Search for missing hiker at 3 weeks: Family clings to hope

GRANITE FALLS — Friends of Samantha Sayers climbed through wildfire haze this week to one of her favorite places, the summit of 6,220-foot Vesper Peak. They packed in cupcakes, grooved to her favorite Beyoncé songs and planted a rainbow flag in honor of her 28th birthday.

The only one missing from the party was Sayers. The hiker from Seattle vanished nearly 3 weeks ago on a solo day trip she had done about a half-dozen times. She was last seen near the summit of the difficult, 5-mile trail to Vesper, east of Granite Falls along the Mountain Loop Highway. Her family has no idea what happened to her.

“That’s the worst thing of missing without a trace,” Sayers’ boyfriend, Kevin Dares, said Thursday. “It’s far more terrible than if a loved one were to perish, because then you know, you grieve and it’s over.”

Dares, a real estate agent in Belltown, still clings to hope that Sayers will be found alive. This month his home has become a command center for volunteer searchers.

“Every picture has been ripped off every wall, and it’s been covered in maps, and clues, and media contacts,” Dares said, recovering from another search. His voice was full of optimism. “We’re hunting every angle.”

The Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office has not given up, either. But thousands of hours have turned up no trace. Sheriff’s helicopters have spent weeks using infrared cameras to scan the dramatic horseshoe-shaped basin between the peaks of Vesper and Sperry; the wide lush valleys at the headwaters of the Sultan River; and the spiny ridges that surround azure Copper Lake.

The sheriff’s office has added up the time spent on the search, through Aug. 12.

County air crews have given 357 hours.

Search & rescue deputies on the ground have given 329 hours.

Drone teams have given 150 hours.

A sheriff’s marine unit has given 82 hours checking Spada Lake.

Two technical climbing teams scoured the sheer north face of Vesper, a popular route for roped climbers, on Tuesday.

Time offered by volunteers has been uncountable, easily thousands of hours from mountain rescue crews, search dogs and handlers from all around Washington. Amateurs have catalogued their footsteps in shared maps, crossing off crevasses, ice caves and brushy zone after zone, as they’ve been explored — crowd-sourcing search efforts through Facebook and Instagram. Roughly 14 teams of trained search dogs were flown in to comb the terrain this weekend. Some camped in the alpine, to get an early morning start on the summit, sheriff’s spokeswoman Courtney O’Keefe said. Officials closed the trailhead for the search.

Dares started looking for Sayers late Aug. 1. He got in his car to drive 75 miles northeast of Seattle, when her phone call didn’t come as expected at 6 p.m. He found her Ford Fiesta at the trailhead.

Climbing through the dark, Dares slipped about two miles deep in the woods, broke a flashlight and retreated by the light of a cellphone, he said. He called for help at the ranger station in Verlot. An official search started around 1 a.m. Since then Dares has spent most days on the mountain, trying to keep negative thoughts at bay.

“You don’t let it consume you, or that’s what I tell myself, anyway,” he said. “There’s some days where I’m climbing and crying. … The fact remains that I just don’t know. Until I know, I’ve got to continue to push.”

He’s gearing up to stay up to 20 days in the wilderness, alone, searching slopes from the peak to the Sultan River valley.

So many possibilities have run through his mind, he said. He’s sure she could survive on berries and snowmelt streams. She’s a strong hiker, but she’d only brought a few sandwiches and no overnight gear. She’d packed a gray wool beanie, gray hiking pants, a light T-shirt, a green sports bra, a hoodie and a violet Local Lion daypack.

There’s no easy route to Vesper Peak. Even the main path — forest, streams, a long boulder field, loose switchbacks, a narrow pass, steep mud, towering snowbanks — is tough.

The trail itself is named for the Sunrise Mine. Hidden shafts dapple the dramatic geology, and the peak is guarded by natural dangers. Thinning, soft snow still coated the final, nearly vertical ascent to the summit on the day Sayers went missing. On social media, outdoor adventurers have wondered if Sayers went looking for mines. Or if she tried to scramble a nearby peak. Or if she wandered far off-trail, to rarely touched woods to the south.

A YMCA group saw her going up the trail that Wednesday morning. A small rock climbing group bumped into her just before 3 p.m. at the summit. A man eating lunch at the top noticed Sayers, too. He did not eat with her, as the sheriff’s office had reported earlier, O’Keefe clarified Friday. That witness has been working with deputies to pinpoint her last known movement, possibly to the southeast. The sheriff’s office still seeks tips.

Sayers sticks out in a crowd. She is bald from alopecia. She worked with the Seattle Repertory Theatre, and she ran an online store selling gifts for new mothers.

Many potential breakthroughs in the search have turned into frustrating dead-ends.

A boot print found off the trail ended up not having the tread of her new Sportiva boots.

A burning tree was wishfully thought to be a signal fire, but it appeared to have been hit by lightning.

Few local stories of missing hikers have exploded like this one, fanned by social media and television reports. Sayers’ smiling selfies were on the “Today” show on the weekend after she went missing; a Facebook page, #findsamsayers, has 18,000 people monitoring it; Dares was awaiting a massive, free shipment from the company that makes Clif Bars. Posters have been taped up across Snohomish and King counties, in restaurants, gas stations and tavern bathrooms. Sayers’ mother, Lisa Sayers, flew in to Seattle from Pennsylvania. She has been sharing updates on Facebook Live.

“This is what I know to be true, she’s alive,” she said this week in a video. “Until there’s any proof otherwise, that’s what’s true. Sam never gives up, and neither will we. That’s something my daughter has taught me her entire life.”

Lisa Sayers wears a T-shirt made for the family by a supporter, with a screen print she’s been using as a kind of catchphrase, “Love and Light,” to counter negativity. She has turned both to God and psychic mediums, she said.

“So much of what most of (the psychics) are saying is the same thing,” Lisa Sayers said. “She’s not as far as we think. We’ve been close to her so many times, that she may be hidden, that she’s near water, that she has water to drink, that maybe her leg is hurt and she can’t move as fast or she can’t move at all. I don’t know how you feel about that, I don’t know how I feel about that, but it’s validation that I know my daughter is still alive. That’s what we’re believing in.”

Underneath some posts from the family, people left links to the story of an Ohio man, 40, found alive Wednesday after a week missing near Mount St. Helens. He survived by eating bees and huckleberries. Dares has received messages of support from Singapore to Scotland, as well as horrifying, hurtful messages from strangers on the Internet. Yet he has tried to read every bit of it, so he doesn’t miss something critical. Social media has created its own mountains — of rumors, tips and leads — to sift through.

“We have seen the best of the best and we have had the worst of the worst,” Dares said. “If there’s anything this has done, it has brought people together. It has shown me that all kinds of people really do care.”

Sayers would have celebrated her 28th birthday Aug. 13. This week her mother flew back to Girard, Pennsylvania, where dozens of yellow ribbons have been tied around power poles as a message of support. Both Sayers’ mother and Dares asked that people keep talking about Sayers and keep looking for her, because her family certainly will.

On the rainbow flag that Dares brought to the summit, people signed notes in marker, begging Sayers to come home. One long love note ends: “I’ll never leave you behind.”

Caleb Hutton: 425-339-3454; chutton@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @snocaleb.