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The strange disappearance of Samantha Sayers from Vesper Peak

Samantha Sayers, Vesper Peak disappearance

Samantha “Sam” Claire Sayers, Disappeared August 1, 2018, Vesper Peak, North Cascades Mountains, Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest, Washington State

Revised June 2024

Samantha "Sam" Claire Sayers, 27, disappeared on Wednesday, August 1, 2018, while solo hiking to Vesper Peak in the North Cascades of Washington, located within the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest.

Despite extensive search and rescue operations and hundreds of hours dedicated by friends and family, no trace of her has been found. Sam’s mother suspects abduction or possible involvement by her boyfriend, but the truth remains elusive.

Was it a tragic accident involving a fall from a cliff or a treacherous slope? The area is notorious for its challenging terrain, including fallen trees and raging streams. For now, the Cascade Mountains continue to guard their secrets.

Who was Sam Sayers?

Sam was 5'8" and weighed around 125 lbs. She had been diagnosed with alopecia in high school and regularly shaved her head after discovering that wigs were uncomfortable. She also had a distinct tattoo on her head—a pattern of stars designed by her mother, Lisa—and several piercings. Despite her healthy look, strangers assumed she’d just undergone chemotherapy, and she didn’t bother to explain they were wrong.

Sam was originally from Girard, a small town near Lake Erie in northwestern Pennsylvania, but she fell in in love with the city of Seattle in Washington State.

According to the Erie School District, Sam went by the last name Steinbaugh when she graduated. She then attended the State University of New York at Fredonia, where she graduated in 2013 with a bachelor’s degree in technical theatre and theatre design and technology.

A name-change petition on file at the Erie County Courthouse states that Sayers received court permission to change her last name from Steinbaugh to Sayers in May 2009 after her stepfather adopted her and her brother in February 2009.

Sam was an avid nature lover and experienced hiker, so she often headed to the challenging Vesper Peak, which was around 1.5 hours away by car from her home.

She was dating her boyfriend, Kevin Dares, 33, originally from New Orleans, Louisiana. He owned a company that deals in real estate, renovates, and manages property.

Sam was self-employed as an Airbnb cleaner. She lived in the Belltown neighborhood in King County, Seattle, with a population of 23,214. Belltown is known as one of the best places to live in Washington.

Kevin Dares with Sam at a New Orleans wedding in 2017.

Kevin, a single dad of three kids, and Sam initially met on Tinder and clicked immediately. He described her as " super smart, cool, funny, super driven, all the things you want in a partner.”

Soon after meeting Kevin, she left a job at the Seattle Repertory Theatre to pursue entrepreneurial endeavors. She obtained a real estate license and marketed interesting products she’d found online, such as an inflatable lounger.

The trails to Vesper Peak

Vesper Peak is a 6,221 ft (1,896 m) peak along the Mountain Loop Highway region of the North Cascades of Washington state. It is about 18 miles (29 km) south of Darrington and 21 miles (34 km) east of Granite Falls in the Mount Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest. Its gentle south and east slopes contrast with a sheer north face, which offers an excellent technical route.

Two of the most popular ways to reach Vesper’s summit are via the Sunrise Mine Trail, which Sam took, and the Vesper Peak Trail.

Sunrise Mine Trail

According to Alltrail.com, Sunrise Mine Trail: “Get to know this 8.0-km out-and-back trail near Darrington, Washington. Generally considered a challenging route, it takes an average of 4 h 41 min to complete. This is a popular trail for birding and hiking, but you can still enjoy some solitude during quieter times of day. The best times to visit this trail are June through November. Dogs are welcome and may be off-leash in some areas”.

To get to the trail, you must take an easily missed Forest Road off the Mountain Loop Highway and then South into a deep valley surrounded by numerous towering Peaks. The road ends where the Sunrise Mine trailhead begins.

The Vesper Peak trail

According to Alltrails.com, “the Vesper Peak trail is a 6.8 mile (10.9 km) out-and-back trail and is generally considered a challenging route. This is a very popular area for backpacking, camping, and hiking and the best times to visit this trail are June through October”

The Washington Trails Association describes the Vesper Peak Trail as "Vesper Peak is definitely not for the novice hiker, but for those thirsting for one step beyond hiking into backcountry adventure, it's a good leaping off point. The potential consequences of stumbling here are decidedly lesser than they are on other summits along the Mountain Loop. Some hikers have said that the Vesper Peak trail is “hard to follow”.

The trip to Vesper Peak

On June 30, 2018, Sam tried to find a hiking partner for her trip to Vesper Peak but failed to find anyone interested that day. So, as she often did, she decided to go on the trip anyway for a solo hike.

Sam left the Seattle apartment she shared with her boyfriend, Kevin Dares, around 8 am on August 1, 2018.

