Search and Rescue Responds to a Missing Person Call — Then Finds a Hidden Camera Deep in the Forest

Added: 2026-05-11

[00:00:00]Pay attention to the trail camera mounted on the pine tree at the eastern edge of the Callaway Creek trailhead. It is aimed not at the trail itself, but at the small gravel parking lot 40 yards below.

[00:00:11]At first glance, it looks like standard wildlife monitoring equipment, the kind forest services installed to track deer movement or flag illegal dumping. The housing is weathered, the mounting strap is old, nothing about it suggests urgency.

[00:00:26]Now, pay attention to the timestamp in the lower left corner of the footage.

[00:00:31]September 14th, 6:47 a.m. A gray Honda Civic pulls into the lot. A young woman steps out. She is wearing a green fleece jacket and dark hiking pants. She adjusts the straps of a small daypack, checks her phone once, and walks toward the trailhead without looking back. Her name is Mira Dunstan. She is 26 years old, a graduate student in environmental biology at Harwick State University. She has hiked the Callaway Creek Loop a dozen times. She knows every switchback, every creek crossing, every exposed ridge where the signal drops. She is not reckless. She is not inexperienced. She is, by every reasonable measure, exactly the kind of person who knows what she is doing.

[00:01:17]>> [music] >> By 4:00 p.m. that afternoon, she had not returned to her car.

[00:01:21]>> [music] >> By 8:00 p.m., her aunt Celeste Dunstan had called the Garner County Sheriff's Department three times. By 9:15 p.m., a search and rescue team was assembled at that same gravel parking [music] lot, headlamps cutting through the dark.

[00:01:36]What they were looking for was a missing hiker. What they would find, mounted to a tree deep in the forest, [music] aimed at a location no wildlife camera had any business watching, would reframe the entire case, and it [music] would terrify every investigator who laid eyes on it.

[00:01:53]Mira Dunstan had driven to the Callaway Creek trailhead that Saturday morning with a specific purpose. She was collecting soil samples along the creek's northern bank for her thesis, a longitudinal study of erosion patterns in second-growth Pacific Northwest forest.

[00:02:09]The work was methodical and solitary.

[00:02:11]She preferred it that way.

[00:02:14]Her thesis advisor, reached by phone the following day, would describe her as one of the most disciplined graduate students he had supervised in 20 years.

[00:02:23]She had texted Celeste Dunston at 7:02 a.m. just after entering the trailhead with a simple message, "Starting now.

[00:02:33]Back by 3:00." Celeste was not Mira's emergency contact out of formality. She was her closest family. Mira's parents had both died when she was in her early teens. Celeste had raised her.

[00:02:45]The two spoke every day.

[00:02:48]When 3:00 p.m. came and went without a message, Celeste called.

[00:02:52]Voicemail.

[00:02:54]She called again at 3:45, again at 4:30.

[00:02:58]Each time, voicemail.

[00:03:01]By 5:00 p.m., Celeste Dunston was in her car, driving the 40 [music] minutes to the Callaway Creek Trailhead. She arrived to find Mira's Honda Civic still in the lot, alone, the only vehicle remaining.

[00:03:13]There was no note on the windshield. The doors were locked. Mira's phone charger was coiled on the passenger seat.

[00:03:19]Celeste Dunston called 911 at 5:44 p.m.

[00:03:23]>> [music] >> Deputy Arlen Mast arrived at the trailhead at 6:20 p.m. He assessed the situation quickly.

[00:03:30]The vehicle, the time elapsed, the failed contact, he flagged it immediately as a priority missing person and requested SAR activation before dark.

[00:03:41]His instincts were right. The Callaway Creek trail system covered nearly 38 square miles of dense second-growth forest with three creek crossings that ran high and fast in September.

[00:03:54]Sergeant Bram Caldwell, coordinator for the Garner County Search and Rescue Unit, arrived at the staging area by 8:50 p.m. with a team of six. Among them were Lena Quarry, a 12-year SAR veteran who had worked recoveries across three states, and Declan Foss, a former wilderness EMT on his fourth season with the unit. Caldwell divided the team into two sectors based on Mira's known research zone along the northern bank.

[00:04:20]They moved out at 9:15 p.m. under cloud cover with temperatures dropping toward 40°. The forest at night gives nothing away easily.

[00:04:31]By midnight, the first three sectors had been swept without contact. No response to calls, no activated personal locator beacon, no disturbed ground or discarded gear.

[00:04:42]Mira Dunstan had, to all available evidence, simply stopped existing somewhere inside 38 square miles of Douglas fir and creek drainage.

[00:04:52]At 12:40 a.m., Lena Quarry's team reached the northern bank at the second creek crossing, precisely the area Mira had identified in her research notes, which Celeste had provided to the team.

