into a lake and my friends didn't even see it.
Really?? Please tell me more!!
Personally I think people greatly overestimate the mental capacity of terrified people lost in the woods.
They also greatly underestimate what the human body is capable of doing before it gives out when a do or die mentality takes over.
For a lot of these cases, I would focus on the details of the story and not take them for granted. What I remember, about another, unrelated case, was that the coroner gave misleading information--that made--the case seem _stranger_ and more bizarre than it really was. That being said, I think it's always helpful to keep open-minded, though, not jump to conclusions--but--this can be difficult, for people who are insecure, over uncertainty. I, myself, enjoy the sense of "mystery"--rather--than needing anything to be "solved", but in all of the cases I have reviewed, those classified under "missing 411" typically have not been given any _satisfying_ answer (even when the bodies or people are found). Anyways, cheers for thee engaging content. I have, almost, watched all of these :D Oh, and about the bear, thing... speaking of "misleading information"... I was told the reverse about black bears, from "hunters" on UA-cam--that--grizzlies are the least likely to attack! Lol, that's the internet for ya though; and yeah, I appreciate you saving the theories for the end and allowing people to think for themselves! That can, actually, be pretty hard to find these days. I am a UA-cam conneseuir of sorts, so I would know. :D
My current theory is a thunderbird. It explains the lack of trails, the injuries, the missing boots, and the snowstorm
Well, they don't exist here in 2022 so any other thoughts?
@@mr.onethirtyeight5088 shit Hawks
@@minekush1138 The delusions of Jim Lahey
I'd say UFO that picked him up and later dropped him at some point before a thunderbird.
...did you miss the part where he had a massive head injury?
Interesting Content ! I've Subscribed. Keep up the good work. Greetings from the French Alps. 💖🎅🐕💖
Something I've always found suspicious and frankly rather damning about this case is that there's never even a mention of blood around his body. If this man got hit hard enough to fracture his skull, ribs, and his femur... he'd be bleeding, and likely would be bleeding quite a bit. Assuming he went down at the ice fall, and then crawled his way over to his final resting position through sheer will, there'd most definitely be a bloodtrail in the snow, and probably a decent amount either soaked into his clothes or pooled in the snow around or under him. And yet... nobody covering this has yet mentioned any blood evidence.
Oh boy! I stayed in Vail when I was visiting family. (Relative had a condo we stayed in at the resorts.)
Think about the cases where people can hear someone yelling for help but no one can find them. Giant birds of prey (that are said to not exist anymore) are sighted throughout distinct regions of the country. If they carry someone to a cliff face or treetop..
Theory: unknown dispute arises between the hikers, and he was struck in the head causing him to fall and sustain critical injuries. They cover him with snow, pretend to search for him until the search ends, allowing them to place him where he was found. The helmet could be a failed attempt to disguise the murder as a snowboard accident. Am I missing a clue that disproves this?
Just so you do know, you can still get a gnarly head injury with high quality helmets. There's a common problem with people that mountain bike where they take a hard wipeout or fall and they don't get medical attention because their helmets are okay and they just have a bit of a headache but they have fairly serious concussions. Idk if you read about how bad the head injury was, but if it wasn't a serious injury that could be seen on the outside, honestly even if you could but it wasn't a compound fracture or something, helmets don't protect as much as people think they do. Sure your head will be in one piece, but that might be just as bad
was mountain biking crested butte last summer with my son, who wears a dirtbike helmet. he went over the handlebars off a turn and flew about 25 feet and landed on his head. helmet wasnt cracked, just scraped, bike was a little bent. he got up and walked his bike down a little dizzy. before we got to the alpine first aid he was sluring his speech. ended up with a bad concussion and still has migraines and vertigo
I think the key phrase here is "If he thought he was in trouble". He probably didn't at any point.
I’ve played Dark Souls, gotta watch out for those sneaky giant ravens/crows getting the jump on you.
Things happen to people which in the rare occasions defy all possible logic or laws of physics. There could be a very simple answer but due to environmental factors and the strange things nature can do it's hard to know how it happened. If murdered there would of been a trail and signs of a struggle etc etc. I do love these mysteries.
Portal/glitchslip...aliens/bogeymen? A process we don't exactly grasp, but I think abduction fits the termination
17:38 ngl when you said what got stolen from his body my first thought was a Roadman Sasquatch (Roadman = Eshay if in Australia or Trailer trash if American). They stole his gloves & his shoes just had my thought of "ayo badman run those pockets, man gimme them shoes! I'll shank you up bruv!"
