1. Lt. Bev Lt. Bev
Any woodsman who says he’s never been lost in the woods is a liar. It’s inevitable. Up here in the North Woods, everybody goes woods queer now and again. That’s because we spend so much time outdoors. Ice fishing, hunting. Kids grow up following their parents into the backcountry, where they learn the basics of outdoor survival. How to build a camp. How to dead reckon by the sun. Up here, we tend to think of being lost as something you can be good at.

I’ve been in the business of finding lost people in the woods for thirty years. I know how hard it is to keep a clear head when lost. The disorientation can be shattering. A lost person is like the believer who is told “There is no God.” After that, everything seems like a lie. But loss of mental control is more dangerous than the lack of food or water. Panic crowds out common sense. It makes the lost person crave a quick, easy solution.

Imagine you’re her. Valerie Gillis. You have been hiking for a long time. Three months. You’re no young lass, though you’re tougher than you thought you were. Like a lot of people, you’d always wanted to hike the legendary Appalachian Trail. Since taking the plunge, you have hiked through mud, water, pain, and heat. Maine is even harder than you heard it would be. One difference is the density of the woods. Walls of vegetation hem you in on both sides. In the past, when the trail got hilly and punishing, you stared at your boots, willing yourself forward one step at a time. But now, you raise your head. You pause. Somehow, for some reason, you step off the path. Maybe you’ve seen something—a rare bird or flower. Or maybe you just need to pee and want some privacy. Hikers are supposed to chug two hundred paces away from the trail before they urinate, and you’re a polite person. Or you’re spooked by a sound in the woods, voices approaching. You step off the path and fight your way through the head-high saplings and sticky bushes. You look up at the sky, which is barely visible through the dense, netted canopy.

Time passes.

Rested, relieved, you look for the path. Ten steps, twenty. Nothing. But the path was right there. You don’t backtrack. Lost people seldom do. Rather, you push on farther, because you are dead certain this is the direction you came from. Every direction you turn, the view is identical, a claustrophobic wall of foliage and shrubbery. You wade forward into the mass of vegetation.

You begin to run. Branches beat your head. Buckthorn snares your feet. Brambles tear your skin. You’re desperate to get a view, to reorient, to understand.

We frequently find lost people looking very beat-up. They’ve been lanced by thorns and snags. Their clothes are filthy and ripped or even torn off from falling down or crawling or stepping into dangers they would have otherwise seen.

That’s what the terror of being lost makes people do.

By the time they get up here, northbound Appalachian Trail hikers have trod 1,900 miles. The class of hikers that starts as a mob down in Georgia really thins out by the end of the season. The beleaguered few who make it up here are an ugly bunch. They are very close to their goal, but it seems to me there’s something about the proximity to the finish that makes them lose focus. They tend to wander off, to break down physically or mentally.

That, I understand.

Dreams burn a wildfire in a body. It’s worth it, but there’s no coda.

This year seems worse than normal. The AT was officially closed for thru-hiking for the first time in history when the pandemic hit in 2020. I question the readiness of some of the folks out here this season.

You can’t get lost on the AT, they all say. But here at the Maine Warden Service, we get several dozen calls for lost thru-hikers every season. Maine is the worst place on the AT to get lost. It’s a whole new kind of hiking, more remote than anything that’s come before. Not much farther north than where Valerie Gillis was last seen lies the Hundred-Mile Wilderness. At the trailhead looms a sign that reads, verbatim: Do not attempt this section unless you have a minimum of 10 days supplies and are fully equipped. This is the longest wilderness section of the entire A.T. and its difficulty should not be underestimated.

Seems appropriate that the architects of the Appalachian Trail put the northern terminus on the other side of these woods. As the hikers say, “No Maine, no gain.”

To search is to guess. If the location of the lost person is known, that’s a rescue, not a search. A lost-person search begins with a couple of knowns and a whole busload of conjecture. If that sounds hard, it is. I always bear in mind that a century ago, the work I do was conducted with no GPS, no CB radio, no sidearm. Just a couple of guys in beaver skins tramping through the snow.

Here’s what we know. On the morning of Monday, July 25, Valerie Gillis awoke early at Poplar Ridge shelter, said goodbye to two female southbound hikers with whom she’d bonded the night before, and continued her journey north. She had a cell phone and appropriate gear and supplies, and was in a fine mood. There’s no cell service on that stretch of trail, but her husband was set to pick her up for resupply at a trailhead the following day. She was almost done with the northern portion of her hike. She smiled for a snapshot just as she turned to leave.

Then she vanished.

The husband waited a day to report Valerie lost. It was common for Valerie to be waylaid at a meetup, so he didn’t panic on Tuesday. He panicked on Wednesday. That evening, we send a crew of wardens out to the shelters on foot in the hope that we run into Valerie ourselves, as often happens on a hasty search. Overdue hikers are frequently found trailside dehydrated or with a broken ankle.

We come up empty. All we get on Wednesday is a lead from a teenaged hiker who runs into a warden in a parking lot thirty miles to the north. He says he saw a middle-aged woman sitting on a rock “looking played out” near Spaulding Mountain shelter the day before. Lacking anything stronger, I designate this as our point last seen. We find the two southbound women who saw her leave Poplar Ridge shelter as they are provisioning in town. They give us the photo—perfect. When I get home, I settle at my kitchen table under a cone of light to study my maps of the search area. Only eight miles stretch between Poplar Ridge shelter and the next shelter north, Spaulding Mountain. But because there is no point of exit between the two shelters, the search area broadens to thousands of acres of conifers, fallen trees, rocks, streams, and hobblebush. Numerous unnamed ridges rise and fall like waves with a short fetch. There are no settlements to speak of in any direction for many miles.

It’s long past midnight by the time I put away my area maps. I spread my old Appalachian Trail map on the table. The trail is named for the mountains that span the entire eastern coast of this country, north of the Gulf Coastal Plain all the way to Canada. And through this range wends one long, continuous footworn path. Georgia. North Carolina. Tennessee. Virginia. West Virginia. Maryland. Pennsylvania. New Jersey. New York. Connecticut. Massachusetts. Vermont. New Hampshire. Maine. The trail does not follow the low ground of valleys, nor does it circumvent obstacles. Instead, it goes tramping over countless summits, straight across streams; it marches into towns and occasionally humps down highways. The trail moves like a story. Sometimes it makes sense and sometimes it doesn’t. The trail wanders like a vagabond. Here it veers toward the impractical, there toward opportunity. How much thought must have been put into its route, and how much agreement. Southerners and northerners clearing a fourteen-state corridor to make way for a humble footpath.

I stare at the map for a long, long time.

Valerie’s whereabouts are somewhere right in front of me.

As soon as I hear the first birdsong, I pack a bag and get in my truck.