People Keep Mysteriously Disappearing in New Mexico's Gila Wilderness. Natives Know The Real Reason

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Search and rescue in the Gila wilderness operates on a numbered system. When a hiker is reported overdue, an incident commander logs the case. A team is assembled. They go in. They search until weather or budget or terrain forces them out. And when they come back, they file a report. And on more days than the National Forest Service likes to admit, that report says the same thing. The team goes in to find the missing person.

[00:00:32]The team comes back, but the person is never brought back every single time.

[00:00:38]They come back one person short. And there is an underlying eerie reason why this area is so dangerous for hikers. In the largest wilderness area in New Mexico, 558,000 acres of canyon, ridge, ponderosa pine, and volcanic rock. That is by federal designation the very first place on Earth ever protected as wilderness.

[00:01:05]That is the rhythm. People go missing.

[00:01:08]Search teams come back without them.

[00:01:11]Sometimes the body is recovered later.

[00:01:14]Sometimes nobody at all. And no one can understand why this keeps happening.

[00:01:19]That is not folklore. That is not paranormal speculation. That is the federal government summarizing its own missing person's record. There is something wrong with this area. And tonight I want to tell you why. We will look at three cases tonight to help us understand what is going on making this area so dangerous for hikers.

[00:01:44]One, the people who carved homes out of these cliffs 700 years ago lived in them for a single generation and vanished.

[00:01:54]The park services official explanation written in plain English on the National Monument's own website. It is not known why the community was abandoned. After a century of professional archaeology, that is still the answer.

[00:02:11]Two, the people who came after them, who held this land for 600 years against everything that was thrown at them, and who before they were forced out by force of cavalry, were trying to tell us something about this country that there are things out there we do not understand and should not disturb.

[00:02:32]Three, the names, the dates, the hikers and runners and ordinary people just like you and me who walked into the Gila in the last 15 years and left their cars parked at trail heads that the Forest Service eventually had to come tow away.

[00:02:51]Before we go any further, I want you to keep one thing in mind. I did my best to research this, but there are many eerie details that just don't make any sense when you add them together. So, do let me know if you have any other information or opinion on this. And also, if you want to see more videos from us, then do make sure to subscribe and let us know where you are watching from in the comments. Thank you.

[00:03:18]>> If you have never been to the Hila, here is the drive. You start in Silver City.

[00:03:24]That is the closest town. Population around 10,000. There is a Walmart. There is a Holiday Inn. There is a Western New Mexico University Museum that holds the largest collection of Meimba's pottery in the country. And we will get to that in a minute. From Silver City, you take State Highway 15 north. The road climbs out of the valley and into Pinion Juniper Country and then into Ponderosa Pine and then it starts switchbacking and the switchbacks do not stop. 44 m of switchbacks. The map says it should take you under an hour. The road takes you closer to two. The road was not built to move people quickly. It was built to keep them slow, to let them think about where they are going. At the end of the road is the Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument. 533 acres of federal land embedded inside the half million acre wilderness. There is a visitor center. There is a paved trail. There is a 1mm loop that climbs about 180 ft up the side of Cliff Dweller Canyon. And at the top of that climb, you walk into five natural caves carved into volcanic tough. And inside those caves are 42 rooms. Real rooms, stone masonry, T-shaped doorways, fire blackened ceilings, wooden roof beams that the original builders cut from juniper and oak and ponderosa pine, hauled up the canyon, and set into morted stone walls. Tree ring dating puts the construction between the years 1276 and 1287.

[00:05:12]The wood is still up there, by the way, 750 years later, sitting in those caves.

[00:05:18]Original beams, original timbers, wood that has outlasted nearly every other man-made thing on this continent because the people who put it there built it to last. Archaeologists call the people who built it the Mogulong. Specifically, the Meimbras branch of the Mgolong. They were the same people who made the famous black on white pottery you have probably seen in a museum somewhere. Bowls painted with intricate geometric patterns and animal forms that collectors still pay tens of thousands of dollars for when an authentic piece comes up at auction. The Muggalon were not primitive. They were not transient.

