They found nothing: no shred of clothing, no sign of a camp. Over the following weeks, hundreds of professional rescuers and trained volunteers searched the woods around Redington. George waited a day, then alerted the Warden Service, which instigated its well-rehearsed lost-person procedure. ![]() The first anyone knew that something was wrong was when she failed to show up for that rendezvous. They had arranged to meet at a road crossing 21 miles up the trail the following evening. She looks set for the trail.įorty-five minutes after leaving Poplar Ridge, Gerry texted George to tell him she was on her way. The Warden Service’s case report states that Gerry was wearing a "blue kerchief, red long sleeve top, tan shorts, hiking boots, blue backpack, distinctive eye-glasses, big smile." They are all there in that picture. At around 6:30 on the morning of July 22, they watched her gather her things, eat breakfast, and strap on her rucksack. ![]() They were the last people to see her alive. Rust and her hiking partner, who were walking south, encountered Gerry at the Poplar Ridge lean-to, a shelter just south of the stretch in Redington where Gerry went missing. One of them, Dorothy Rust, told The Boston Globe, "She was just full of confidence and joy, a real delight to talk to." She was a meticulous planner-she always knew where to find water and shelter-and her gregariousness and warmth won her many friends among fellow hikers. Her sense of direction wasn’t great, but she was well equipped. She was slow, managing about a mile each hour (she adopted the trail name "Inchworm," in recognition of her larval pace). A family emergency forced Jane to return home, but Gerry carried on alone. They made good progress, and by the end of June were in New Hampshire. They had help: Gerry’s husband, George, was shadowing them in his car, resupplying them at prearranged locations and occasionally taking them to a motel for a rest. They had planned to hike the trail "flip-flop" style, walking north to Katahdin then driving back to Harpers Ferry, before continuing south to Springer. She had set off with a friend, Jane Lee, on April 23, 2013, from Harpers Ferry in West Virginia. Courtesy of Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press Until the surveyor stumbled on her camp, no one had any idea what had become of her.Įxcerpt adapted from From Here to There: The Art and Science of Finding and Losing Our Way, by Michael Bond. Over two years, it failed to uncover a single clue. Her disappearance triggered one of the biggest search and rescue operations in the state’s history. Geraldine Largay, a 66-year-old retired nurse from Tennessee, had gone missing near Redington in July 2013 while attempting to walk the length of the Appalachian Trail, a national hiking route that stretches more than 2,100 miles from Springer Mountain in Georgia to Mount Katahdin in central Maine. ![]() He wrote later, "From what I could see of the location on the map and what I saw in the picture, I was almost certain it would be Gerry Largay." The news soon reached Kevin Adam, the search and rescue coordinator for the Maine Warden Service, who immediately guessed what the surveyor had found. He took a photograph, then hurried out of the woods and called his boss. He noticed a backpack, some clothes, a sleeping bag, and inside the sleeping bag what he assumed was a human skull. One day in October 2015, a forest surveyor working in an area of dense woodland near Mount Redington in Maine came across a collapsed tent hidden in the undergrowth.
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