Going on a trip and never coming back from it is not something anyone wants to experience, but unfortunately some do. Actually, make that many.  From friends looking to enjoy some exciting journeys with the best of people and the best of times to couples looking for an intimate getaway to single adventurers looking to get away from it all and experience life on a dare, individuals every day go out for a temporary escapade and do not return leaving friends, family, and complete strangers to wonder: What exactly happened to them? And will they ever be found (hopefully, alive)? Here are a few of the most unsettling stories of people who took their own journeys, out into the woods as hikers, and didn’t return to share their stories.

15. The Cal State Students at Joshua Tree

Let’s open with a very recent story in a popular hiking location: Joshua Tree National Park. With a huge population of traffic, having approximately 2.5 million visitors a year, people routinely go missing understandably. However, most of them are quickly found. Unfortunately, there are exceptions to every rule and this has not been the case for all of the park’s visitors. Pictured above are two Cal State University Fullerton students who have been missing since July 27, 2017 during a hike at Joshua Tree National Park while on an airbnb trip. Even though there was much track evidence from the pairs’ car to the park to show that the pair were still in the location, the sand of the park made it hard to follow any further. A park ranger found the students’ car in one of the trail’s parking lot called the Maze Loop that goes through an area with high rock walls.

Checking cellphone provider records, police and investigative authorities picked up on some sort of signal from somewhere in the park early in the disappearance, but nothing more thereafter. Despite intensive daily searches with police dogs, airplanes, helicopters, and even a few of the pairs’ family members coming to help, there has been no further evidence of the two.

Could it have been the extreme weather-noted to be in the 100 degree Fahrenheit range with heavy thunderstorms-that was taking place in the week of their disappearance that could be to blame and they unfortunately became the victims of Mother Nature? To date, they have still not been found.

14. The LA Couple at Joshua Tree…Who Actually Never Ended Up at Joshua Tree

This story is also unfortunate, but has a fortunate ending. Last November, a Los Angeles couple, photographer Aaron Morganstein and his girlfriend, Masha Mitkova, disappeared for five days after telling friends and family that they were taking a day hike at Joshua Tree. Instead that day turned to five consecutive days in which family, friends, and colleagues began to grow concerned when the couple didn’t report to their respective jobs. The reason was because of hiking at Joshua Tree, the couple were instead found 100 miles to the south in the desert near the Mexican border after getting lost.

It is suspected that the couple must have been using a wiFi GPS signal to hike at another park and then lost their wireless Internet signal on their phones. The couple wandered in starvation and dehydration nearing death for four days as they started to follow the direction of a red flashing light they could see far off in the distance.

It is believed that following the light drew them to a more public place where they then spotted a cellphone tower and maintenance workers who contacted the Border Patrol. From there, the couple was saved.

13. The 3-Year-Old Girl at Joshua Tree

Are you seeing the theme yet? This well-known, high-traffic national park is the host of another popular activity that you might have suspected by now: disappearing visitors.

Let’s rewind from the present-day and go back thirty years. Three decades ago, Joshua Tree’s missing persons reputation was arguably born. The park became the focus of an intensive search after a 3-year-old by the name of Laura Bradbury who was there with her family disappeared from their Indian Cove campground area. Investigators and police authorities suspected she was abducted and reluctantly ended their relentless search that sparked all sorts of news coverage. Two years after her disappearance and the abandoned search, skeletal remains of a small skull were found at Joshua Tree. Upon inspection, it was believed that the remains were of Laura Bradbury.

12. The Missing Couple at Amboy Crater

Moving to another location finally, here is another very recent hiker horror story. On August 12th just after 1:30 p.m., a married Californian couple of hikers were found dead around the Amboy Crater, a long extinct volcano halfway between Barstow and Needles, in 104 degrees weather. Even with the notorious hot weather that many hikers are never prepared for, many Europeans like to come to visit. Unfortunately, it seems that this husband and wife were not prepared either.