[00:05:05]Quarry documented the site. Soil samples had been collected.

[00:05:09]>> [music] >> The flagging tape Mira used to mark sampling locations was still in place.

[00:05:14]She had been here. The work was partially done. The sample bags, three of them, were sealed and sitting upright against a root cluster, arranged as though she had set them down and intended to return.

[00:05:25]>> [music] >> Mira Dunstan had not left the trail in a hurry. She had stopped in the middle of a task.

[00:05:31]>> [music] >> That detail troubled Quarry enough that she radioed Caldwell directly. Caldwell expanded the search radius by a quarter mile in every direction from the second creek crossing. That order put Declan Foss and his two-person team on a game path running northeast, an unmarked social trail used by hunters in the off-season, not indicated on any official forest map.

[00:05:55]>> [music] >> Foss moved along the path for approximately 300 yards before his flashlight caught something on the bark of a mature Douglas fir, roughly [music] 8 ft off the ground.

[00:06:06]A trail camera. He almost kept walking.

[00:06:10]Trail cameras in forest land were not unusual, but something about its angle stopped him.

[00:06:16]He swept his light across the surrounding trees, orienting himself.

[00:06:20]The camera was not aimed at the game path. It was not aimed at the creek or at any wildlife corridor. It was aimed at the second creek crossing, at the exact location where Mira Dunstan had been working.

[00:06:34]Foss did not touch it. He took photographs with his personal cell phone, marked the GPS coordinates, and radioed Caldwell.

[00:06:42]Sergeant Caldwell reached the location 12 minutes later. He looked at the camera for a long time without speaking.

[00:06:49]Then he radioed Deputy Mast [music] and told him to contact the Garner County Criminal Investigations Division immediately.

[00:06:56]It was 1:58 a.m.

[00:06:59]The search for a missing hiker had just become something else entirely.

[00:07:04]Detective Oren Valek of the Garner County CID arrived at the trailhead staging area at 3:15 a.m.

[00:07:11]His partner, Detective Shauna Prewitt, [music] arrived 20 minutes behind him.

[00:07:16]Both had worked missing persons cases before.

[00:07:18]>> [music] >> Neither had been called to an active SAR operation in the middle of the night because of a camera mounted to a tree.

[00:07:25]Valek reviewed Foss's photographs on site. Then he hiked out to the camera location himself with Caldwell and Corey.

[00:07:33]He stood at the base of the Douglas fir for a long moment. The camera's angle was deliberate and precise. From that mounting height and position, the lens had an unobstructed view of the second creek crossing, the [music] flat open bank where Mira had been working.

[00:07:50]Anyone sitting in that spot would be fully visible. Anyone crouching at the water's edge would be in frame.

[00:07:56]Valek had the camera logged as evidence without removing it. He wanted it processed in place before it was touched. He contacted the Garner County forensic unit at 4:00 a.m. and requested an expedited response at first light.

[00:08:10]The SAR search continued through the night. At 5:33 a.m., as gray light began filtering through the canopy, Lena Quarries team located Mira Dunston. She was approximately half a mile northeast of the creek crossing, off trail, partially concealed beneath a rock overhang at the base of a ravine. She was conscious but severely hypothermic.

[00:08:34]She had a laceration on her left forearm and was unable to walk without assistance. She did not have her daypack. She was alive.

[00:08:44]Declan Foss stabilized her on site. A litter evacuation team extracted her from the ravine in just under 90 minutes. Mira Dunston was transported by ambulance to Garner Valley Medical Center at 7:20 a.m. where she was admitted for hypothermia and treated for her injuries. She was alive.

[00:09:03]But the question Sergeant Colwell and Detective Valek were now asking had nothing to do with her medical condition.

[00:09:09]It had everything to do with what she had seen and what had seen her.

[00:09:16]Mira Dunston was coherent enough to speak with Detective Prewitt by mid-afternoon on September 15th, roughly 32 hours after she had parked her Honda Civic at the Callaway Creek Trailhead.

[00:09:27]What she described was methodical and clear, delivered with the precision of someone trained to observe and document.

[00:09:34]She had been at the second creek crossing since approximately 9:30 a.m.

[00:09:38]Collecting her third set of samples at some point between 11:00 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. She became aware of a man standing at the tree line on the opposite bank.

[00:09:48]She had not heard him approach. He was simply there, watching her.

[00:09:53]She described him as somewhere between 40 and 50 years old, wearing dark work pants and a gray fleece.

[00:10:00]He carried no visible pack. He made no greeting.

[00:10:04]When she looked directly at him, he stepped back into the trees. She packed her sample bags and began moving back toward the main trail.

