KallMeKris

And to someone reading it without prior knowledge of the area, it looked like a reasonable set

of options.

So on July 23rd, rather than retracing their route back out to the main highway, Egbert identified what looked like a more direct path westward through the mountains.

And from the valley, the Panamint Range rises steeply to the west, and there are a handful of routes through it, some paved and some not.

And the one Egbert chose appeared to cut through the mountains and come out on the other side, saving them significant backtracking time and getting them to cooler elevation camping a lot sooner.

And along the way, they stopped at the stone geologist's cabin near Anvil Spring, which was a structure that had stood in the back country for decades

and is something of a landmark for the relatively small number of people who travel that far into the park.

And the cabin has a guest log, and visitors are invited to sign it.

So Cornelia stopped and wrote a few lines in German, like we said in the intro, and she would write four names, their destination, and she would also write, we are going through the pass.

So a few days would go by, and the family would miss their flight on July 27th back to Dresden.

And at first this would have meant very little to anyone because international travel in 1996 involved misconnections and change plans with some regularity.

And there wasn't really a mechanism at this point that like triggered an alert if you missed a flight.

And the four of them were two adults and two children, and they had been moving through a foreign country without incident for three weeks.

So the silence that followed their missed flight was just silence for a while.

But back in Germany, family members and colleagues would have begun to notice.

There was no postcards, no phone calls, no word at all.

But tracing a family moving through the American West in the pre-smartphone era of 1996 was not a simple thing to do.

And communication between German authorities and American ones took a lot of time.

And the bureaucratic machinery of the International Missing Persons case moved slowly when there was no crime scene and no accident report.

and no last known location beyond a country the size of a continent.