Federally owned and managed lands have created swaths of the US that are wilderness gems.

But go and get lost in them and you could be on your own and if the worst happens, and depending on where it is, you might not ever be found!

When 18-year-old Joe Keller vanished from a dude ranch in Colorado's Rio Grande National Forest, he joined the ranks of those missing on public land. No official tally exists, but their numbers are growing. And when an initial search turns up nothing, who'll keep looking?

July 23, 2015 was the eve of Joseph Lloyd Keller's 19th birthday. The Cleveland, Tennessee, native had been spending the summer between his freshman and sophomore years at Cleveland State Community College on a western road trip with buddies Collin Gwaltney and Christian Fetzner in Gwaltney’s old Subaru. The boys had seen Las Vegas, San Francisco, and the Grand Canyon before heading to Joe’s aunt and uncle’s dude ranch, the Rainbow Trout Ranch, in the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado.

The ranch is in Conejos County, which is bigger than Rhode Island, with 8,000 residents and no stoplights. Sheep graze in the sunshine; potatoes and barley are grown here and trucked north to Denver. Three new marijuana dispensaries in the tiny town of Antonito lure New Mexicans across the nearby state line.

The GPS track on Collin’s watch shows him turning right off Forest Road 250 onto the ranch drive and snaking up behind the lodge, trying to check out three geologic outcroppings – Faith, Hope, and Charity – that loom over the ranch. But the run became a scramble, so he cut back down toward the road and headed upriver. A fly-fisherman says he saw Collin 2.5 miles up the road but not Joe. Collin never encountered his friend; he timed out his run at a pace that led to puking due to the altitude.

No Joe. Collin moseyed back to the ranch house and waited. An hour later, he started to worry.

When Joe didn’t show up to get ready for dinner, Collin and Christian drove up the road, honking and waiting for Joe to come limping toward the road like a lost steer. At 7:30, a small patrol of ranch hands hiked up the rocks toward Faith, the closest formation. By 9:30 there were 35 people out looking. “If he was hurt, he would have heard us,” recalled Joe’s uncle, David Van Berkum, 47. “He was either not conscious or not there.”

There was nothing to go on. In that first week, the search engaged about 15 dogs and 200 people on foot, horseback, and ATV. An infrared-equipped airplane from the Colorado Division of Fire Prevention and Control flew over the area. Collin’s brother Tanner set up a GoFundMe site that paid for a helicopter to search for five hours, and a volunteer flew his fixed-wing aircraft in the canyon multiple times. A guy with a drone buzzed the steep embankments along Highway 17, the closest paved road, and the rock formation Faith, which has a cross on top. A $10,000 reward was posted for information. How far could a shirtless kid in running shoes get?

But after several days, volunteers began going home, pulled by other obligations. The few who remained did interviews, followed up on leads, and worked teams and dogs. But the search was already winding down. “We had a very lim¬ited number of people,” one volunteer told me. “That’s fairly typical in Colorado. You put out calls and people say, ‘Well, if he hasn’t been found in that time, I have to go to work.’ ”

Joe Keller had just joined the foggy stratum of the hundreds or maybe thousands of people who’ve gone missing on our federal public lands. Thing is, nobody knows how many. The National Institute of Justice, the research arm of the Department of Justice, calls unidentified remains and missing persons “the nation’s silent mass disaster,” estimating that on any given day there are between 80,000 and 90,000 people ac¬tively listed with law enforcement as missing. The majority of those, of course, disappear in populated areas.

What I wanted to know was how many people are missing in our wild places, the roughly 640 million acres of federal lands — including national parks, national forests, and Bureau of Land Management property.

Cases like 51-year-old Dale Stehling, who, in 2013, vanished from a short petroglyph-viewing trail near the gift shop at Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park. Morgan Heimer, a 22-year-old rafting guide, who was wearing a professional-grade personal flotation device when he disappeared in 2015 in Grand Canyon National Park during a hike after setting up camp. Ohioan Kris Fowler, who vanished from the Pacific Crest Trail last fall. At least two people have recently gone missing outside the national forest where I live in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. There are scores more stories like this.

The Department of the Interior knows how many wolves and grizzly bears roam its wilds — can’t it keep track of visitors who disappear? But the government does not actively aggregate such statistics. The Department of Justice keeps a database, the – National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, but reporting missing persons is voluntary in all but ten states, and law-enforcement and coroner participation is voluntary as well. So a lot of the missing are also missing from the database.

After the September 11 attacks, Interior tried to build its own database to track law-enforcement actions across lands managed by the National Park Service, Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Indian Affairs. (The Forest Service is under the Department of Agriculture.) The result, the Incident Management Analysis and Reporting System, is a $50 million Database to Nowhere—last year, only 14 percent of the several hundred reportable incidents were entered into it. The system is so flawed that Fish and Wildlife has said no thanks and refuses to use it.

That leaves the only estimates to civilians and conspiracy theorists. Aficionados of the vanished believe that at least 1,600 people, and perhaps many times that number, remain missing on public lands under circumstances that defy easy explanation.

Numbers aside, it matters tremendously where you happen to disappear. If you vanish in a municipality, the local police department is likely to look for you. The police can obtain assistance from the county sheriff or, in other cases, state police or university law enforcement. If foul play is suspected, your state’s bureau of investigation can decide to get involved. Atop that is the FBI. With the exception of the sheriff, however, these organizations don’t tend to go rifling through the woods unless your case turns into a criminal one.