He definitely no clipped into one of the staircases and it launched him into the air down the mountain.
I believe that Jim lost sight of the trail when it started to snow and kept hiking in white out conditions out of panic and fell off of a cliff because he couldn't see the edge. He didn't see Vale because of the snow. You can die of a fall a long time after the fall happened. There are cliffs everywhere there even though you say there aren't.
yeah just the boots and gloves part
I appreciate the dark humor moment deeply.
It’s a dark story, had to have some comedic relief
It's ok to be "Petty" sometimes
I love your vids, but I feel like saying "they were experienced hikers" doesn't completely hand wave simple, "stupid" mistakes. Experienced hikers make mistakes all the time. It is incredibly easy to get disoriented, no matter how experienced you are.
He fell into a crevice which contained an ice chute.
You forgot about thunderbirds my man. They’re said to be big enough to pick up a grizzly bear. Could explain the fall damage and explained trailess travel
What about a nearby town? Have locals seen or heard of something like that happening before? Any other missing people on that trail?
i had a friend's dad go missing on a hike in phoenix, i dont remember what mountain it was, but he was later found off the trail dead of dehydration and heat stroke. keep in mind this wasnt a hard hike and was one that he had done several times before, as have i, and he lived in phoenix. everyone with a brain knows that in phoenix you dont go anywhere without water, let alone a hike. but for some reason he didnt have enough and had to turn back and leave his group because he apparently wasnt feeling well. although its fun and spooky to believe that the wendigo may have taken jim, bad things can happen at the most random times. what i believe is that he got to the top, maybe wanted to explore around a little, and wandered a little farther than he intended and got lost. knowing that he could see vail only a few miles away, he could have just tried to make his way down, and knowing he had all that gear and safety equipment thought he would be fine. then when that storm rolled in that dropped 8 feet of snow, he got hypothermia, started taking off his gear, and fell off those falls you mentioned. he may have still been alive after the fall, though highly unlikely, and due to some brain damage didn't know the extent of his injuries and didnt think to call for help and continued to wander around until he died. as for the tracks not being found, people can get unlucky. yes the searchers may have been highly trained and experienced, but things happen. again its fun to wonder and theorize, but i personally feel that sometimes the best explanation is the one that makes the most sense, even if it doesnt line up with what we know. because again, things can happen and people can get unlucky
"Get it?"
Alright now ya got me, gonna watch the whole backlog of content now
Kinda pushing it but, it could’ve been a mental break where he tried to hide, fell, and then hypothermia why he took his clothes off. He may have left the trail and civilization intentionally and since he was an outdoorsman he would’ve been able to cover up his tracks presumably if he had a hallucination of being chased or something. You can randomly have a vivid hallucination and then never again
Also, if the tracks weren’t deep enough, they can be covered up with wind, and it’s definitely a windy area regardless of whether it was super windy or not mountains are always windy
I live in Colorado and now I want to move
Magic is just science that hasn't been explained yet
Re: the helmet. Helmets can look pretty good while being completely compromised. I don't know if they'd still look fine after being impacted while compromised? But like, even if your helmet looks fine after an impact, you should replace it because it may not work anymore.
no I'm completely and totally on your side here there's something very screwy going on. No governments going to tell us.
I am proud to say that I have personally seen the vampires on Ventura Boulevard. As for this story, it's certainly a strange one. The best I can come up with is that his death was caused by an unusual freak accident that we are never going to know.
It would be very useful to know which type of head injury.
This reminds me of videos where eagles pick up goats and drop them off cliffs to kill them.
Hiking as fast as they were at that elevation- was he experiencing high altitude affects? I know it made me try to sleep on lava rock at 10,500 feet and I wanted to take all my protective clothing off. I was vomiting too and reluctant to go down the mountain. I just wanted people to leave me alone to rest. Luckily my friends forced me to hike down while I still could.
Could he have been disoriented and took off his helmet and shoes, fell, was conscious for a bit, put on helmet because he was not able to think but it was a natural reaction?
I've heard you and MrBallen cover this. Neither has mentioned estimatef time of death. Coroner's always do that.... so do they belive he died immediately or later?.If he died immediately that explains him not calling etc....
Perhaps the body was too decayed to determine a set time of death, or the fact that it was found in winter made it harder for the coroners to use bugs and bacteria to get a date
A split snowboard isn’t designed so it can be carried easier. It splits so it can be cross country skis!