The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands

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But overall, this is a harrowing, heart wrenching journey for all involved. The terrain is magnificent, brutal, and unforgiving- but beautiful- despite the circumstances. 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. One elderly woman, who had become a dear friend to Jacob, told him that she was happy she had the chance to meet him before she died. He was a compassionate, loving person with a heart of gold and Billman portrayed him as an unstable mess. A year after living with us, he ended up getting an apartment, since he was doing well with his job and classes. He would visit us nearly everyday and oftentimes we, HIS FRIENDS, would pile into his small apartment to watch movies and play videogames. Searches are as unique as fingerprints.” Terrain, season, weather, circumstance of the disappearance, and physical / mental capabilities of the missing person all factor into a search plan.

THE COLD VANISH | Kirkus Reviews

Colorful side characters, like psychics and Bigfoot hunters, provide some light moments, but what makes a lasting impression is the story of Randy and his ultimately dashed hopes of finding his son alive. The author's personal involvement makes this tale all the more affecting."―Publishers Weekly (starred review)While watching an old episode of ‘Disappeared’ on Discovery plus recently, an anguished mother described her life as living somewhere between hell and hope. I think that may be the most apt description of being caged in the relentless trap of 'not knowing'. I personally didn't enjoy the book when I was reading due to the frequent mentions of Big Foot, aliens, and alternate dimensions as explanations for these 'cold vanishes'. I thought it to be really quite ridiculous and disrespectful to include these as legitimate explanations. If this was my loved one featured in a book, I too would be very upset.

The Guardian Top 10 books about missing persons | Fiction | The Guardian

I am horrified and quite glad that I did not finish this book for it's really closer to something like speculative non-fiction than it is a non-fiction. Ron Rash is renowned for his writing about Appalachia, but his latest book, The Caretaker, begins ... The narration is good overall, but it got boring at times, so much so that I was left wondering why I was even reading this work in the first place. I very much enjoyed parts of this book, primarily the smaller stories. I liked the bookend parts of Jacob and Randy’s story as well, although I found the middle parts in which Randy is wandering around looking at cult compounds to be both pointless and sad. Unlike those books, each of which focuses on a single disappearance, The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands presents the stories of multiple individuals who vanished without a trace in wild areas across North America and a few other places on the globe, including Australia, Israel and Hawaii. It is nicely structured, with a narrative that weaves around the efforts of Randy Gray to locate his son Jacob, who disappeared in Olympic National Park in April 2017. Alternating chapters relate the stories of other missing persons and of the individuals who are committed to finding them.

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Loved this book! Billman presents facts in an interesting way, and brings the stories of the vanished to life. I read my review copy, and then immediately bought the audio book. Hope to read more by this author! Lastly and probably one of my biggest issues with this so I will bring it up again. Billman did not get permission by the people he included in the book. He used full names, locations, and personal anecdotes that they were not informed he would use. It’s even more upsetting as he would make up information about them too. The most simple request I would like to make is that if you MUST continue to print this book, just remove the names and locations. I’m sure everyone would be much more comfortable and wouldn’t care about the lies as much if their names weren’t connected to such misinformation. Billman should’ve just taken inspiration and write a FICTION book if he wanted to use Jacob’s story so badly. Perfect for readers of Jon Krakauer and Douglas Preston, this "authentic and encyclopedic" book examines real-life cases of those who vanish in the wilderness without a trace (Roman Dial)—and those eccentric, determined characters who try to find them. 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: