Peaks and Troughs

Story 1: Tragedy in Death Valley

America's Death Valley is aptly named, being the site of the highest ambient air temperature ever recorded on Earth.

Over the centuries, this region has claimed the lives of countless travelers who were poorly prepared for the extreme dangers such an unforgiving environment presents.

Join us as we examine one such tragic case.

The sun had yet to fully rise when Dave Brenner had arrived at the airfield's main gate, but then his duties for the day dictated the earliest of starts.

The park ranger had been tasked with carrying out a search for suspected drugs labs, which were rumoured to have been set up within the confines of his jurisdiction.

This morning, armed with all the most recent intelligence reports, he was determined to finally pin down their location.

Once the search pattern was eventually agreed over a hastily drained cup of coffee, Brenner had waited for the pre-flight checks to be completed before the military helicopter finally lifted off into the dawn skies.

Unfolding the map across one knee, he directed the pilot to head on a southern bearing in the direction of Willow Spring, where the steep slopes and thick vegetation could easily cover any illicit activities.

After several fruitless passes over the location, Brenner requested that his pilot turn east, proceeding towards an area located some miles away, known as Anvil Canyon.

As the chopper flew on, Closely following the path of the waters which were gently meandering through the landscape beneath them, Brenner continued to scan the ground.

Frustratingly, there was no obvious trace of criminality to be found, but his attention was suddenly drawn to bright sunlight glinting off something metallic, which was situated a short distance away.

Moments later, the nose of the helicopter swung around and slowly made its way across to the source of the reflection.

Through his binoculars, the park ranger was soon able to identify a green-coloured passenger van, which was sitting in the canyon's wash, directly below the hovering aircraft.

Despite feeling slightly dejected, Brenner asked the pilot to set him down nearby.

Whilst the vehicle's presence was a clear breach of the legislation put in place to protect the park's natural beauty, it was hardly the sophisticated criminal setup he had been hunting for.

But as he drew closer to this mysterious vehicle, he found himself consumed by a growing sense of unease.

The van, a Plymouth Voyager bearing California license plates, was buried in the sand up to its axles.

Three of its four tyres were deflated, with signs that they had been driven in this state for some distance.

There was nothing resembling a main road for miles around from which it might have strayed, and only the most confident or desperate of drivers would have considered braving this unforgiving terrain in such an inadequate vehicle.

On finding the car was empty, as well as locked and secured, Brenner hurriedly made a note of its license plate and then jogged back to his waiting transport.

Clambering back inside, he was hopeful that the remainder of the day would yield more exciting developments.

Little did he know that he had already become embroiled in a mystery that would remain unsolved a quarter of a century later.

The initial checks conducted by Dave Brenner and his colleagues on the morning of October 21st, 1996 revealed that the vehicle he found abandoned in the middle of the Death Valley National Park had been listed as stolen three months prior.

It belonged to a rental company based in Los Angeles and had been reported to the police 30 days after it failed to be returned on the agreed date, as per company policy.

Further inquiries with the rental company painted a deeply concerning picture of the circumstances surrounding its loss.

The last customer to have leased the missing vehicle was a foreign tourist who had collected the minivan on the morning of July the 8th, the day after he and his fellow travellers had arrived in the United States via Los Angeles International Airport.

Egbert Rimkus was a German national and engineer who was holidaying in the United States with his 11-year-old son, Georg.

He was separated from his ex-wife, and accompanying him on his travels were his girlfriend Cornelia Meyer and her son Max, aged 4.

At the time he had collected the Voyager, Rimkus had been unable to provide the company with a valid licence, and so Meyer had been designated as the driver for the duration of the holiday.

The party had based themselves in the San Clement area of Southern California, where they seemed to have enjoyed the complete tourist experience.

On the 12th of July, Rimkus had tried to request additional funds from his bank in Dresden, only for this transaction to fail.

The following week, he had then sent a fax to his ex-partner, requesting the same, only for this attempt to also result in failure.

During the early hours of the 22nd of July, the quartet had checked out of their hotel and travelled across the boundaries of the Death Valley National Park.

