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  When You Find My Body

  When You Find My Body

  The Disappearance of Geraldine Largay on the Appalachian Trail

  D. Dauphinee

  Camden, Maine

  An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

  4501 Forbes Blvd, Suite 200

  Lanham, MD 20706

  www.rowman.com

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2019 by Denis Dauphinee

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

  ISBN 978-1-60893-690-8 (hardcover)

  ISBN 978-1-60893-691-5 (e-book)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  For Raymond Dauphinee Sr.,

  who taught me what to do if ever I were lost in a wood

  Contents

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1: The Good Trail

  Chapter 2: Trail Magic and Zero Days

  Chapter 3: A Hike Worth Doing

  Chapter 4: Maine

  Chapter 5: Off the Beaten Path

  Chapter 6: Lost

  Chapter 7: What Is One to Do?

  Chapter 8: The Search

  Chapter 9: The Will to Live

  Chapter 10: All Leads Explored

  Chapter 11: Dig Deeper, Keep Looking

  Chapter 12: Acquiescence

  Chapter 13: Legacy and Lessons

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  On October 14, 2015, on the eastern slopes of the four-thousand-foot Redington range, just north of the Appalachian Trail in Maine, two contractors were conducting an environmental survey on lands used by the US Navy for its Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school. Often referred to as the SERE school, the training takes place on a naval property whose southeastern border runs along a section of the Appalachian Trail and is separated only by a corridor of forest about five hundred feet wide.

  It was eighty-six degrees that day, hot and humid. The surveyors were young and physically fit and were used to negotiating the steep ravines, the thick, burly cedars, the scrub spruce trees, and dwarf juniper that choke the many small brooks in the area. They were practised at cutting swaths through sections of brush that are so hard going that moose, deer—even rabbits—walk around them. The topographers were cruising through the forest about 10:30 in the morning. At the top of a steep, rounded ridge, they sighted a transect—a fixed path an observer can move along and count certain species of a study, such as plants or animals.

  Once the transect line was established between two fixed points, the man operating the transit stepped backward to obtain a bearing, sighting between the two chosen points, like a golfer lining up a shot. On the third or fourth backward step, the young man stepped on something strange—it wasn’t a stick. It wasn’t a rock. The surveyor looked behind him. It was a collapsed tent. He stood, staring at the ground, analyzing the moment, when he called to his partner: “I think I found that hiker.”

  They looked around. There, in the scanty shade of a hemlock tree, were the remains of a campsite. There was a small, flattened, black tent with a mustard-yellow rain fly. They inspected the site. Lying near the tent was a green backpack. Near the tent and backpack was a tattered sleeping bag.

  The young surveyor peered closer. Inside the bag were some bones. They were unmistakably human.

  For the discoverers, it was disconcerting. They collected themselves, snapped a photo of the site for the state police, and created a waypoint of the campsite on their GPS. It was a waypoint of despair. The remains were less than eight hundred yards from the Appalachian Trail.

  To the west of the surveyors was the wrong direction home, leading deeper into the forest. To the east, a steep slope led fifty yards downhill to a boulder-strewn brook. They chose a route and made their way out of the dense woods and called their boss at the forest resource and management company they worked for, who called the state police.

  DNA testing would later prove what everybody had suspected, and what the head of Maine’s official search-and-rescue team, Lieutenant Kevin Adam of the Maine Warden Service, had known to be true: the body on the knoll was that of Geraldine “Gerry” Largay, most recently from Georgia, who had gotten lost two years earlier when she’d left the Appalachian Trail to relieve herself. She had walked off the trail to get out of sight, and, at some point, she’d become disoriented. Had she been distracted by a lovely plant? Did she see an interesting bird? (Gerry loved birds and flora.) Whatever happened, she’d gotten turned around and could not find her way.

  Within forty-eight hours of her stepping off the trail, one of the largest, most challenging rescue efforts in the history of the state was under way. Gerry was lost.

  In Maine, the warden service has a remarkable 98 percent success rate for finding people lost in the woods. They’re good at it, and they pride themselves on it. During the extensive search in 2013 for Appalachian Trail hiker Geraldine Largay, it seemed the entire state of Maine was either emotionally or physically invested in her cause. I, too, was invested.

  The book before you is less a biography than a reporting. Perhaps it is an homage. It is meant to celebrate not only Gerry’s life but also her spirit of adventure, her yearning for lifelong scholarship, her will to pursue her dream, and her faith. I hope that it will illustrate her journey—and the journeys of those who tried to help her. This book will cover aspects of the Appalachian Trail, the many volunteer searchers, and the Maine Warden Service.

  Though I have years of search-and-rescue, medical, wilderness, and expedition experience, I have tried throughout this book to minimize my own opinions and have drawn conclusions based on research from those involved closely with Gerry’s ordeal, from testimony of some who knew her well, and from people she met on the trail.

  Geraldine Largay was an extremely likeable woman. She seldom complained. Well into her sixties, when some people settle into complacency as they approach seventy, she possessed an insatiable desire for learning. Having never met Gerry, those traits, realized from conversations during my research, have endeared her to me.