[00:06:02]They had a continuous culture in the American Southwest that lasted by the most conservative estimate from around 300 B.CE to,300 CE. That is 1,600 years, longer than the entire history of the United States multiplied by 6. 40 to 60 of them lived in the cliff dwellings, 10 to 15 families. They grew corn and beans and squash on the meases above the West Fork of the Gila River. They hunted mule deer, elk, beaver, ducks, turkey. They wo cotton cloth. They made sandals out of yucka cord and agave leaves. They were skilled potters. They traded with neighboring cultures. They built their homes facing south into the warmth of the winter sun. and the natural overhang of the cave kept the rooms cool in the summer. The architecture is by any measure intelligent, considered permanent, and they occupied those caves for one or two generations. By approximately the year 1300 CE, within 20 or 30 years of moving in, the Molong were gone from the cliff dwellings. They walked out. They left the walls standing. They left the wooden beams in place. They left fire pits, grinding stones, ceramic shards. The oldest beams in the structure are dated to 1263.

[00:07:35]The newest to 1287, 24 years between the first cut log and the last, and then nothing. Then they were gone. The official explanation from the federal government on the National Park Services own website reads as follows. It is not known why the community was abandoned. And folks, I want you to understand how unusual that is. The park service does not write sentences like that lightly. The park service has billiondoll archaeology programs. They have ground penetrating radar. They have isotope analysis on bone fragments. They have the Smithsonian. They have 120 years of academic study on the Mogulon. And after all of that, on the official monument page, the answer is still we don't know.

[00:08:30]There are theories. The leading theory is drought. Tree ring data from the southwest shows what scholars call the Great Drought running roughly from 1270 to,300.

[00:08:43]There is no doubt that there was a drought. The trees record it. But here is the thing about drought as an explanation for abandonment. People dig in during droughts. They don't walk away from defensible high ground homes that they have just spent 20 years building.

[00:09:00]They certainly don't walk away from cliffhouses with stone walls 4 ft thick that hold their heat in winter and stay cool in summer. Drought makes you protect your shelter. Drought does not make you leave it. The second theory is conflict. The Apache had been pushing into the southwest from the north for centuries by then. And there is some evidence that the arrival of the Apache pressured the Mogulon out of the country. But again, the Mogulon weren't living in tents. They were living in fortified caves on the side of a cliff that you can only reach by climbing a single narrow trail. If you were trying to defend yourself against an enemy, the cliff dwellings would be the place you would dig in, not the place you would abandon. What we know for certain is what they left behind. In 1912, archaeologists working at the cliff dwellings recovered multiple mummified human remains from the caves. Most of them were lost to looters before the site was federally protected, but one survived. A mummified infant. the archaeologist called Zeke. Wrapped, preserved, left inside one of the rooms.

[00:10:17]The discovery made national news. It is part of why the monument received the funding to be protected.

[00:10:25]Now, I want you to sit with that for a second. The Moyon left in a way that meant they did not take their dead with them. In a culture that buried its dead with care, that left grave goods, that observed morttery practices we have documented from a thousand other Mgolon sites at the Gila Cliff dwellings. They left an infant behind in the room where it had died and they walked out and never came back to collect it. I am not telling you what that means. I am not even sure I know what it means. But I am telling you, it is in the federal record. It is what the archaeologist pulled out of those caves and the park service still has not been able to put that fact together with the drought theory in any way that makes sense. What I will say is this. The Mogul built homes meant to last forever. And they left them inside 30 years in a way that suggests they did not finish living in them. And the people who came next, who watched them leave, who moved into the country they had abandoned, held that same country for the next 600 years without ever building anything you couldn't walk away from in 20 minutes.

[00:11:45]That is not an accident. The Molon learned something. The Apache learned from them. The thing I keep coming back to is this. The Mgolon built homes meant to last a thousand years. and they couldn't make it 30. The Apache built nothing they couldn't fold up and carry on a horse and they held this country for six centuries. That is not a coincidence. When the Spanish first sent expeditions into what is now southwestern New Mexico in the 15 and 1600s, they encountered the Apache. The Apache had not been in the Chile country for as long as the Molon. Most scholars place the Apache arrival in the southwest somewhere between 800 and 1,000 CE, working their way down from western Canada along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. By the time the Spanish arrived, the Apache had been in the country for roughly 600 years, and they had taken its measure. The Spanish put a single word on their military maps to describe the territory the Apache controlled. Apacheria. It was not a polite word. It was a warning. It meant this is the country you do not enter.