One week later, on discovering that they had not returned to Frankfurt via the return flight which had previously been booked, Egbert's ex-wife contacted the German authorities.

On the 14th of August, an Interpol alert was subsequently circulated.

officially reporting the family as missing.

Having now located the missing minivan, the American authorities quickly swung into action.

Additional park rangers, aided by resources from the local sheriff's department, returned to the abandoned vehicle and began to search the surrounding area.

Other than a few discarded food wrappers, there was little of note, with no obvious trails of footprints or signs of a disturbance.

With nothing to show for this initial search, a more extensive effort was then carried out utilising tracker dogs and helicopters, predominantly examining the area to the east of the minivan.

It was felt that this direction was most likely the one that the missing tourists would have headed had they broken down.

Other than some discarded drinks containers, which appeared to match others that had been recovered from inside the vehicle, and the telltale signs that a group of people may have rested on a ledge two miles east from where the Voyager was found abandoned, no additional clues were forthcoming as to the fate of the missing family.

Checks of the various tourist sites and guest houses within the park did however uncover several clues which served to assist with the investigation.

On the 22nd of July, the group had visited the Furness Creek Visitor Centre and purchased a German language map of the park.

They had subsequently signed the visitor's book at a geologist's cabin in Warm Springs Canyon the following day, suggesting they must have camped out overnight, alongside their vehicle.

Despite a rescue effort including two helicopters and more than 50 search personnel, no trace of the four missing tourists was to be found.

Assertions relating to their fate included a variety of colourful and outlandish theories.

containing various degrees of plausibility.

Some media reports speculated that they may have been killed by unknown offenders, who they had unexpectedly encountered.

The inhospitable environment which resulted from the park's remote geography and murderous temperatures had previously drawn Charles Manson and his followers to the location to carry out their work away from the prying eyes of the authorities.

Could this have been a case of history repeating itself?

For a time, there was speculation that they may have faked their deaths, in an effort to escape some unknown threat in their home country and to start a new life in the United States.

But by far the most bizarre theory pertaining to their disappearance was that Egbert was an undercover agent working on behalf of the German government, and had used his holiday as a front to spy on American weapons facilities.

With both the infamous Area 51 facility and the China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station located within a two-hour drive of the National Park, and Egbert's background working on hybrid propulsion systems back in his home country, rumours began to spread that he had been captured by the American authorities attempting to access a restricted area, potentially being eliminated in the process.

But it would be 13 long years before any clue as to the fate of the missing Germans came to light.

And rather than successfully solving the mystery, all that this new evidence created was heartbreak and further unanswered questions.

As time wore on, the story of the missing Germans became the stuff of legend.

But for some members of the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit, the failure to solve the mystery remained something of an unwanted mark against their team's otherwise stellar reputation.

The original rescue effort to find Egbert and his family was continually revisited and assessed, in the hope hope that something which might have been overlooked would suddenly become apparent.

To two members of the team, Tom Mahud and Les Walker, the answer to solving the riddle potentially lay in the most unlikely of directions.

Confident that all possible efforts to find the family to the east of the minivan had been exhausted, the pair began to suspect that where the rescuers should have instead been searching was to the south.

Whilst some speculated that the minivan's presence in such a remote and inaccessible part of the national park added credence to the theory that the family had been murdered and their vehicle concealed by the offenders, Mohud came to a very different conclusion.

A hypothesis which took into account Anvil Canyon's topography in relation to the surrounding area.

On the day the family disappeared, Temperatures at ground level within Death Valley were approaching 51 degrees Celsius.

But but these temperatures reduced by roughly 3 degrees with every increase of 1000 feet in elevation.

Mahud theorised that having become lost within the confines of the park, Rimkus had realised that he and his companions were ill-equipped to survive the killer heat, and had driven the minivan to the highest area of ground he could find.

Sadly, The rental vehicle was completely unsuited for traversing such an environment, but Mahud believed that Egbert had driven on, until the Voyager had sunk into the sandy ground after its tyres had deflated.