  Once she became lost in the forest, Gerry’s saga was miserable. She was in the thick of it. Nature has the power to save people and to break hearts. There were mistakes made, which will be discussed, but it’s important for the reader to understand that for more than three months on the trail, in a difficult environment, and with the considerable help of her devoted husband, George, Gerry more than held her own. Some readers will regard her as simply someone who shouldn’t have been hiking alone, and others will debate whether she should have acquired some “woods sense” in addition to her hiking experience. Others might call it a perfect storm of unfortunate events. My deductions, born of two years of research, are rather simple in the end and will be evident in the pages of this book. I invite readers to form their own opinions.

  Appalachian Trail hikers have a tradition of adopting “trail names.” Please note that to avoid confusion, I have italicized each hiker’s trail name thr
oughout this book.

  D. Dauphinee, October 2018

  Chapter One

  The Good Trail

  The forest makes a claim upon men’s hearts . . .

  that so wonderfully changes and renews a weary spirit.

  —Robert Louis Stevenson

  Tim McElhannon had already hiked hard for five hours in the low, rolling hills of the Mahoosuc Range on the Appalachian Trail in southwestern Maine when he cruised over a hill in the trail and saw a woman sitting on the ground with her pack off. The day was clear and windless, with temperatures in the eighties. The dew point was high, which made it a warm day in the mountains of Maine. The air felt heavy. The songbirds were quiet in the midday heat, and the distant drone of the cicadas made the day seem hotter still. The date was July 17, 2013. Tim stopped to say hi to the woman, and they exchanged greetings. She looked to Tim, who was fifty-six years old, to be a hiker of some age, older than himself. As they shook hands, she introduced herself as “Gerry . . . Inchworm,” her adopted trail name. Tim noticed that Inchworm was a small woman but looked fit for her age. With her short brown hair, black-rimmed glasses, and her ready smile, she graced the trail with a certain style.

  “Walker,” he said, sharing his trail name. “Tim, in the real world.” Gerry flashed an effervescent smile.

  “I really paused just to say hello,” Tim recalls, “to exchange trail names, and to make sure everything was okay with her. I felt she had a special quality about her, so I took off my pack and sat down next to her.”

  Stopping during a hike was unusual for Tim. A former navy helicopter pilot and instructor at the Virginia Military Institute, he is an athlete, tall and lean. He likes to hike fast, and he likes to keep moving. He is a handsome, high-achieving family man and is kind to strangers—one of those career military men who seem like regular, nice gentlemen but whom you want in your corner if things go south. But Gerry, just by being there, made him slow down and relax. The new acquaintances looked out across the blue and gray hazy landscape at Baldpate Mountain, one more scene of beauty among hundreds along the Appalachian Trail. Both were thru-hikers, tackling the entire “AT” in a single season.

  “My husband, George, is following along the hike in his car,” Gerry told Tim. “I get to spend most nights with him in towns along the way. He’ll be waiting for me at the road crossing near Andover. If you want, he can give you a ride into town, and he’ll have time to get back and pick me up.” She knew her pace. She mentioned that she was hiking slowly and that she had some back pain. Gerry had been hiking on her own for eighteen days.

  “Once I was a few miles down the trail,” said Tim, “I called the Pine Ellis Lodge in Andover, where Inchworm and George would be staying, and made a reservation. The manager offered to meet me at the road crossing, and, not knowing for certain if George would be there, I took him up on it.” When Tim reached the crossing, George was there waiting. Tim told him he had met his wife, and they made plans to have dinner together.

  Once Gerry and George finally got to the lodge, “Gerry was pretty tired,” recalls Tim. He and George picked up some takeout food while Gerry got cleaned up, and they all ate, talked, and watched television at the lodge before calling it an early night. The next morning, Tim rode back to the trailhead with Gerry and George. “Being a faster hiker,” reports Tim, “I didn’t expect to see them again on the trail.” (Tim’s daily hiking mileage was about twice that of Gerry’s.)

  But Tim did see them again, just three days later. Walker reached the town of Rangeley on the 19th. “I planned to stop just for the night,” remembers Tim, “but there were some severe thunderstorms, so I decided to take a zero day”—those days when no trail miles are logged. “About lunchtime on the 20th, I ran into George at an ice cream shop. We talked for a while, and George said Gerry was scheduled to arrive that evening. He mentioned that Gerry had been hiking with Dianne Gummy Bear Cook, a Canadian woman whom I had met on July 4th, outside of Hanover, New Hampshire.” Tim had crossed paths with Gummy Bear several times on the trail. “I remember being happy that she and Gerry were hiking together,” Tim recalls.

  At the ice cream shop, Tim and George made plans to have dinner together with Gerry at a popular pizza shop in Rangeley. “We did,” said Tim. “We had a great dinner, and we talked a long time.” Gerry and George—both gregarious people—opened up to him. They explained to Tim how they’d met and what their plans were for the future. Though they’d raised a family in the Nashville area, George and Gerry had most recently lived in Georgia.