[00:13:04]The Spanish tried, of course. They sent priests. They sent soldiers. They sent miners looking for silver and gold in the Molum mountains. The mortality rate was catastrophic. Spanish records from the 17th century read like a casualty list. Mission after mission abandoned, detachments lost, settlements burned.

[00:13:27]The Spanish Empire, which conquered the Aztecs and the Inca, which built cathedrals and colleges across central and northern Mexico, never successfully colonized the Gila country. They went around it. After the Spanish came the Mexicans, after the Mexicans came the Americans. The Wikipedia entry on the Gila wilderness, which I want to read to you exactly because the language is so understated, it almost hides what it is saying, puts the entire Apache military history of this country in a single sentence. Because of their fierce protectiveness, the area remained undeveloped into the 1870s.

[00:14:10]Three centuries of resistance summarized in 14 words. And the man who more than any other came to symbolize that resistance was born inside this wilderness. His name at birth was Goyakla which translates roughly to the one who yawns. He was born in 1829 near Turkey Creek, a tributary of the Gila River into the Bedon Co band of the Cherikawa Apache.

[00:14:39]The Bedon Koy were the smallest of the four Churikawa bands. His grandfather had been the chief. He had three brothers and four sisters. He grew up moving with his band through the canyons of what would almost a century later be designated the Gila Wilderness. The Spanish, who would eventually come to fear him more than any single Apache who had ever lived, gave him the name they called out in panic when he led raids on their settlements. They called him Geronimo.

[00:15:14]Geronomo's biography is wellknown. He fought for nearly 40 years. He surrendered three times. He led the final Apache resistance after the rest of the Churikawa had been forced onto reservations. In 1886, after his last breakout, the United States government sent General Nelson Miles after him with 42 companies of US cavalry. The Mexican government sent 4,000 soldiers. They cornered him with less than 30 fighters, most of his band by that point being women and children. And even then surrounded outnumbered more than a thousand to one the US army could not capture him. The surrender was negotiated in the end by Apache scouts.

[00:16:02]Apaches who had been pressured into working for the army who rode into Geronimo's camp in Skeleton Canyon just over the Arizona border and persuaded him to lay down his rifle on September 4th, 1886.

[00:16:18]He was loaded onto a train. He was sent to Florida, then to Alabama, then in 1894 to Fort Sil in Oklahoma. He died there, a prisoner of war, in 1909. He never saw the Gila again. I want to tell you something about how the Apache themselves described Geronimo. This is from the Mescalero Apache trib's own official website, which I want to be clear about. This is the Apache speaking for themselves on their own platform about their own ancestor. They say of Geronimo that he was a great spiritual leader and medicine man that he is said to have had supernatural powers, that he could see the future. And this is the line that I want you to hear that he could walk without creating footprints.

[00:17:12]Walk without creating footprints. I am not telling you that is literally true.

[00:17:17]I am not making a paranormal claim. I am telling you that the people who knew this country best, who had lived in it for 600 years before the United States Army learned it existed, described their greatest warrior as a man who could move through this land without leaving a trace. And I am asking you to hold that detail in your head while we talk about the rest. Because here is the thing about Apache resistance in the Heila. It was not just that they fought hard. The Comanche fought hard. The Lakota fought hard. The Apache held their country longer than any of them in a fraction of the numbers against a comparable enemy.

[00:17:59]The Apache did not build cliff dwellings. They did not build fortified pblos. They lived in wikiups, dome-shaped brush shelters you could put up in a few hours and walk away from in a few minutes. Everything they owned they could carry. They moved through this country the way the country itself moves. Quiet, patient in and out of the canyons, up and down the elevations.

[00:18:26]They knew where the water was. They knew where the deer crossed. They knew which canyons echoed and which ones didn't.

