There are roughly 1,600 people that have vanished in America's national parks or forests,

but there really is no official way of keeping track of those who have gone missing on federal land.

Once the search is done, it's done.

If the missing person isn't found after about a week or so of searching,

efforts to look for that missing person

just sort of evaporates.

And this is especially true if the search involves disappearances in the wilderness.

Everyone kind of just goes back to their everyday lives, the missing left behind, and the families

left wondering.

In a way, I understand as painful as it is to leave a place where you know someone is,

thinking that they might just be found around the next bend or just over the next embankment, obscured from our view, but possibly so close.

You just can't search forever though.

You have to walk away hoping that at best with some

sheer stroke of luck that maybe that missing person might somehow miraculously make their way to safety or at worst

someone will someday stumble across what remains.

The fact is that there just aren't enough resources to maintain long-term search efforts

beyond more than a week.

That seems to be the plausible time frame for survivability in the

wilderness for the average person. Once a rescue isn't a rescue anymore, once it

becomes a recovery effort, the urgency to find the person drops off unless

there's a crime suspected. Otherwise, recovery of the missing person is left up to chance.

It's very expensive to send up search aircraft,

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