A missing student spent two nights near Yosemite Falls in March 2015. A visitor spotted him injured among boulders less than half a mile from the falls.
The missing student was eventually spotted less than half a mile from the base of Lower Yosemite Fall. For roughly forty-eight hours, that distance had been enough to conceal a severe injury.
On March 21, 2015, three friends from the University of California, Santa Barbara, arrived in Yosemite for their first visit. They went to the lower falls and began moving among the boulders near the viewing area.
After about half an hour, two of them looked for the third. He was gone.
Yosemite Falls: No route to search
The twenty-year-old wore jeans and a sweatshirt. He carried a camera but no phone or wallet. His friends searched for several hours before contacting rangers.
Responders faced a basic difficulty: nobody knew where he intended to go. The group had talked about hiking, perhaps to the top of the falls, but had not made a concrete plan.
Teams searched the boulder field and questioned visitors higher on the Yosemite Falls route. Without a direction of travel, they had to consider both an injured person hidden near the attraction and a walker who might have continued much farther.
The second night brought cold rain and a thunderstorm. That changed the urgency of finding someone whose clothing offered little protection from prolonged wet exposure.
On March 23, about fifty searchers from four counties joined Yosemite Search and Rescue personnel. Part of their task was to contact visitors who might have seen the student and narrow down where to look.
The camera offered a partial explanation
At approximately 11 a.m., a visitor noticed him among a pile of boulders. He was hypothermic and seriously injured.
The camera later provided clues. Investigators believed he had climbed toward Sunnyside Bench, possibly for photographs or as a shortcut. The park reported a fall of more than fifty feet. It also described the possibility that he had crawled toward the trail and sheltered from the rain among the rocks.
Investigators could piece together parts of the route, but his movements after the fall remained uncertain. At the time of the park’s release, his condition was critical but stable.
The site’s popularity had not guaranteed that someone would see him quickly. Rocks large enough to explore around were also large enough to hide an injured person from nearby traffic.
The unsettling scale of the search was therefore local as well as vast: multiple counties, dozens of searchers, two cold nights—and a young man still close to the place where the outing began.
Sources and reporting
Researched reporting: an original narrative based on the published records linked below.