But all those bets are off when you disappear in the wild. While big national parks like Yosemite operate almost as sovereign states, with their own crack search and rescue teams, go missing in most western states and, with the exception of New Mexico and Alaska, statutes that date back to the Old West stipulate that you’re now the responsibility of the county sheriff.

“There are no federal standards for terrestrial search and rescue,” Koester says.

“Very few states have standards. A missing person is a local problem. It’s a historical institution from when the sheriff was the only organized government.” And when it comes to the locals riding to your rescue, Koester says, “There’s a vast spectrum of capability.”

Take Rio Grande National Forest: it has just one full-time law-enforcement officer, who wasn’t given clearance to talk to Outside. Ranger Andrea Jones of the 377,314-acre Conejos Peak district, where Joe disappeared, did lament to me that sometimes she discovers cases in the weekly newspaper. “On occasions when we initially learn about a search and rescue in the forest from the local media,” she explained, “it’s difficult for us to properly engage, communicate, and offer available knowledge or resources.”

But wherever you are, once a search goes from rescue to recovery, most of those resources dry up.

On August 4, 2015, after Joe had been missing for 13 days, Sheriff Galvez pulled the plug on the official search. What had begun as a barnyard musical was now a ghost story. The river — already dropping quickly — had been searched and ruled out. Dog teams had scratched up nothing. Abandoned cabins had been searched and searched again. “I mean, we checked the pit toilets at the campgrounds — we did everything,” Galvez said. “We even collected bear crap. We still have it in the evidence freezer.”

Galvez had been elected sheriff only nine months earlier, and while he had years of law-enforcement experience, he had no background leading search and rescue operations. One responder told me that by the time he arrived on the second day of searching, tension was already rising between Keller and Sheriff Galvez. Keller felt that Galvez wasn’t doing enough; Galvez felt that Keller was in the way, barking orders and criticizing his crew.

When dogs and volunteers start to go back to their lives and the aircraft return to the hangar, a missing-persons search can look eerily quiet. “For a lost person, the response is limited to five days on average,” Keller told me. “There needs to be a plan for applying resources for a little bit longer.”

It’s not likely that legislation would help the Stehling family, but an amendment to an existing law recently made it easier for volunteer search and rescue outfits to access federal wildlands with less red tape. The issue of permit approval is largely one of liability insurance, but the Good Samaritan Search and Recovery Act of 2013 expedited access for qualified volunteers to national parks and forests, and now they can search within 48 hours of filing the paperwork. More such laws would make things easier for experts like Michael Neiger, 63, a retired Michigan State Police detective who now specializes in backcountry search and recovery. Neiger lauds Streetman’s database and wants to take it further. He’d like to see a searchable resource that gives volunteers like himself the same information that government officials have including case profiles, topo maps, dog tracks, and weather.

On Wednesday, July 6, John Rienstra, 54, a search and rescue hobbyist and endurance runner—and a former offensive lineman for the Pittsburgh Steelers—discovered Joe’s body in a boulder field below the cliff band.

“I heard there had been a lot of searching for two and a half miles,” Rienstra said.

“I started looking for rapids, caves, cliffs, of course — and right at two and half miles, there is a place to pull off the road, and there were cliffs close by. It took me about an hour to get up there to the base of the cliff, and I went left until I ran out of room. Then I turned around and went back toward the ranch on the base of the cliffs and found him.” The area was too rugged for horses or dog teams. When the Colorado Bureau of Investigations came to retrieve the remains, they packed horses in as far as they could, then had to reach Keller on foot.

Joe’s body was 1.7 miles as the crow flies from the ranch. Searchers had been close. In November 2015, Keller and David Van Berkum had come within several hundred yards. “I regret not searching there on the 25th of July,” Keller told me. “That’s where I wish I’d started. What part of here would take a life? It’s not the meadow on top; it’s the cliff.”

The preliminary cause of death, according to David Francis, was “blunt force trauma to the head.” Jane told me he also suffered a broken ankle. It appears that Joe scrambled up and then fell — perhaps the lost-person behavior laid out by Professor Rescue, Robert Koester. Occam’s razor wasn’t as dull as it had seemed for most of a year.

Still, Joe’s death remains a mystery to his mother. “The events do not fit for a one-hour run before dinner,” Zoe says, “after they had just driven 24 hours straight to get to Rainbow Trout Ranch.” The boys hadn’t slept in over a day. Joe had just split wood with his uncle David’s 75-year-old father, Doug Van Berkum.

She can’t see her son running up to the canyon rim — she insists that he did not like heights and was not a climber. “There is something we still do not know about what happened, is how I feel about it.”

It’s hard to put your hunches and suspicions to rest. We’ll never know for certain what happened to Joe Keller. We’ll know even less about what happened to a lot of other people missing in the wild.

One question I had early on was, Are you better or worse off going missing in a national forest than from a Walmart parking lot? I thought I knew the answer. You can see an aerial view of my firewood pile from space on your smartphone.

I thought that in the wild, someone would send in the National Guard, the Army Rangers, the A-Team, and that they wouldn’t rest until they found you. Now I’m not so sure.

The lesson to learn here is that you must be more prepared if you venture into the wild on federal land than taking a few overnight survival items and your cell phone. You also have to know how to address injury or sickness on your own, because depending on where you get in trouble – you may be on your own.

The good men and women dedicated to organizing and searching for missing persons on federal land are not to blame – their resources are limited.

That means you have to be prepared and assume going in that you are on your own if something goes very wrong.

To learn more on this subject, please visit Outside.