By now, isolated and far from any nearby roads, Egbert may have consulted his map to find that the China Lake military facility to the south was the nearest point of reference.

But unlike smaller military installations back in Europe, which benefited from regular perimeter patrols and CCTV systems, the sprawling nature of the American naval base itself itself was seen as its main protection, meaning that huge sections of the fencing were not patrolled.

Mohud believed that the family must have perished whilst attempting to locate or access the base, and this was the area in which their remains would be found.

On the morning of November 12th, 2009, after several days of combing their planned search area, Mohood and Walker encountered a debris field of personal effects.

After locating abandoned identity papers and long-discarded food containers, the two men then came across what appeared to be a pile of assorted human bones lying at the base of a nearby cliff.

Initially, when these remains had been recovered, it was believed that they were too bleached and weathered by their lengthy exposure to the elements to be able to provide any DNA evidence.

But four months later, forensic scientists were able to positively confirm that what had been recovered accounted for the bodies of Egbert Rimkus and Cornelia Meyer, but of their two missing sons, there remained no trace.

The fact that Tom the Hood and his colleague were able to successfully locate the final resting place of Rimkus, where so many attempts beforehand had met with failure, adds great credence to his belief about the cause of the couple's deaths.

And yet, questions about this theory still remain, largely revolving around the continued absence of the children's remains.

It is inconceivable that the couple could have become voluntarily separated from their children in such a harsh and dangerous environment.

And had the two boys tragically passed away as a result of dehydration or an accident, it seems equally unbelievable that the adults would simply have moved on and left them where they died.

On occasion, rumours of Egbert's supposed involvement in secretive engineering programmes back in his homeland prompt some to revisit the assertion that he was using the other tourists as a cover to spy on American military research programmes.

In reality, closer inspection of his employment demonstrate that he was associated largely with the kind of hybrid technology that the automotive industry now takes for granted, and nothing more sinister.

The suggestions that the couple were attempting to disappear for for a new life also seem equally unfeasible.

Both had arrangements in their personal and professional lives mapped out following their return from America, and nothing has ever been found hidden away in the depths of their everyday lives which might have prompted them to look for a way out of their existing situations.

Death Valley remains one of the most enigmatic locations in North America and is the site of several mysterious phenomena.

Over the years, rocks have been found to slowly make their way across the valley floor of their own accord, leaving lengthy trails behind them in the sand, a mystery which was only recently solved.

There are also reports of strange metallic noises which echo out across the plains, seemingly generated from inside the ever-shifting sand dunes.

There have been numerous reports of UFOs moving through the night skies, seeming to stalk the boundaries of the nearby military facilities.

The vast and bleak terrain has also been the site of a number of other unsolved disappearances, leading some commentators to draw parallels with the missing 411 theories of David Polidas.

Could it be that the circumstances behind the disappearance of the Rimkus party are something other than simple misadventure?

Whilst America's great open spaces such as the Death Valley National Park are areas of great beauty, their sheer scale also means they are places of great danger.

And far too often, those who visit them in order to find peace and a touch of solitude instead find themselves never again returning to their friends and loved ones.

Whatever the true reasons behind the deaths of Egbert Rimkus and Cornelia Meyer, It is hard to see past the sheer tragedy of their situation.

The fate of their children remains unanswered, with hope of further evidence coming to light, evaporating with each passing year.

Our hearts go out to the families of these four individuals.

It remains our sincerest hope that by revisiting their story and others like them, these cases may be re-evaluated by the authorities or other interested parties at some future point,

so that the many unanswered questions can finally be laid to rest.

Story 2.

The Mystery of the Tatra Mountains

On a summer morning in 1925, a Polish family set out on a planned hike through one of the country's picturesque mountainous regions.

Beset by uncharacteristically poor weather conditions, what happened to them next remains unexplained to this day.

Join us this week as we delve into the mystery of the Tatra Mountains.

The lone hiker came to a halt in the center of the clearing, before unshouldering his pack and rummaging deep inside to recover his spare water canteen.

The ground beneath his feet remained damp from the bad weather which had plagued the last few days.