[00:10:12]He followed, not closely, not obviously, but she was certain of it. The sound of movement behind her when she paused, the absence of it when she stopped and turned.

[00:10:25]She made a deliberate decision not to run, not to show panic. She altered her route, moved off the main trail toward the northeast, trying to put [music] distance and terrain between herself and whoever was behind her.

[00:10:38]At some point, moving quickly down a slope she did not know, she lost her footing on wet rock and [music] fell into the ravine.

[00:10:46]The fall cost her the day pack, which went one direction, and her ability to walk more than a few steps without sharp pain in her right ankle.

[00:10:57]She pulled herself under the rock overhang, got as far from the edge of the ravine as she could, and waited.

[00:11:03]She heard him moving above the ravine for a period she estimated at 30 to 40 minutes. Then, silence.

[00:11:11]She stayed under the overhang until she no longer could.

[00:11:15]Prewitt relayed the account to Valec immediately. The man Mira described had not been a casual hiker who startled her. He had followed her deliberately, patiently, and without identification.

[00:11:28]And somewhere [music] in that forest, mounted on a tree with a direct sightline to her research location was a camera that had been watching her work possibly for far longer than that morning.

[00:11:40]>> [music] >> Vallec requested an expedited warrant for the camera's memory card. It was granted by 6:00 p.m. on September 15th.

[00:11:47]Tech Rosie Aldum of the Garner County Forensic Unit processed the camera in place, then transported it to the lab for full analysis. What the memory card contained was not the footage of a single morning. It contained footage spanning 11 weeks. The camera had been placed at the Douglas fir on or around July 3rd, more than 2 months before Mira Dunstan ever set foot on the Callaway Creek Trail that September. The memory card held continuous motion-activated footage covering the Second Creek Crossing and a [music] 30-ft stretch of the northern bank on either side. Tech Aldum identified 47 discrete recording events across those 11 weeks. Most were wildlife. Deer at the water's edge, a black bear in early August, birds triggering the motion sensor, but 17 of those 47 events were people.

[00:12:40]11 of them were Mira Dunstan. She had visited that exact location working her research transects on 11 separate occasions across the summer and early fall. The camera had recorded every one of those visits. The timestamp showed the camera operator, or whoever had placed it, would have been able to review that footage remotely. The camera model, identified by Aldum as a commercially available cellular-connected trail cam, transmitted motion alert thumbnails directly to a paired mobile device in near real time. Whoever had placed that camera had been watching Mira Dunstan work visit after visit, week after week.

[00:13:19]They had known her schedule. They had known her route. They had known exactly where she would be on the morning of September 14th. The remaining six non-Myra recordings showed other hikers and trail users at the same location.

[00:13:33]Four women, [music] two men.

[00:13:36]All appeared unaware of the camera.

[00:13:38]Valek and Prewitt now had a surveillance operation, 11 weeks in duration, targeting a specific young woman at a specific location in a remote forest.

[00:13:47]>> [music] >> They had a suspect description from Myra herself. They had a camera model and a serial number. What they needed was a name.

[00:13:56]The cellular trail camera serial number was the thread that unraveled everything.

[00:14:01]Manufacturer records, obtained under subpoena on September 17th, traced the camera's registered activation to an email account created through a free provider under the name R. Hart. The IP address used during account creation resolved to a residence in the town of Pell Crossing, 11 miles from the Callaway Creek trailhead.

[00:14:23]Detective Valek pulled the property records for that address on the morning of September 18th. The resident was a 44-year-old man named Gideon Hart. He had lived in Pell Crossing for 6 years, employed as a contract forestry technician, work that gave him extensive knowledge of trail systems, land survey points, and remote forest access routes throughout Garner County. His employment records showed he had worked a vegetation survey contract in the Callaway Creek drainage area the previous spring.

[00:14:50]He knew exactly where that creek crossing was. He had worked within a quarter mile of it. Valek ran Hart's background. No prior criminal convictions. No protective orders on file. No history of reported incidents.

[00:15:04]But a canvas of Hart's neighborhood surfaced a neighbor, Curtis Wade, who had noticed Hart's truck, a dark green late-model pickup, absent from the property for extended periods on Saturday mornings throughout the summer.

[00:15:19]Wade also mentioned, without being prompted, that he had once seen Hark loading what appeared to be trail camera equipment into the bed of the truck on an early July morning. Valek requested a search warrant for Gideon Hark's residence and vehicle on September 19th.

[00:15:34]It was signed by 2:00 p.m.

[00:15:37]The search of Hark's property took 6 hours.

[00:15:39]>> [music] >> Investigators found 11 additional cellular trail cameras in various stages of preparation in a detached workshop behind the residence. Seven were fully operational, their memory cards intact.

