People wander off. They get lost. They take a swim and drown. (after neatly folding their clothes). He says picking berries is a common thread. Guess who else LOVES berries and resents someone else taking them? That’s right, it’s Mr. BEAR! They fall off cliffs, they stumble onto grows and get raped and killed by Mexicans. They get murdered for fun and profit. Some simply WANT to vanish because of businesses, divorce, life failure, etc. They get murdered by the people they are in the forest with, by strangers, and by rapey creepers who know communications suck, and law enforcement is far far away.
The reason there are clusters is that they all head to the same wild and dangerous places.
And anyone who is outdoors a lot can tell you appalling stories of how utterly unprepared a lot of people are and how they think it is like a day at Knotts Berry Farm to go hiking in a park. Lots of them take the big nap.
So anyway... I’ve wasted enough time and intelligence on you. Have fun. Booga Booga~
Yeah. When I took seatbelt safety class (ok, snicker away) the trauma nurse who taught it did a great job, with slides of showing all the ways people die in cars.
In Oregon it’s pretty common for cars to go off the road into the woods and not be found for years, especially when it’s single driver who dies in the accident. The forest is thick, you can’t see very far into it. The roads go for hundreds of miles in all directions.
That’s one possibility.
Being a Californian and an Indian (Hindu-type) I’ll go out on a limb here and say he was not carrying a gun. (All the Hindus I know are mad gun banners). So, yeah the cartels maybe got him. The kids / wife may be sex enslaved somewhere by now.
It’s a rough old world. Kinda stupid to go wandering around in the woods unarmed, but that is why we call them tards.
Spent most of my younger life out in the southern U.S. deserts (used to be a reptile collector), always shocked the hell out of me the numbers of people who had no idea of how dangerous those places could be.
The Mojave, the Great Basin, the Sonoran, the Chihuahuan, all great places to visit, but only if you know what your doing and carry plenty of spare parts and water.
I don’t even recall how many people I had to help out of some really bad situations.
Pulled people out of drift sand, and changed a lot of tires.
The two I remember most are, one time I found and old couple (they were in their 60’s, back then they were old to me) out on a dirt road between Baker and Death Valley (husband said they wanted to take a scenic route), their fan clutch broke and overheated their car.
I was driving a GM 4 wheeler at the time (they were in a Caddy) and had a spare on board, so I fixed them up and filled their radiator.
They had no water, no blankets, no spare oil or fuel, no food with them.
Followed them back to Baker and told them to stay on the paved road.
The other one was 6 Swedish tourists (yes they were all young ladies, yes they all spoke english), they were coming out of Stovepipe Wells headed towards Panamint Springs.
Boiled every drop of water out of their car on the upgrade out of the valley.
They had 2 bottles of water between them in their car (the little bottles that you sip out of) and they had been running their AC on the way up the grade.
Had to wear gloves to pop the hood, it was 114 in the sun that day.
Took almost 4 gallons to get the block and radiator topped off, told them to head for 395 and don’t use the AC, open the windows if they got to hot.
I have noticed that people from the urban areas and especially foreigners have no idea of what they are doing in harsh country.
They all think that help is just around the corner and don’t realize that it is probably a hundred miles away on a road that probably only gets 2 cars a week on a busy week.
Those places aren’t Europe and they aren’t LA county, where if you go five miles you find a supermarket or a cop.
Where I grew up you could go a hundred miles in a straight line and just find more sand or more trees.