The faint trace of a chill still lingered in the air.

But these were far removed from the worst conditions that Marius Saruski had ever experienced, and in truth, he had never felt more alive alive than when he was traversing this mountainous region.

A prominent public figure, Zaruski had always been something of a restless soul, and had spent most of his adult life exploring the various summits and valleys of the Tacha mountain range.

These were difficult times for the Polish people.

Their nation was still coming to terms with the aftermath of the Great War.

and in doing so, struggling to define their own political identity.

As a result, the former cavalry officer took every opportunity to escape the turbulent demands of his daily life, devoting any of his free time to fellow travellers who may require assistance.

As beautiful as this landscape was, it was also a place of great danger, with various hunters and hikers having lost their lives over the years due to exposure and other such hazards.

And it had been during the previous evening, whilst having dinner at a local tavern, that he'd overheard the story of a family which had yet to return from the mountains after setting out on a walk a few days prior.

Having spent the rest of that evening consulting the various maps and sketches of the region he had compiled over the years, Zaruski resolved to make his way up to an area named Bald Clearing.

located at the base of the Sycamore Valley.

From his own experience, he had decided that this was the most likely route the family would have taken, given their last reported sighting.

Zaruski was standing in quiet contemplation when there was a movement at the far end of the clearing.

A woman slowly emerged from the trees, bedraggled and displaying signs of possible hypothermia.

Hurrying towards the floundering figure, Zaruski did not arrive in time to prevent her from falling heavily to the ground.

He was again reaching for his canteen when she gripped his arm tightly, preventing him from doing so.

Wild-eyed and staring up at him in a mixture of confusion and terror, she mumbled something he could not quite understand.

It was only when he leant in closer that he managed to make out her words.

Dead, she said.

They are dead.

The Tatra Mountains stretch across an area in excess of 300 square miles, rising up from sea level to form a natural border between Poland and the neighbouring country of Slovakia.

With an undulating landscape which is somewhat similar in nature to its alpine cousins, the Tatra region forms the highest part of the wider Carpathian mountain range, which spreads out in an arc around Eastern Europe.

The peaks of the Tatra Mountains are generally considered more accessible to visitors, and over the years they have become popular with both seasoned hikers and far less experienced winter tourists.

And it was into the latter half of these two groups that a trio of visitors arrived in the region for a short trip during August of 1925.

Having travelled from the nearby city of Kraków, the party consisted of Kazimius Kosnica as well as his wife Valeria and their 12-year-old son.

Kasnica was a criminal prosecutor of some national repute, and he had planned to walk with his family up through a region known as the Sycamore Valley and on through the resort town of Zakopana.

The route he had selected covered almost 16 kilometers.

It was generally considered to be easily traversable, save for an arduous stretch known as the Ice Pass, which rose up at points to a height of roughly 2,500 meters or just over 8,000 feet.

Having eaten their breakfast at a hillside shelter in the valley of the five ponds,

the family commenced their hike early on the morning of August 3rd, only for the weather to almost immediately close in upon them.

At lunchtime, with the wind speed increasing and temperatures dropping, They encountered a group of four more experienced climbers at one of the mountain shelters and asked if they could accompany them.

Although initially agreeable to this, three of the four climbers soon tired of having their progress significantly impaired by the newcomers.

This was largely as a result of Kasnica, whose spectacles kept steaming up, causing him to have to stop and clean them before then moving off again.

A few hours further up the trail, the quartet came to a halt.

and there followed some debate about whether they should move off on their own and leave the family behind.

After a brief discussion, Zvignir Vasaberga was the only member of the group who felt obligated to remain with the Kasnikas, and simply watched on as his fellow hikers headed off up the mountain at their own pace.

As the three climbers later paused further on up the trail, they turned to see the family and Vasaberga falling further and further behind them.

until they were swallowed up by a patch of rolling fog.

It would be a further two days before they were seen seen again, and after they were finally located, the question over what had happened to them after being left behind would puzzle commentators for decades and remain unsolved to this very day.

