An astonishing 600,000 people go missing in North America each year, most of whom are quickly found, but those who disappear in the wilder parts of the continent are often much harder to find. Journalist John Billman admits to being “obsessed with writing about missing persons in wild places,” and in this book he travels thousands of miles from Hawaii to Washington State to the wilds of northern Ontario pursuing intriguing stories of “cold vanishing.” The “cold” is often of the “cold case” sort and sometimes literally people disappearing into wild, cold places.

The “wild” here is not necessarily wilderness because some of the people in the book vanish on the outskirts of cities, in the “urban-wildland interface” where runners disappear on their daily workout and day-hikers go missing on what should be easy terrain. While some inexplicably vanish in what might be called deep wilderness, most of the cases Billman describes are not of that sort. People are lost where they shouldn’t be lost and where intense searches should easily find them, but do not. Billman writes:

While many of the incidents are readily explained – swept down a roiling river, caught in an avalanche, dragged off and eaten by a mountain lion, hypothermia, suicide, etc. – I’m drawn to the stories that defy conventional logic. The proverbial vanished without a trace incidents, which happen a lot more (and a lot closer to your backyard) than almost anyone thinks. These are the missing whose situations are the hardest on loved ones left behind.

Billman travels the country looking into unexplained disappearances, describing some cases that ultimately are resolved and some that are not.

The narrative thread that binds the book together is the story of Jacob Gray, a troubled young surfer from Santa Cruz who sets out on a bike tour of Washington’s Olympic Peninsula in April 2017. He doesn’t go far before he parks his bike near the Sol Duc River in Olympic National Park, sticks four arrows into the ground between his bike and the road, and disappears.

A driver reports the bike, which is loaded with gear, the National Park Service conducts a brief search revealing nothing and concludes Jacob may have accidentally slipped into the river flowing with April snowmelt and drowned. Billman describes the initial search as rather cursory and hampered by bureaucracy.

When he learns Jacob is missing, Randy Gray, Jacob’s father, rushes north from Santa Cruz. He and other members of the family pester the Park Service to do a more thorough search, but when they do not, he begins a long personal effort to find his vanished son.

Billman covers the search for Jacob Gray in detail, traveling to join Randy who, a very experienced surfer and intrepid outdoorsman, does everything he can to search for his son, dead or alive, with an almost manic intensity. Randy floats the rushing Sol Duc River many times in a wetsuit (or not), grabbing rocks to search deep pools, hiking up and down the banks of the river with other searchers, even venturing up into the deep snow of the upper Sol Duc. He is tough, and obsessed. Billman writes:

For someone close to someone missing, the world is reduced to this binary: missing and searching. Two awful gerunds. Most people left to search don’t know what to do, don’t know where to look. Wildlands can be overwhelming in their scope and scale. Or they’re physically incapable of doing much footwork on rough terrain. And they need to get back to their day jobs, to support their families and keep the plates in the air that we all have to juggle. Randy Gray will liquidate his world in order to find his son. Or die trying. Living on the open road in a self-contained camper, changing parks, forests, and cold Pacific beaches on a whim – that’s every rich man’s dream. Except that Randy Gray has lost a kid.

The story of Randy’s search stretches through the book with Billman inserting stories of other vanishings between episodes of Randy’s efforts. He joins Randy to describe first-hand many of his searches.

Reading The Cold Vanish is a dive into an always intriguing and often strange world of searching for those who vanish and are often never found nor their disappearance explained. There is search-and-rescue, mostly volunteers, who offer expertise and often complex organization to systematically cover the ground or water where the vanishing occurred. Grid searches, highly trained dogs, aircraft, and considerable expense and bureaucracy are this world.

Then there are the psychics who offer their services, and myriad wild theories explaining why someone vanished – “Hell’s Angels. Aliens from space. Russian mafia. Portals to other dimensions. Aliens from the hollow earth. String theory. Satanic cults.”

Even perhaps, in the case of the Olympic Peninsula and Jacob’s disappearance, Sasquatch. Billman doesn’t give much credence to any of this, but reveals how someone like Randy is willing to follow any lead. He goes along as Randy follows some pretty sketchy possibilities.

As a search-and-rescue volunteer in Oregon and Washington specializing in mountain rescue, I was always called to search for, rescue, or retrieve lost, injured, or deceased hikers and climbers. Never did we get involved in a vanishing, though I was touched later by this phenomenon when one of my students inexplicably disappeared on Mount Baker in the North Cascades and was never found. Except in this instance, the cases were solved one way or the other. I found this book interesting because of the mystery and diversity of unexplained disappearances and the range of responses to them. I had no idea of the number and diversity of these cases. Billman is not a dispassionate student of unexplained vanishings, and he is drawn deeply into the case of Jacob Gray.

The author writes in an engaging journalistic style. He is an outdoor writer and his interest in what may seem to many an esoteric topic was piqued by an assignment for Outside magazine. He tells a good story, and his approach of diving deeply into the Jacob Gray case interspersed with accounts of others who disappeared in wild places works well.

We wonder not only what happened to Jacob but what might happen to Randy, whose obsession seems to threaten both his sanity and his physical health. The Cold Vanish is part mystery, part glance into a world of heroes and charlatans, death, and loss that most of us, fortunately, do not know, and don’t want to know, but perhaps should. The Cold Vanish is informative, and in a sad way, captivating and well worth a read.