[00:18:34]which ridge lines hid the smoke of a fire and which ones broadcast it for 50 mi. The US army when it finally pursued Geronimo into this country had to contract Apache guides. Without Apache guides the army could not function in the healer. They could not find water.

[00:18:54]They could not find passes. They could not even tell whether they were being followed. The country was to a US cavalry officer in the 1880s fundamentally illeible. To the Apache, it was home. In 2004, almost 120 years after Geronomo's surrender, his greatgrandson Harlon Geronimo, a sculptor and a medicine man, returned to the headarters of the Gila River with his wife Karen, who is herself a medicine woman. They traveled to the place Geronimo had identified as his birthplace almost 7,000 ft up in the wilderness and they conducted a blessing in the Apache language. It is called Itidile.

[00:19:42]Harlen raised his fingers smeared with the yellow pollen of the river cattail to a gray sky and he prayed. He prayed for the security of the United States.

[00:19:53]He prayed for the elderly. He prayed for the youth and he prayed that the spirit of his great-grandfather in the spirit world would sense this place and appreciate it. Then he and a group of volunteers built a can of stones on the spot where Geronimo had been born. The Forest Service supervisor at the time, Marcia Andre, signed off on the project.

[00:20:18]It was the first official acknowledgement the US government had ever made that the man it had spent decades hunting and decades imprisoning had been born here on this ground before this ground was anything called wilderness. There is a backcountry guide who works in the Gila today. His name is Joe Sans. He descends from a band of Churikawa Apache who lived for months at a time in these same canyons because his band is not part of any federally recognized tribe because the federal recognition process froze the Apache nation as it existed in the moment of surrender. Joe does not have a reservation. He does not have a casino.

[00:21:05]He does not have a tribal seat. He has Apache culture and horses in his words and he has the healer. In 2020 in a National Geographic feature about the wilderness, he was asked what it meant to him to be in this country. He gave one of the most quietly devastating answers I have ever read. He said, "When I'm here, I'm in my home. When I'm here, I'm in my home." And less than 50 years after his ancestors were marched out of this home onto a train bound for Florida, 38 years to be exact, between Geronimo's surrender in 1886 and the federal designation of the Gila Wilderness on June 3rd, 1924.

[00:21:54]The United States declared this country the first wilderness in the world. The first place we ever set aside as untouched. The first place we ever called untrabled by man. The first place we ever decided to protect from the developing hand of civilization because it was so wild and so empty and so pristine. It was wild because the Apache had kept it wild. It was empty because we had emptied it. Here is where I want to be honest with you. Most documentaries about missing hikers frame Native American knowledge of the land as just folklore, as legend, as local color. The Apache held this country for 600 years. The federal government today, with every tool the modern world has to offer, fails to find people in it. Maybe the Apache knew something, we are missing out today. Maybe we are doing something wrong.

[00:22:56]The man who drew the line on the map was Aldo Leopold. He gets the credit for the wilderness designation, and the credit is real. Leopold was a Forest Service supervisor at the Carson National Forest north of here in the early 1900s. He had spent time in the Heila as a young man, and he had a moment in this country that changed him, that changed the way he thought about wild land. and that he eventually wrote down in a book called Asan County Almanac, which is one of the founding documents of American environmental thought. Leopold was on a ridge somewhere above one of the whitewater forks of the Gila River. He had a rifle. He saw a wolf below him. He shot her. He climbed down to where she was dying. And in his own words, which I want to quote exactly because the language is doing real work here, he wrote, "We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then and have known ever since that there was something new to me in those eyes. Something known only to her and to the mountain.

