Haley Fox

And he clocked Ajay's regular parking space, the one closest to the trailhead.

Farley remembers that the day Ajay disappeared, his white Ford F-150 truck was parked in that very same spot, surrounded on all sides by wilderness.

And it creates a bowl shape.

We're not totally sure about the devil part of it, though.

According to local lore, early homesteaders saw a grinning devil in the rock formations.

We didn't see Satan in the rock face.

But we did see something else.

Thanks to a county park employee named Dave Neumer.

Pattern recognition is why we see gods and goddesses in the stars, and the man in the moon.

It's also a key part of criminal investigations, a way to turn information into a story.

And that's why we've come to the Devil's Punchbowl, to see if we can make sense of what happened on June 11, 1998.

So we pull out a map we printed from the internet, because we're prepared journalists and elder millennials, and we present it to Ranger Farley.

Let me show you what it looks like.

This will definitely get us lost in the wilderness, but it was a good thought.

Farley proves his outdoor prowess by whipping out some real maps of the area to help orient us to our surroundings.

Okay.

One witness reported seeing Ajay near the picnic tables at the main trailhead sometime before noon.

This witness was a local teacher there on a field trip with a bunch of elementary school kids.

Ajay stopped to talk to him.

He pointed to a jagged mountain in the distance, Mount Baden-Powell, and said that's where he was headed.