Kevin Bardsley was scouring the mountains for his son when he felt something. “We feel very, very strongly about today. We’ve felt the spirit in certain areas and felt Garrett’s presence,” he said.
A week ago, on 20th August 2004, Kevin and his son Garret Bardsley were camping in the mountains. The 12-year-old wanted to go back to the campsite and change shoes.
When Kevin asked if he knew the way back to the campsite, the boy responded, “Yes, Dad, I’m sure.”
The campsite was only 150 yards away, more so along an established trail. Yet when Kevin reached the campsite 15 minutes later, Garrett was nowhere to be found. He disappeared somewhere in that 150-yard distance and was never seen again.
Garrett Alexander Bardsley was the youngest of four children born to Kevin and Heidi Bardsley. The boy grew up in a close-knit family in Elk Ridge, a small Utah community.
Growing up, Garrett was especially close to his brother Cameron. According to his mom, they were inseparable. They shared interests, played football and baseball together, and had overlapping friend circles.
“Garrett was always the kid who had the most fun; he was the one who made us laugh,” Kevin reportedly reminisced in an Oprah show appearance. Kevin also recalled Garrett asking him to feel his neighbors’ horses’ noses to see how soft they were.
Naturally, the observant boy grew to love the outdoors. He eventually enrolled in the Boy Scouts. An offbeat Christmas vacation revealed he was a Boy Scout through and through.
In winter 2003, the family had decided to spend the holiday season giving humanitarian aid in Mexico. The kids, including Garrett, loved the trip so much that they decided to spend the rest of their Christmases helping people.
In December 2004, they planned to go to Ecuador to help build gardens in a remote mountain village. But the plan never came to fruition. In August that year, Garrett celebrated his last birthday with his family.
Just weeks before the ill-fated day, Garrett received the Aaronic Priesthood, a preparatory priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His older sister, Courtney, recalled the boy making his debut as a deacon with a big grin on his face.
As a deacon, his duties were to pass the sacrament, help care for the poor and needy, and assist the bishop with temporal matters. On 19th August, just days into his new position, Garrett went camping.
Fellow young men from the Salem 8th ward, along with a few ward members, including his dad and brothers, also joined him on the trip. No notable information is available about their first day hiking.
On 20th August, Kevin took his son fishing early in the morning. The father and son went to the lake and started getting ready to fish. As Kevin was setting up Garrett’s fishing pole, the boy slipped his feet into the water.
He was wearing socks, and his feet got wet. Kevin asked him if he wanted to go back and change, but Garrett refused, saying he wanted to fish. So that’s what they did, sharing a few laughs in the process.
After a while, Garret changed his mind. “We’re not catching anything. I’m going to go back and get some dry shoes on and eat breakfast.” Kevin recalled him saying. The cautious father asked if he wanted someone to accompany him back.
But Garrett was a boy teeming with independence. He was confident about going back on his own, so Kevin didn’t push it. He even watched his son take a wrong turn, so he corrected him, and then Garrett went on his way.
Kevin would return to the camp 15-20 minutes later. He went straight to the campfire. It was cold, and most boys wore hoods. He walked over to a boy wearing a hood, assuming it was his son.
But when he looked, it wasn’t Garrett. He ran back to the lake and called out to his son, but heard nothing back. That’s when he realized his son had gone missing.
The camp was less than a quarter-mile away from the Lake Cuberant fishing spot, where Kevin last saw Garrett. He was wearing sweatpants, a T-shirt, a black hooded sweatshirt, and tennis shoes.
He had no provisions or a backpack. After his search at the lake proved fruitless, he alerted the camp leaders, and they joined in.
At first, the group decided to search on their own until noon. They started searching along the path where Garrett should have been, then combed out, widening the search.
The group started becoming concerned just an hour into the search. At 11 a.m., the Summit County Sheriff’s Office was notified, and authorities joined the search.
Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds enlisted the help of no more than 200 volunteers. Any more would needlessly put people at risk of hurt in the rough terrain, in Edmunds’ opinion.
The search escalated soon. Search dogs combed the ground, while helicopters and a plane searched from the air. Despite rain, hail and cold weather, the operation stayed on course.
“We’re going to continue to search until we find something,” Edmunds told Deseret News. He believed they owed Garrett and his family. But 3 days into the search, hope started to fade.
4 days after Garrett was last seen, the chances of him being alive were very slim. Search crews had already combed over 36 square miles, looking under logs, peering into small caves and wading through streams.
They also arranged a submersible with a video camera, but it would take days to fly it to the remote Lake Cuberant area where Kevin and Garrett were fishing.
Edmunds believed it highly unlikely that the boy had drowned. No predators were in the area, and there were no signs of foul play. By Tuesday, 24th August, authorities had classified the rescue operation as a recovery operation.
That day, 75 searchers, including an FBI SWAT team, were focused on a concentrated area of cliffs south of the ponds and the campsite. The area was a bit less than two miles wide.