  “Gerry wanted to finish her hike and then move to Nashville, where she could be close to her grandchildren,” recalled Tim. “She said she wanted to be close to her ‘babies.’” Gerry and George were both air force veterans, and Tim was retired from the navy. The three talked for a short time about the military. “We had that connection,” says Tim, “but we didn’t go into any great detail.”

  The three made tentative plans for the future. Because Gerry was trekking the northern half of a “flip-flop” hike, she hadn’t hiked any part of Virginia yet. Tim lives in that state, in Lexington, about twenty minutes from the AT. “We made plans for them to stay at my house when Gerry would be hiking through my part of Virginia,” said Tim. “I told them I would help them with shuttles and give them some local intel” (read: best ice cream places) “and maybe hike a few days with Gerry.” George paid for the pizza. “He wouldn’t accept any money from me,” said Tim. “He was a generous guy. I had such positive feelings about them both. I looked forward to seeing them again some time in the fall, in Virginia.”

  “The next morning, July 21st,” reports Tim, “I had made arrangements for a shuttle to the trailhead. Postman, a hiker I had hiked off and on with since North Carolina, arrived at the hotel early to share the shuttle. The shuttle was late, so I called George on his cell phone to see if we could ride with him and Gerry to the trailhead. It went straight to voice mail. I left a message but didn’t hear back.” The cell service in western Maine is notoriously spotty. It is not unusual to have to travel miles for any reception. “Eventually, the shuttle arrived,” said Tim. “Once on the trail, Postman and I hiked together for a while, but he had to stop and fix a problem with his pole. I kept on hiking, knowing he’d catch up to me.”

  About a mile or so later, Tim came upon George and Gerry stopped on the trail. “Hello!” said Tim. “I was happy to see them again and asked them how they were.”

  “I’m just hiking in with Gerry for a few miles to make sure she’s all set—to make sure her water’s right, and to make sure she’s okay for the next couple of days,” said George. (This stretch of trail is rough going, as they say in Maine, and many hikers require two nights to reach the next road crossing, usually staying at the Poplar Ridge and Spaulding Mountain shelters.) They all exchanged hugs, and Tim kept hiking.

  “I had a strange feeling after our brief meeting on the trail that something wasn’t right with them.” Tim recalls, “They weren’t as warm and friendly as they had been the night before. I wondered if they were having a disagreement about something.” That was the last time he saw Gerry and George on the trail. What couples, married or otherwise, don’t have occasional disagreements? It could’ve been anything: Was George’s back hurting? Gerry’s? Disagreement on how much water to carry? Had Gerry forgotten something at the hotel? It was just a feeling. Had Tim misread them, and actually all was well? (George would later say that Inchworm had told him that the trail was getting harder for her.)

  Tim was among the last people to see Gerry alive.

  Eighty-seven days earlier, on April 23, 2013, sixty-six-year-old Geraldine Largay and a hiking companion, Jane Lee, had departed north from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, on their quest to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. It had been an auspicious start. Both women were relatively fit, and though they did not have mountaineering experience, by any means, they had worked hard to acquire the expertise t
o tackle the physically and mentally tough AT.

  Most thru-hikers, like Tim Walker McElhannon, are nobos—hiking northbound—starting at Springer Mountain in Georgia. About 10–15 percent hike southbound. They are called sobos. Both hiking directions have their pros and cons. There are enough overlapping pros, however, that some hikers, like Gerry and Jane, make the decision to attempt a flip-flop hike: typically starting at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and hiking first to Maine, then traveling back to Harpers Ferry and starting again, hiking the southern half of the trail. The two women were well prepared; Gerry’s husband, George, would be driving his Toyota Highlander along the way, helping with equipment, food, and support. Eventually, his adopted trail name would become Sherpa. A preexisting back ailment, combined with the fact that an AT thru-hike “wasn’t my thing,” kept George from attempting the adventure. “This was her hike,” he would say. George, like other family members, felt strongly that his wife should not attempt the Appalachian Trail without a companion. Jane Lee, Gerry’s hiking friend, would be that companion.

  Gerry and Jane had met years earlier when they were members of the Alpharetta Newcomers Group, a multi-interest club in Georgia. They both belonged to the same canasta club.

  “When I was hosting the group at my house,” said Jane, “I overheard Gerry talking about going on a hiking trip in the Smokies. I asked if I could join her, and the rest is history.”

  Gerry Largay, born Geraldine Burnite, grew up in a family of modest means in Tampa, Florida. Graced with an infectious smile and love of learning, she easily made friends. One of her earliest and closest childhood friends was Betty Anne Ferguson. Gerry and Betty Anne were in the Girl Scouts together and went to the same high school. Still active in the Girl Scouts while in high school, Gerry would play the ukulele on campouts for sing-alongs with the Scouts. “Our singing probably wasn’t great, but it was so much fun when she played the ukulele,” says Betty Anne. “I’m not sure if she actually knew any chords, but it sounded good.”