Deputies discovered the couple in the area of the Amboy Crater and National Trails Highway, laying about 100 feet from each other, after receiving a call about two lost hikers. This call was actually catalyzed by a phone call from the wife who hysterically reached out to 911. However, the rescuers could not arrive in enough time and the wife and her husband died. The couple were believed to be in their 50s and from Yorba Linda, California.

11. Seattle Hiker at North Bend Trail

On August 4th, a 40-year-old Seattle woman named Kimberly Haines, who had disappeared with her dog four days earlier from a popular trail on Mount Teneriffe near  Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, was rescued successfully along with her dog by a chopper that took her to an ambulance after receiving data from her phone.

On July 31st, in the evening, Haines’ family reported her missing when she and the family dog still hadn’t yet made it home after her hike on the popular but arduous eight-mile trail with its 3,800 feet elevation and steep inclines that takes up to 10 hours to complete. The hike even made it into the news following a death there just a year before when a female hiker went off the trail and fell 100 feet. Although Haines is an avid hiker and marathon runner, she had never hiked at Teneriffe before. About 40 people, on ATVs or on horses, came to the scene to help and search dogs sniffed items from inside her car to be able to follow her scent. Early on August 3rd, search and rescue teams made “voice contact” with Haines, came to the area and heard her dog barking, they called out for Haines, and Haines responded. From there, a chopper came and took her to an ambulance in North Bend with only minor injuries.

10. The Hiker Who Almost Survived the Appalachian Trail

On October 14, 2015, a forester from a private company began an inventory of trees on the Appalachian trail that were used by the Navy’s remote SERE survival school in Redington Township, Maine. Soon, he came across an old campsite: a collapsed tent, a green backpack. And then human remains swaddled in a sky-blue sleeping bag that would soon be revealed to be the remains of a 66-year-old hiker named Geraldine Largay who had disappeared in the woods on July 22, 2013.

The forester called his headquarters, which called the Navy, which called Maine law enforcement. The next morning, Lieutenant Kevin Adam, the search-and-rescue coordinator for the Maine Warden Service and the forester joined some 10 wardens, the State Police Evidence Response Team, Naval Criminal Investigative Service agents, Maine’s chief medical examiner’s representatives, and a reality television series crew about the Warden Service, and they all hiked back to the campsite to verify.

When they arrived two hours later, they indeed found Largay’s body in her sleeping bag, her driver’s license tucked into a zip-lock bag, and physical signs of her frantic attempt for rescue like trees with  scorch marks from fires and strips of Mylar emergency blanket hanging from branches.

My deepest love to you. And to all my friends. I pray to see you all in heaven.

The photo shown above is the last known photograph of Largay, taken by fellow hiker Dottie Rust on the morning of July 22, 2013, at the Poplar Ridge Lean-to.

9. The 30-Year Unsolved Case at Appalachian Trail

On the morning of July 11, 1983, Maine State Police got a call from a woman in Texas worried about her sister Jessie Hoover who she hadn’t heard from since May 16 when Hoover called from a Bangor motel en route to her trek to the the Appalachian Trail, which she had come to Maine to thru-hike. She is believed to have started to hike south but northbound Appalachian Trail hikers coming through the Daicey Pond checkpoint didn’t see her. In fact, it had been six weeks since anyone had. Hoover had even planned out all of the major stops she would take along the trail to pick up supplies and wire for money.

Since her disappearance three decades ago, her name has been forgotten, and only listed recently in public missing person reports and unsolved case files. To this day her family still does not know what ever happened to her.

8.  The Russian 11 at Dyatlov Pass

Named after the group leader, Igor Dyatlov, aged 23, Dyatlov Pass is the scene, or more accurately, the trail where a company of 10 students and graduates (most also in their twenties with just one in his seventies) of Ural Polytechnical Institute in Russia, succumbed to mysterious, unsolved deaths while ski-hiking in the northern Ural Mountains on February 2, 1959.