[00:24:13]Something known only to her and to the mountain." That moment, Leopold later said, changed his thinking on conservation. It was the moment he stopped seeing wild land as a thing to be managed for the convenience of hunters and settlers and started seeing it as a thing that had its own knowledge, its own logic, its own purpose that didn't require human approval to exist. By 1922, he was actively lobbying his Forest Service superiors to protect the headquarters of the Gila as wilderness. On June 3rd, 1924, the regional forester Frank Puler signed it into being, 558,000 acres, the first wilderness area on Earth. And here is the part of Liupold's writing that almost nobody quotes. In a draft forward to the companion volume of San County Almanac, Liupole wrote about his Gila proposal in his own words. I contrived to get the Gila headquarters withdrawn as a wilderness area to be kept as pack country free from additional roads forever. He understood even as he wrote it that the only reason this country was still wild enough to designate as wilderness was that the Apache had refused to let it become anything else. He was not preserving an empty land. He was preserving a land that had just been emptied by force and he knew it. Now let me tell you what happens to people who walk into the Gila today. On March 27th, 2012, an ultrarunner named Micah Tru, known among long-distance runners by his Tara nickname, Cabalo Blanco, the White Horse, set out for what was supposed to be a 12mi run from the wilderness lodge in Gila Hot Springs. He had made that run dozens of times. He left his dog in his car at the trail head, which is not what you do if you're planning a long day. He was 58 years old. He had spent 20 years living among the Tara people in Mexico's Copper Canyon, where he routinely ran 170 mi a week. He was the central figure of Christopher McDougall's best-selling book, Born to Run. By any reasonable definition of the term, he was one of the most prepared and capable runners alive in this country at that moment. Within hours, he was missing. The search that mobilized for Matru was unlike anything the healer had ever seen. Three aircraft, at least nine, search and rescue teams on horseback, in off-road vehicles, on foot. Ultrarunners flew in from across the country and from Mexico. Scott Jurich, Kyle Skaggs, Timothy Olsen, dozens of athletes who had run with Cabalo Blanco in the Copper Canyon Ultra. They covered 200,000 acres in 4 days. 200,000.

[00:27:25]That is more than a third of the entire wilderness. searched in 96 hours by professionals and elite athletes who knew exactly how a runner of his ability would behave if he were lost or injured.

[00:27:41]On March 31st, friends of his, not the official search teams, but his own friends who knew his running patterns, who had been retracing the lines they thought he would have run, found his body about 3 mi from where he had last been seen. He was on the bank of a stream. His legs were dangling in the water. There were abrasions on his hands and forearms and knees consistent with a fall. The Grant County Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death cardiammyopathy, an enlarged scarred heart, a condition some endurance researchers have begun to call Fidipades cardiomyopathy, named for the Greek messenger who ran from Marathon to Athens and dropped dead at the finish. The official cause is on the record. I am not arguing with it.

[00:28:35]What I want you to sit with is this. A man who had run thousands of miles in some of the harshest country on earth.

[00:28:44]Who knew this trail by heart, who took a 12mile run from a place he had stayed at for years. His body wasn't found for 4 days with every resource the modern world could throw at the problem. 4 days in a country where on his last run he was wearing nothing but shorts and a t-shirt and carrying one water bottle.

[00:29:07]If mic true can disappear in the kila for 4 days with three aircraft and nine search teams looking for him, what do you think happens to the people whose families don't know to call the Taraumara?

[00:29:20]Same year, same wilderness. February 2012, an Albuquerque woman named Margaret Paige, 41 years old, told her family she was going to Florida. She was not going to Florida. She drove into the Chile with her cat, parked her car at a trail head, and disappeared. The Forest Service ran her plates on February 25th, they actually found her car, and through what the official investigation later called a communications failure. No search was launched. 3 weeks went by.

[00:29:56]Her sister kept calling. Her sister escalated. Search and rescue went in.

[00:30:02]They found her huddled in a sleeping bag with her cat whose name was Mia and who never left her side. She had lost a third of her body weight. She was barely able to speak. She had been rationing the food she had brought and drinking water from a stream. She was alive, barely. The geler had her for nearly a month before anyone came.

[00:30:27]Stop and think about this for a second.

[00:30:30]The Forest Service literally found her car. They ran her plates. They knew where she had gone in. And nobody got a search organized in time. Now imagine the case where there is no car at the trail head. No phone call, no license plate in the system, just a person who walked in and didn't walk out. And nobody noticed for over a month.

[00:30:57]In 2007, before either of those cases, an unnamed hiker, and that is part of the point. The records on this case are fragmentaryary, survived 40 days lost in the Gila wilderness before being found. 40 days.