Having successfully intercepted Valeria Kosnika on the afternoon of the 5th of August, Marius Zaruski carried her back down the trail in order to seek medical assistance, before heading back up the mountain with a search party.

A little further up the Sycamore Valley from where he had encountered Valeria, Zaruski and his fellow rescuers went on to discover the rest of her party, lying dead in a patch of open ground known as the Frog Pond.

Kajimiya's Kosnika was lying backwards across a rock near some water, eyes staring sightlessly up into the clear skies above him.

Not far away from where he lay, Slumped against a boulder, was his lifeless son.

Neither body exhibited any indication of how they had perished, which was in some contrast to the remains of Vasaberger.

His body was sprawled out well away from the other two, having apparently sustained a head injury and a broken arm as a result of a harsh fall.

At a loss to explain what had occurred, the army officer documented the scene, before ordering the men accompanying him to retrieve the bodies and begin the slow descent back towards civilization.

It had been hoped that as soon as Valeria was able to recount her tale, the reason for the three men's deaths would become more apparent.

And yet, once she went on to regain consciousness, the account offered by the prosecutor's wife only seemed to deepen the mystery further.

She explained how, as their group had pushed on up the ice pass, their progress had slowed as both the weather and their strength significantly deteriorated.

Eventually, Cajenius had finally ceded to Vasaberga's pleas for them all to turn back, and amidst a howling gale, the four of them had begun to clamber back down the mountain.

The first sign of the coming danger was when her son began to weaken and complained to his mother that he could not walk any further.

Keen for them to push on to a place of safety, Vasaberga had passed the boy's pack to Valeria and then carried the youngster down the trail in his arms.

But at this point, as they neared the frog pond, Cajemius had dropped to his knees and stated that he was feeling extremely weak.

Valeria had begun to assist him when she had suddenly heard a worried cry from behind her and turned to see Vasaberga collapse, apparently afflicted in a manner similar to that of her ailing husband.

Amidst a state of growing confusion, she had turned and hurried back towards the climber, assisting both him and her son in getting to the shelter of a nearby boulder.

Having sat them down alongside one another, Vasaberger had told her that he also felt extremely weak.

Valeria administered some cognac, which she had brought along with her in a hip flask, and then gave her son some chocolate before running back to help Cajimius.

Once she had reached her husband, she had given him a sip of the brandy, watching on in helpless panic as he subsequently passed away in her arms.

There was a sudden thump from behind her, and Valeria turned to see Vasaberga lying at an odd angle on the ground, having apparently tripped and fallen whilst walking towards her.

He too was now dead.

and when she returned to care for her son, she found that he too had passed away.

In despair, she had sunk to her knees, apparently unaffected by whatever it was that had killed the rest of her group.

For the next two days, hemmed in by bad weather and unsure of what to do next, she'd huddled up with her blanket and the family's gas burner, before finally descending in search of help when the rain ceased.

Autopsies carried out on the remains of the three victims proved somewhat inconclusive as to the cause cause of their deaths, and with no evidence to support that any crime had taken place, the tragic event was not investigated any further.

In the years that have followed, very few theories have been put forward to explain what might have taken place,

and even those which have been suggested have proven woefully unconvincing.

When looking at this incident, there are two clear commonalities amongst the deceased.

The first is that they were all male.

The second is that they all took a sip of the cognac from Valeria's hip flask.

If we are to believe her account, she is the only member of the group who did not drink any of the brandy, and for obvious reasons, this has caused a great deal of suspicion to fall upon her in the ensuing decades.

Commentators theorise that Valeria wished to do away with her husband and son, either in the hopes of inheriting her spouse's wealth or running to the arms of another man without enduring the stigma of divorce.

They speculate that Valeria spiked the brandy, with the intention of offering it to her family members at the most appropriate moment.

The presence of Vasaberger foiled this somewhat, and there is a possibility that he refused the brandy entirely, at which point she bashed his head in with a rock, so as not to leave any witnesses.

It's a plausible explanation, but one which falls apart under closer scrutiny.

First and foremost, there is a clear lack of motive.

