10 People Who Vanished in the Backcountry - Then Walked Out With Strange Stories | Who Found Them?

Most people who go missing in the backcountry are found in the first day, or they are not found alive at all. These ten were gone long past that and came back anyway. This video is about the ten people who ended it, and in six cases out of ten they were not part of any search. I'm Cliff Hollis. Thirty-two seasons as a backcountry ranger in the mountain West, the last fifteen running search and rescue. I have signed a search over from active to limited continuous, which is the part of this job nobody makes a film about. So this one is told from the finder's side. Here is who actually ended each of these, and what they were doing at the time. TWO MEN DRIVING TO A WORK SITE. Gaston Schaeffer and John Tattrie came around a bend on a gravel road in northern British Columbia and found SAM BENASTICK walking toward the truck on two sticks, with his legs wrapped in a cut-up sleeping bag and a gash he had stitched shut himself with fishing line. Fifty days. The organized search had been suspended a month earlier. A RESORT OWNER OPENING FOR THE SEASON. Christopher Gutierrez walked into a rental cabin at Lake Edison and found TIFFANY SLATON inside it after twenty four days. He has said he leaves one cabin unlocked every season on purpose, for exactly this. Not for her. For whoever. A TRAIL CREW THAT HEARD SOMETHING OVER A RIVER. Miles Cottingham decided a sound under the noise of the Chilliwack River was not the river. ROBERT SCHOCK had been barefoot in North Cascades National Park for thirty days and immobile in one spot for two weeks. VOLUNTEERS IN A HELICOPTER THAT STRANGERS PAID FOR. The official search for AMANDA ELLER on Maui ran about seventy two hours and stopped. Thirteen days later Javier Cantellops, Chris Berquist and Troy Helmer spotted her from two hundred feet up, in a different drainage from the one she started in. TWO HUNTERS AFTER A DEER. They found GENE PENAFLOR, seventy two years old, at the bottom of a ravine in the Mendocino National Forest and carried him out on a stretcher made of their own coats. The search had been suspended thirteen days before. A SKI PATROL TEAM FOLLOWING A TRACK IN THE SNOW. They came on a cold fire pit east of Rainbow Falls and a snowboard track going the wrong way. ERIC LeMARQUE went out of bounds in Mono County and was found in Madera County, over the crest, in a different watershed. HUNTERS ON FOUR WHEELERS. They came along a Forest Service road in Elko County, Nevada, and a door opened from inside a buried minivan. RITA CHRETIEN had been in it for forty eight days. Her husband Albert walked out for help three days in. Elk hunters found his remains seventeen months after Rita came out of that van. NOBODY AT ALL. PETER DeLEO walked twenty miles out of the Sierra Nevada after a plane crash that killed both men flying with him, and the first place he went was a diner in Olancha. A GAME WARDEN WATCHING A BUILDING THAT KEPT GETTING ROBBED. Terry Hughes put motion sensors on a camp in Rome, Maine, and caught CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT mid-burglary. He had been living in the woods a mile away for twenty seven years. Nobody had ever filed a missing person report on him. A PARK VISITOR WHO SAID HE HAD SEEN HER. Rangers found HOLLY COURTIER alive in Zion National Park after twelve days. Where, they have never said. Also in this video: what suspending a search actually means, and what it does not; why the finder's name is missing from the record in three of these cases; the two incompatible accounts of the same twelve days; and the one case where the return happened and the story never did. Sources are agency releases, sheriff's office statements, contemporary newspaper and broadcast reporting, and published interviews. Day counts are computed from the dates and I say which clock I am using, because most of the numbers you have seen on these cases are anchored differently by different outlets. Where the record does not reach, I say so instead of filling it in. There is nothing to buy here. Nothing in this video replaces the rangers on duty where you are headed. When in doubt, ask at the station. Stay found, folks. #missingpersons #foundalive #searchandrescue #survivalstories #backcountry #parkranger #nationalparks #lostinthewoods #truestory #northcascades #sierranevada #retiredranger #wilderness #stayfound #survival