[00:31:16]It set the New Mexico state record for the longest a missing hiker has ever been recovered alive in the state's history. the hiker survived. But you do not set a record like that without a system that fails. You do not set a record like that in a small forest. You set a record like that in a country that hides people from the people looking for them. And then there are the cases that don't make the news. The hikers whose names appear once in a county sheriff's bl and never again. The cars towed from trail heads after the parking time limit expires. The campsite where someone left their pack and their water bottle and walked off and didn't come back. And a passing party found the gear 2 months later and reported it. And nobody ever attached a name to it because there were no missing person's reports filed that matched. The Gila wilderness is jurisdictionally fragmented in a way that makes it almost uniquely difficult to track. The wilderness is administered by the Forest Service. Inside the wilderness, the 533 acre Gila Cliff dwellings are National Park Service. Search and rescue is run by Grant County and Katrine County, depending on which side of the line you went missing on. And those two counties have had ongoing jurisdictional disputes about who pays for what. New Mexico State Police get involved when foul play is suspected. The Bureau of Land Management is responsible for some of the access roads, six different agencies, three different chains of command, two counties, one wilderness, and a hiker who has been missing for 48 hours. Some are never found. That's the official line. And the official line is, if anything, an unersell. I want to bring this home. Now, the Keela Wilderness is the first land we ever called wild. We called it wild because by 1924, it was empty. And we called it empty because we had spent three centuries making it empty. The Apache held it because they understood what the country was and what it asked of the people who lived inside it. The Molyong couldn't hold it. They built homes meant to last forever. And they walked out of those homes inside 30 years, leaving an infant in a stone room behind them. And the federal government cannot tell you why. The Spanish couldn't hold it. The Mexicans couldn't hold it. The US cavalry could only hold it once they had removed by force the people who had been holding it for six centuries. And every year the search teams who go in there come home with fewer answers than they walked in with. Some of the missing get found. Some don't. And the federal record on the federal page in the federal language says it as plainly as it can. It is common. Some are never found. I don't know what's out there. I want to be clear about that. I am not making a paranormal claim. I am not telling you there is some crypted in the canyons or some spirit on the ridges.

[00:34:41]The official cause of death for every name case in this video is on the record. Heart failure, hypothermia, falls, exposure, dehydration.

[00:34:53]Those are the federal answers and I am not arguing with them. But I am telling you that the Apache held this country for 600 years in numbers that never exceeded a few thousand people against forces that should have annihilated them in a generation. I am telling you that the Mgolon left in a way that does not match a drought theory and the park service knows it which is why the park service still uses the phrase it is not known why. I am telling you that on a continent where almost every other native homeland has been paved, damned, drilled, fenced or cleared, the Gila is one of the very few places where the country itself, the actual physical land, still operates by the rules that the people who lived there for centuries understood. Quiet, patient, carrying nothing, leaving no footprints. And every summer the people walk in with light packs, with trail apps, with the assumption that they will be the exception that the country will accommodate them. That the search teams who come looking when they don't check in on schedule will find them, will pull them out, will get them home. Sometimes that's how it goes. Most of the time that's how it goes. And sometimes the search team comes home alone and the family waits and the trail head parking lot has one car too many. And eventually the Forest Service towes it and the file gets thinner and thinner until the agency closes it. And the case sits in a county records office in Silver City or reserve. And the wilderness goes back to being what it was before the missing person ever walked into it. Quiet, patient. 558,000 acres of canyon and ridge and old growth pine. Doing what this country has always done to anyone who walked into it without knowing where they were. The Apache always knew. The Molon learned and they got out while they still could.

[00:37:06]Aldo Leopold had a glimpse of it in the eyes of a dying wolf and called it something known only to her and to the mountain. We named it wilderness in 1924. We protected it with federal law and we still walk into it every year, every summer like the rules don't apply to us. They do apply to us. The country has its own way of saying so. As strange as this case was, I know there are areas with even stranger cases and much more detail than this cases that genuinely disturb me. If you want to see those, then consider clicking on this one appearing on the screen right now. Thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next