If she really wished to inherit her husband's fortune or elope with a hidden lover, why kill her own son?

By all accounts, Valeria was a loving wife and doting mother, entirely happy in her marriage.

After the deaths of her husband and child, she fell into a deep depression and didn't remarry for many years.

There is no denying that Cozimius was well off, but his alleged fortune, often cited by many who believe this theory, was non-existent.

There was no vast wealth for Valeria to inherit, and she had neither the constitution nor motivation to murder her family in cold blood.

So instead, could the prosecutor have been targeted by criminal or even political elements within his community, who poisoned the drink without his or Valeria's knowledge?

It is not hard to imagine the reasons behind killing someone of Cajimius' stature, if he had laid legal proceedings against the wrong people.

But this seems an awfully clumsy way to assassinate someone.

Why go to the trouble and invite the risk of secretly poisoning a hip flask which belongs to the wife of your target?

Surely it would have been easier to stage a robbery gone wrong in some remote mountain pass.

In any case, the real sledgehammer blow to this theory comes from the post-mortems.

Whilst the contents of Valeria's hip flask were never tested, Autopsies clearly showed that all three deaths were attributed to pulmonary edema, followed by cardiac arrest, with no toxic substances found in the bloods.

Not to mention that all three of the deceased were exhibiting signs of a serious decline before they even consumed the brandy, although we concede that we only have Valeria's word to go on in this instance.

Another thing which was revealed by the post-mortem was that Cojimius had an existing heart defect, which had not been public knowledge.

and that his son's heart also bore traces of the same disease.

It may be that some biological factor which arose during the trip somehow triggered identical heart attacks in the father and son.

And yet, the death of Vasseberger would seem to contradict this.

He was fit and well, with no trace of an underlying health issue, yet died with the same symptoms.

Given the results of the autopsies, It would be fair to assume that the trio died as a result of acute mountain sickness, or AMS.

Whilst this is more prevalent at much higher altitudes, the phenomenon has been known to occur even on smaller peaks like those of the Tatra Mountains.

The symptoms for the deaths which emerge from Valeria's account are similar to those found in severe cases of this condition.

However, the time scales are far too short.

The time between onset and death is usually hours, not minutes, and at lower altitudes, this process is even slower.

As a result, death from AMS at such a low altitude is extremely rare, with less than 5% of cases proving fatal.

Essentially, what we have is an extremely rare condition taking into account the altitude, causing even rarer fatalities in three individuals all at the exact same time.

This would be unheard of in mountaineering circles, as pulmonary edemas are very specific to each individual.

It is not something that generally affects everyone in a group at the same time.

Not only that, but Vasseberger in particular was a seasoned climber.

As a veteran of the Swiss Alps, the Tatra Mountains would have been a walk in the park for him.

So why he was affected in this way is a complete mystery.

If the deaths were caused by something environmental as opposed opposed to biological, such as an aerosol or maybe even a vacuum created by the fierce winds, then why would it only affect the male members of the group and leave Valeria unharmed?

Could there be some unknown biological process in the male body, which activates under certain conditions?

Perhaps the administering of alcohol only served to exacerbate this phenomenon.

Of course, this is completely speculative, but some of the more fringe theories point to the similarities in other deaths involving males, low temperatures and trace amounts of alcohol, such as those seen in the canals of Manchester, England and various parts of the US.

Although intriguing, this is a tenuous connection at best, but one that perhaps warrants more investigation.

With so little evidence to go on, both because of the circumstances of the event and the passage of time, sadly, theory is all that can be applied.

Whatever the cause, be it naturally occurring or something more artificial, it is difficult to see beyond the tragic deaths of those involved.

It is possible that as our understanding of mountaineering and the various hazards associated with it improves, in the future, a new explanation may be offered for the deaths which occurred on that fateful summer's day.

For now, all we are left with is an enduring mystery, which makes little to no sense.

May the souls of these unfortunate hikers rest in peace, with the hope that their passing may one day help in understanding other mysterious deaths which occur in the mountains.

Bedtimes glories.