BRECKENRIDGE – On a clear fall day in September 2005, Michelle Vanek and a friend left the trailhead around daybreak, heading for the summit of Mount of the Holy Cross. A few hours later, the 35-year-old trying her first 14er took a seat in the saddle below the windy summit and urged her hiking partner to go ahead. She would meet him across the mountain on the descent.
No one would see Vanek alive again. It would take nearly 20 years to figure out what happened to the Lakewood mother of four.
Hundreds of searchers scoured the 14,007-foot summit in the days following her disappearance. On the third day she was missing — Sept. 27, 2005 — 126 people, six dogs, a horse team and five helicopters were involved in the search. The next day there were even more searchers, and one dog, Buster, from Front Range Rescue Dogs, signaled there may be something in the cliffs on the northeastern side of the peak, but weather forced the handlers to keep moving down the mountain.
They said they had to drag Buster along because he wouldn’t move. The search was called off after eight days, leaving so many questions and conjecture around her hiking partner, campers in the area and one of the largest searches in state history. (There were 21 search and rescue teams involved in the search of an area that spanned 16 miles by 7 miles at the top of Eagle County, including nine air operations and members of 23 agencies and local businesses.)
Every member of the Vail Rescue Group knows the Vanek story. Rescuers in every county of Colorado know well the stories and searches of lost adventurers who were never found.
“This case was something that was talked about pretty much after every team meeting,” said Erika German, who joined Vail Rescue Group in 2012.
German compiled every handwritten report, file and handdrawn map from the 2005 search. She pored over statements from Vanek’s hiking partner. In 2021 a hiker was reading about Vanek’s disappearance and reported seeing a boot on a hike months earlier. The next summer searchers found the boot and confirmed it was Vanek’s, delivering the first piece of evidence in the case.
In 2023, the head of Vail Rescue Group said he had seen Vanek in a dream and she told him “it was a man who got me into this and it will be a woman who gets me out,” German said during her keynote presentation at the Colorado Search and Rescue Association’s 16th annual SARCon gathering at Colorado Mountain College in Breckenridge last month.
A band of women with the Vail Rescue Group organized a search team and began a new investigation that included German’s consolidated information.
On one of those days, the team struggled to find a precise route on the vast peak.
“We felt she wanted us to have her perspective with route-finding challenges,” German told the standing-room-only auditorium filled with Colorado search and rescue leaders.
The searches by the women’s teams and German’s maps pointed to a vast alpine swath of ponds and boulder fields known as the Bowl of Tears. German spent 20 hours entering coordinates of previous searches into SARTopo, a digital mapping tool created by CalTopo for search teams across the country. Her map includes air, ground, dog and horse searches, all color coded. She deployed drones to help her craft new search maps.
The mapping showed the 2005 searches had been largely focused on areas where previously hikers had lost their way on Mount of the Holy Cross. But Vanek had not summited the peak, so her direction of travel was different than most hikers. In the compiled reports and maps, German saw that leads may have been lost in the long, mostly handwritten reports filed by search teams. She called it “information overload.”
“The original search focused on too many areas and had too many pieces,” she said. “It felt like it just could not all be put together.”
German’s maps showed a zone that had not been searched on the top of cliff bands in the Bowl of Tears. She and a partner were searching there in the middle of September last year when the partner spotted red. Vanek had been wearing a red T-shirt beneath a blue windbreaker when she went missing in 2005.
From that elevated perspective above the cliffs, the searchers were able to find Vanek’s ski pole and a backpack with the keys to her Toyota Sequoia. They also found a sliver of bone that later proved to be Vanek’s.
A few weeks later, searchers with a forensic dog team found the remains of Vanek in an alcove of a rocky chute. Vanek was less than a half-mile from where she was last seen in the saddle below the summit. Buster, the dog who signaled in the days after Vanek went missing, had shown interest in that exact area.
At a later presentation at the annual confab sponsored by the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, German rolled through dozens of maps she had built using online mapping tool SARTopo, each tracing one day of searching dating back to the first eight days of searches in September and October 2005.
German entered GPS coordinates that were handwritten in notes from those early search teams. She created digital search grids from hand drawn maps.
The final map with color-coded tracks from 19 years of searching is a Jackson Pollock painting of Mount of the Holy Cross. More than 30 searchers from teams across the state packed into a CMC classroom to hear German’s technical details about mapping several dozen days of searches involving hundreds of searchers.
German said evidence indicates that Vanek likely suffered a fatal fall as she contoured around the peak below the summit. She had left the established trail on the north ridge of the mountain.
“Exactly why she left the trail and how she fell will never be known,” German told her colleagues.
“This absolutely lights a fire under every one of us here today”
Ron Corkish, the longtime president of the La Plata County Search and Rescue team, recently assembled a cold case team to pore over Vanek-like disappearances. His team has called off four searches in the last three years.
Daniel Lamthach, an ultrarunner from Utah, disappeared July 17, 2022, while running in the Trinity Peaks area near Molas Lake. David Lund, a 29-year-old Durango trail runner, went missing Oct. 1, 2022, while running a long route through the La Plata Mountains. The search for 28-year-old ultrarunner Ian O’Brien was called off in July 2023 and his remains were found in September that year. On Sept. 3, 2023, a 79-year-old hiker named Jim Shadid disappeared while scouting possible hunting sites in the Hermosa Creek drainage south of the Purgatory ski area.
La Plata County searchers have recently deployed drones and cellphone detection technology to assist in searches. They also are using Eagle Eyes — a drone app that scans video feeds in real time and can search for color or motion that human eyes can miss — on its 50 to 60 search missions every year.
Josh Duttry, who joined the La Plata County search team in 2018 and runs the drone program, said the video app also can be used to scan previously captured video from aerial searches.
“This is just another tool in the belt, another thing we can use for tomorrow’s missions as well as going back,” Duttry said.
The new technology and innovation led by younger members of search teams — like German and Duttry — inspires Corkish. He’s hoping a combination of new technology and fresh perspectives can help families find closure.
“This absolutely lights a fire under every one of us here today,” Corkish said after German’s presentation. “We have a few unresolved cases, and they are on all our minds. They are the first thing we think about when we hear something like this.”
Ben Vanek, Michelle’s husband in 2005, attended German’s talk with two of their now-grown children.
The dentist said the questions surrounding Vanek’s disappearance were hard on the family, especially as conspiracy theories swirled.
“We still don’t know all the answers but we know some of it. This is not closure for us, but it’s peace,” he said. “This was a defining moment in our family but it doesn’t define our family.”
He called the gathered searchers — volunteers who contribute their time and gear to help rescue people in need — “unsung heroes.”
“We will do what we can to sing your praises,” he said.