The group, all full of experienced trekkers, were camped at Kholat Syakhl when heavy snowfall and sub-zero temperature suddenly struck during the night causing them to hastily flee. Upon investigation, six victims’ deaths were suspected to be hypothermia, one victim a fractured skull, another brain damage, and another female victim with her tongue, eyes, part of her lip, and some of her facial skin missing from suspected putrefaction due to her face being in a stream of water for quite some time. Their deaths were a mystery and guessed to be caused by an “unknown compelling force” or an animal attack, hypothermia, an avalanche, infrasound-induced panic, military involvement, or some combination of these. For three years after the incident, this area was closed off..

7. Two Dutch Students in Panama

Two Dutch students  Kris Kremers and Lisanne Froon arrived in Panama for a six-week vacation on March 15, 2014 to tour the country for two weeks and then begin volunteer work with some of the local children for one month in Boquete. On March 29, 2014, they made it to Boquete where they were  accommodated by a local host family. On April 1, 2014, they went on a hike with the host family’s dog at around 11:00 am nearby the forests of the Baru volcano on the trail of Pianista. They even wrote on Facebook about their pending adventure before starting the hike.  As a very interesting note, they were reported to have been seen out for brunch with two young men (who were reportedly Dutch) before they set off.

The local host family became alarmed when their dog returned home that night without the two women. Froon’s parents stopped receiving instant phone messages from her, which Froon and Kremers both used to keep in contact with their families. On April 2, Froon and Kremers were supposed to meet their tour guide Feliciano at 8:00 am so he could guide them on the trails. After failing to meet Feliciano, he visited the local family to see neither girl there and so he went to the police station that night to declare them missing. The next day, aerial searches and searches by local tribes and farmers began over the forest. On April 6,Kremers’ and Froon’s parents flew to Panama along with police, special forces with dog units, and detectives from the Netherlands to do a 10-day search of the forests. Unfortunately, Kremers and Froon were not found. Their parents then offered a $30,000 reward for anybody that could help identify their whereabouts. Eventually months after, the women’s wheareabouts were discovered, but not in a comforting way.  By a river bank, Froon’s backpack showed bone remains (some that were bleached) and a boot nearby contained a foot with Kremers’ pelvis bone inside.  There cell phones were also found showing tons of emergency calls attempted.

6. The Hiker Who Was Missing for 9 Months at the Sierra

2. The Case of the Japanese Climbers in the Alps

Now, this story hits even closer to home (in terms of the date), in which an Alps climber this September found a foot remains at the bottom of the Matterhorn glacier about 9,200 feet above sea level. Forensic research of the foot were analyzed by DNA and since police in the mountainous region keep a list of people who have been reported missing since 1925 due to the many disappearances that have mounted there, they were able to identify the remains as belonging to two Japanese individuals: Masayuki Kobayashi, who was 21, from Tokyo, and Michio Oikawa, then 22, from Chiba, a suburb of Tokyo. This conclusion came after the police contacted the Japanese consulate in Geneva who then contacted the victims’  relatives in Japan to provide some DNA to fully confirm the theory. Having been missing since August 18, 1970, the two are suspected to have been caught in a snowstorm while heading to climb Matterhorn.

1. The Missing N.J. Attorney at the White Mountains

Another recent story stems from July 21 when an experienced hiker and New Jersey attorney by the name of Greg Auriemma, 63, was found dead in the Crawford Notch area of the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire. Auriemma had taken a bus up there in late June to take some adventurous strides up the trails as a metaphorical and physical way to celebrate the recent strides he’d made in treatment in his battle with cancer after having been given a terminal diagnosis with the illness two years earlier. His most recent diagnosis had been that he looked to have another three years of life. But, Auriemma’s body being found after a long week of searching cut that trajectory short. He had been due back home in New Jersey on July 5.