AS FAR AS WHY YOU WOULD CARE ABOUT KSL'S NEWS ARTICLE: If you enjoy being in the backcountry going on hikes, have you ever wanted to learn from others' mistakes so that you don't have the same misfortune? Or are you just intrigued by mysteries of the great outdoors? Have you also noticed that on the news people go missing in the Uintas? Anyway, in 2003 a mother and daughter went hiking from a trailhead along the Mirror Lake Highway. It started raining as they were on their walk. They were found 9 months later under a lean-to shelter, and a ways from the trail. Search and Rescue said most likely they had gotten lost because the cold storms coming in forced them to hurry on back and in the process made a deadly navigation mistake, heading back in the wrong direction after making a wrong turn. SAR said most likely hypothermia is what finished them. They said this is because the ladies had been found under a lean-to shelter, and an emergency blanket had been found laying on the ground nearby. It also had been snowing after it was raining. The story of the hikers in the news, and a picture slideshow from their discovered camera can be found at KSL's "Pictured in Time" article
THE REASON WHY THIS IS STILL CONSIDERED A MYSTERY AND INTRIGUING TO MANY: The route Search and Rescue said the hikers took versus what the pictures on the hikers' camera appear to suggest are quite different! Search and Rescue had said they believed these hikers took the Crystal Lake Trailhead over to Long Lake, and on the way back took a wrong turn up the Middle Fork of the Weber River. However, remember these hikers had a camera which was found with them, pictures posted on KSL a few years later. What's intriguing is various people have gone out there looking for the locations of all those pictures and found that although these two women started from the Crystal Lake Trailhead, they must have instead traveled by Wall Lake, on up towards the Notch, but before reaching the Notch they cut on over to Clyde Lake, then for some unknown reason went straight over to Hidden Lake, then went down to the Middle Fork of the Weber River before they made it to their final resting shelter. Now it's a mystery for what may have happened to these women! Was their actual route intentional and did they get injured in the process, or did they instead get lost? User Dmitry Pruss from Summit Post has done a lot of research on this. He posted a map of what investigators suggest versus their actual route!
I went out there myself. Compare some of these pictures from the hikers' camera to what I took with my camera (ten years difference) Link to my GPS track with picture slide show, feel free to zoom in on my map or change to satellite view:
ONE OF THE PURPOSES OF THIS CACHE: To maybe come across someone who can help solve the mystery of where the final resting shelter was at, so that other hikers can learn from others' mistakes and hopefully be safe in the future. The approximate location of this final shelter is somewhere to the west of this cache, near the Middle Fork of the Weber River. Here is a photograph posted by Search and Rescue on KSL, of the final final resting shelter many want to locate:
DETAILS FOR THIS GEOCACHE: If you go up the Mirror Lake Highway to the Crystal Lake Trailhead, it's $6 recreational fee to park, and usually closed Nov. through May. An alternative way of getting there is driving East past Oakley up Weber Canyon to the Holiday Park Trailhead. Inside the geocache there is a DVD, Star Wars glow in the dark puzzle, and pedometer. Please trade fairly!