The Dogs Stopped Two Miles In - What Hides Beyond the Shelf?

The Dogs Stopped Two Miles In - What Hides Beyond the Shelf?

A line of search dogs halted dead at a granite shelf two miles from the trailhead - not slowed, not split, stopped - while a twenty-three-year-old hiker lay somewhere beyond, her fate unknown. Thirty-one stone cairns, eleven miles of roadless terrain, and a fossil no scientist had ever recorded would later turn the search inside out; what made the dogs quit where they did?

In this episode, you’ll hear the timeline from the first missed Wednesday call to the moment a meter reader’s photographs redirected the search, following the actions of the coordinator Earl Gallagher, handler Diane Pruett, and the missing hiker Wendy Clark as the question of what happened at the granite shelf remains open.

Person: Wendy Clark Date: October 3-10 (disappearance discovered October 7; search began October 8) Location: Cassidy Flat trailhead / Piñon Divide, northeast of Grand Junction, Colorado Coordinator: Earl Gallagher Handler: Diane Pruett

- Dogs stopped at a granite shelf roughly two miles from the Cassidy Flat trailhead and would not advance past it. - Wendy Clark was 23 years old and worked at Dunbar's, a hardware and outdoor supply store near Grand Junction. - Wendy’s car was logged at the trailhead on the morning of Thursday, October 3; her pack and trekking poles were missing from the vehicle. - Wendy fractured her left fibula in the dark on Friday night and crawled to a shallow depression behind a granite outcrop, seven miles in. - Grant Evans photographed five neat stacks of flat shale plates (cairns) on or around October 15 and reported them to the sheriff’s office on day five of the search.

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