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2/28/2018
Hiking Mystery
what happened ?
We had seen the news of the hiker missing for a week from the Thacher Park area. It was good weather on her rare day off and a place that we enjoy so we decided to take a hike and "perhaps" help out. Dozens of search and rescue crews have been scouring the area as we proceeded up through the grid area. You can see the beauty and potentially treacherous terrain we were in near the East West sweep of block 4 here.
The missing hiker was a 71 year old Psychiatrist. I believe they have a higher than average suicide rate so our first inspection was this 100 +/- foot Mine Lot water falls area. The shortest walk from any of the parking lots up there to this falls is the Paint Mine parking lot where his Mustang was parked.
A jump (or slip) from the top would surely be catastrophic and it would be difficult to inspect the area even though they have used drones and technical ice climbers there.
On our way out of one of the forest trails, Colleen spotted a couple dozen torn up bits of paper in the drainage ditch near the parking lot. You can see several pieces in the water before we collected them all. With the freezing and thawing conditions this might have just been released and not seen by previous searchers.
It was chilling reading the bits of this torn up note. Obviously the person was distraught. "I am, I am, future with children, success, Goddess of Aphrodide, pain, divine love"... I wanted to photograph it before turning in to the police so we did a quick layout on my tarp inside the truck cab. Maybe you can help, as in crowd sourcing - to make sense of the text?
So we went up to the command post at the visitor center, filed a report with the lead State Police investigator, turned over our "evidence" and a Ranger went back with us to the scene of the note discovery to take a GPS reading.
A psychic friend of ours got an indication of foul play.
There might be video from the Visitor Center indicating perhaps a less than "normal" actions on the part of the missing hiker.
The last missing person, a skier from Whiteface Mountain was found a week later in California.
Stay tuned...
-continueshttps://altamontenterprise.com/03012018/search-guilderland-man-lost-thacher-park-continues
http://cbs6albany.com/news/local/state-police-searching-for-missing-71-year-old-man-at-thacher-park
6/10/18 UPDATE: The day they re-opened this Indian Ladder Trail 6/10/18 a hiker found the bones and wallet of the missing hiker apparently quite a ways down the steep slope from this trail. It fits my theory but officials say little and their case summary may take quite a while to wrap up.
The water falls is just a trickle now. I would have gone further down the slope except for the fact that is way way dangerous. Photos can't fully capture the dramatic severity of the topography. Those are turkey vultures in the distance. They hang out here all the time looking for food.
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