Teams of up to 10 people searched the stretch, divided into eight sections. The family also told law enforcement that Garret had received wilderness survival training.
According to his training, he was supposed to build some sort of shelter and hunker down if he got lost. Keeping this in mind, Edmund’s team went ‘rock by rock, boulder by boulder, tree by tree, searching every nook and cranny’.
The next day, the authorities found a Nike sock in a boulder field about a half-mile from where Garrett was last seen. The sock seemed to have been taken off a wet foot and was wadded up.
According to Edmunds, this find supported the assumption that Garrett sought shelter from the cold and went into the boulder field to find a crevice or outcropping.
Over the next couple of days, the team found lots of clothing and sunglasses, but none of the items were confirmed as belonging to Garrett. The team had no meaningful leads either.
On 28th August, the search was scaled up one last time to involve 500 personnel. Searchers were instructed to look out for anything that Garrett could have left behind, including small pieces of trash.
One rescue group reported mushrooms broken off a tree at eye level. They believed it could be Garret leaving clues to find him, but nothing was confirmed.
Officials believed Garrett might have died from hypothermia, as temperatures dropped to 18 degrees with rain and snow earlier that week. So they scaled back the last full-scale search after a full day of searching.
But Kevin wasn’t done searching for his son. In September, he and some friends, family, and a few volunteers decided to keep looking for Garrett.
On 2nd September, Kevin led 50 volunteers into the dense Uinta Mountain range forest around 8 a.m. The treacherous terrain was divided into 7 grids, each measuring 500×500 meters.
Working in groups of three, the volunteers used handheld GPS devices and walked roughly 8 feet apart, combing each section systematically. Covering a single grid took about 11 miles of walking.
This video from Labor Day (September 6, 2004) shows volunteers spending the holiday searching for Garrett and features interviews with Kevin and Heidi Bardsley.
The searches continued through September and October until they had to stop because of snow. 30 inches of snowfall on the ground made it impractical to continue searching.
Until the weather improved, Kevin kept distributing flyers and maps asking hunters visiting the area to watch for his son’s clothing, possible remains, or his fishing rod. None of these efforts yielded a solid lead.
Then a year later, the family organized a last independent search starting 4th August, 2005. The first day saw a turnout of about 300 volunteers. By then, the chances of finding an intact body were slim.
The volunteers watched an instructional video produced by the sheriff’s office, explaining how nearly a year of exposure to weather, insects, animals, and decomposition could reduce a body to small fragments.
The volunteers and professionals involved in the search looked for small remains like teeth, bone fragments, and pieces of clothing. The search continued till 6th August.
Over the three days, they collected many bones, scraps of cloth, and garbage, but the Sheriff’s office confirmed none belonged to Garrett. But Edmunds still clung to hope.
“It leaves us believing he’s still out there and we will make a find one day,” he told the Salt Lake Tribune.
On 11th August 2005, almost a year after their boy had disappeared, Kevin and Heidi Bardsley announced that all organized searches for Garrett were over. They said they wanted to cherish his memory and focus on the foundation they had set up in his name.
The Garret Bardsley Foundation is a non-profit organization that uses experience and resources to help with search-and-rescue situations for those in need in wilderness terrain. The foundation’s social pages regularly post alerts about people who go missing in the area, urging volunteers to help with searches.
Over the years, Kevin helped co-ordinate many missing-person searches in the Uinta Mountain area. For his volunteer and rescue work, Reader’s Digest named him Hero Of The Year in April 2007.
The American Red Cross also conferred on Kevin the 2011 Wilderness Rescue Hero Award. Here’s a video of him explaining the spirit behind his efforts and how Garrett’s disappearance inspired him.
To commemorate their son, the Bardsleys also built a school in Ecuador in his name. The Garret Bardsley School replaced a one-room school serving 60 students in Puca Cruz and was built to serve students up to grade six. Kevin promised it was the first of many.
After the school was finished, he and Heidi returned and raised more money to open a secondary school that July. The government of Ecuador also agreed to fund future schools with a 50 percent match and staff them with teachers.
Beyond their humanitarian efforts, life had changed permanently for the Bardsley family. Kevin kept visiting the lake where Garrett had disappeared, not to find more evidence, but just to feel closer to his son.
Every time, he felt as if he was visiting a grave. In a 2025 interview with KUTV, he expressed a regret that has stayed with him all these years.
“We don’t know what happened to Garrett. It’s been 21 years, and we haven’t found anything,” said Kevin Bardsley. “I wish I never would have let Garrett go back by himself.
He learned the hard way that one shouldn’t go into the wilderness alone.
Kevin isn’t the only parent with this experience. Maxine Barter was on a family trip when her son, Daniel Barter, was walking along the shoreline within sight. She looked away briefly to tend to some fishing gear, and when she looked back, Daniel had vanished.
Another such unexplained disappearance is that of Christopher Thompkins. The 20-year-old was part of a survey crew and was fifty feet away from his colleagues when he vanished. Read the whole story to find out how!