[00:15:52]Three had been wiped, but forensic recovery by Tech Alden retrieved partial footage from all three. The fourth was newly packaged, unused. [music] The recovered footage from the workshop cameras showed locations across three separate trail systems in Garner County.

[00:16:07]The subjects were exclusively women. 12 individuals were identified across the recovered recordings. All appeared unaware they were being filmed. The recording spanned, in total, a period of approximately 22 months.

[00:16:21]The Callaway Creek camera had not been Hark's first. It had been his most recent.

[00:16:27]On the hard drive of a laptop recovered from Hark's bedroom, investigators found a folder containing 340 still images extracted from trail camera footage. All women, all outdoors, all photographed without their knowledge.

[00:16:41]A second folder contained what appeared to be handwritten schedule notes, digitized, tracking the movement patterns of specific individuals at specific trail locations across seasons.

[00:16:52]Mira Dunstan's name appeared in those notes. So did the names of four other women.

[00:16:58]Gideon Hark had not been conducting surveillance opportunistically. He had been conducting it systematically over nearly 2 years, maintaining records with the discipline of a man who considered it a project. Ranger Olive Steck of the Garner National Forest Service, contacted by Valek's team on September 20th, confirmed that Hark had accessed a Forest Service vehicle access permit for the Callaway Creek drainage area on six separate occasions between July and September. Each visit corresponding within a day or two to a period of new recordings on the creek camera.

[00:17:34]He had been going back to check on it to verify the footage, to watch.

[00:17:40]Gideon Hark was arrested at his Pell Crossing residence on the morning of September 21st without incident. He did not speak to investigators. The charges assembled by ADA Winston Crane over the following weeks were extensive. Hark was charged with stalking, unlawful surveillance, and criminal invasion of privacy. The latter charge applied 12 times over, once for each identified victim whose image had been captured without consent. The following of Mira Dunston on September 14th generated an additional charge of criminal menacing.

[00:18:11]Prosecutors also pursued charges relating to the organized nature of the surveillance operation. The notes, the schedules, the systematic targeting of specific individuals.

[00:18:22]Medical examiner Dr. Petra Selk, brought into assess the physical evidence recovered from the ravine site, confirmed that Mira's injuries were consistent with a fall on wet rock. A fall that had occurred, forensic analysis suggested, while she was moving at a faster than normal pace across unstable terrain.

[00:18:42]She had not fallen because she was careless. She had fallen because she was running.

[00:18:48]At trial, ADA Crane presented the full scope of the operation. The 22 months of recordings, the 12 identified victims, the scheduling notes, the seven operational cameras found in Hark's workshop.

[00:19:02]The jury heard from three of the other identified women, all of whom had hiked the same trail systems Hark had monitored. All of whom had no idea they had been watched until investigators contacted them. The defense argued that Hark had not physically harmed Mira Dunstan, that the surveillance, while disturbing, had not crossed into criminal contact.

[00:19:23]Aida Crane's response to that argument was measured and direct. The fall into that ravine in freezing temperatures with no means of communication in terrain that took a trained SAR team 8 hours to search, that fall had come within a margin of killing her. [music] The man who put her in that position was the man who had spent 22 months watching women in the forest, [music] learning their schedules, and following one of them when the opportunity arose.

[00:19:51]The jury deliberated for 2 days. Gideon Hark was convicted on all counts. He was sentenced to 14 years in a state correctional facility with mandatory registration as a sex offender upon release and a lifetime prohibition from accessing public forest lands or holding any forestry, survey, or land management employment.

[00:20:13]Mira Dunstan recovered fully from her physical injuries. Her ankle healed over the course of several months. The laceration on her forearm left a small scar. She returned to her thesis research the following spring. Different trail system, different drainage, different county. She completed her graduate degree in June. [music] Celeste Dunstan was in the front row at the ceremony. In the aftermath of the Hark case, Garner County Sheriff's Department partnered with the state's [music] Department of Natural Resources to launch a systematic audit of unauthorized equipment on public trail systems, a review that had never previously been conducted.

[00:20:51]In the 14 months following Hark's arrest, rangers and volunteers removed 63 unauthorized cameras from public trails across four counties.

[00:21:01]None of those removals would have happened without what Lena Quarries team found in the dark on a game path at 12:40 a.m.

[00:21:08]Sergeant Bram Caldwell submitted Quarry and Foss for commendations. Both received them. The second creek crossing on the Callaway Creek northern bank is still there. Still flat. Still open.

[00:21:21]Still the kind of place where a researcher might set down her sample bags, crouch at the water's edge, and lose herself in the work. The Douglas fir is still there, too.

[00:21:31]The camera is gone.