Dares had texted her to be careful and call him if she needed him. Her response, which turned out to be the last text Kevin received from her, read, “Okay, baby, I love you.” He couldn't accompany Sam that day because he was working.

She wore a green sports bra, maroon jacket, grey yoga pants, and hiking boots. She also had a black or blue backpack, a tan colored hat, and hiking poles.

Sam didn't arrive at the Sunrise Mine trailhead until around 10 to 10.30 am, where she parked her car, signed the trail register, and began her hike.

The day was hot, with the faint haze from far-off wildfires. Other hikers would recall seeing Sam stripped down to her bra and hiking pants. They remembered her distinctive bald head.

Sam reached the summit after climbing more than 4,000 feet up switchbacks across boulder fields and finally across the patchy snow that covers parts of the stone pyramid of Vesper’s peak, with its distinctive triangular point. Though it was a weekday, the pleasant weather brought summer crowds.

Several people saw Sam as she made her way up toward Vesper Peak. One witness later saw her at the summit around 2-3 pm, and this person reported she was sitting down, eating a sandwich, and watching some other rock climbers in the area. Sam was also seen talking to other hikers while hanging around at the summit.

Sam Sayers goes missing

Sam was expected to be home that evening by 6 p.m., but there was no sign of her. Becoming increasingly concerned, Kevin tried her cellphone several times, but it went to voicemail. There was minimal cellphone signal in that area of the Cascades apart from a few patchy spots near the peak, and that made him nervous she hadn’t left the area. It was unusual and concerning that she hadn’t checked in with him by this late hour, as Sam was always highly organised and timely when she went on hikes.

Increasingly worried, Kevin decided to look for Sam in person. He headed to the Sunrise Mine Trail around 8 pm and arrived at the trailhead around 9 to 10 pm. During the 90-minute drive, he stopped at a gas station to buy a flashlight. When he reached the trail, he was alarmed to find her blue Ford Fiesta still in the parking lot.

The Sunrise Mine Trail parking lot was pitch black, with just some moonlight to help guide the way. With a flashlight, he started up the dirt path around 10 pm, quickly through the first third of the hike, which meanders through the thick forest. There, the route passes across the south fork of the Stillaguamish River; hikers jump over boulders in water a few feet deep. The trail gains elevation through a switchback path cut into a hillside covered in heavy timber.

Kevin quickly moved into the next stretch into Wirtz Basin, a box canyon with some trees. It looks like a dead end as rock climbers need ropes to scale the steep walls surrounding it, but there’s one other way out - a trail that climbs through a boulder field to Headlee Pass. From Headlee Pass to Lake Elan, he climbed up to Vesper Peak itself. There, Kevin tripped and broke his flashlight, forcing him to return to his vehicle and give up the search. Using his cell phone for light, he headed back three and a half miles to the car.

Then he drove 20 miles down the Mountain Loop Highway to the Verlot Public Service Center, a visitor center staffed by U.S. Forest Service rangers. It was closed when he arrived, but fortunately, it had a pay phone.

At around 1:30—2 a.m., Kevin was still at Verlot when Search and Rescue Sergeant John Q. Adams from the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office arrived. It was Adams’s first year as a search and rescue sergeant, taking over from a predecessor who oversaw SAR response for 22 years.

Kevin was eager to replace his broken flashlight and return to Vesper to look for Sam. But Adams and his deputy Peter Teske, who would also play a huge role in the search, advised Kevin not to return alone in the dark. Adams and Teske had a feeling: “We better throw everything we’ve got at this one, at least for a couple of days.”

They gave Kevin a helmet, food, and a headlamp and then contacted Snohomish County Volunteer Search and Rescue teams to request immediate assistance.

The search

The official search for Sam started at 6 -7 a.m. on Thursday, August 2, 2018. The Snohomish County Sheriff's Office began the search, one of the longest and largest rescue efforts authorities have made in years.

When volunteers arrived, they took off in teams to comb the trail. Adams dispatched the county-owned Snohawki helicopter and used its FLIR infrared camera to scan the landscape for heat signatures. They spotted a tree on fire, but no Sam.

Everett Mountain Rescue, a specialized group of volunteers trained to explore Vesper, joined the search. By the weekend, volunteer Search and Rescue teams from King, Skagit, Kitsap, Kittitas, and Pierce counties had arrived, along with four other mountain rescue squads. Trained sniffer dogs and expert human trackers scoured for footprints; others searched the creeks.

Adams established operations bases near Big Four ice caves and Spada Lake below Vesper’s southeast side. A dozen PJs, or Air Force Pararescue personnel, came up from Oregon, and even the Navy flew a mission there.

On August 4, three days into the search, the AFRCC, or Air Force Rescue Coordination Center, had been actively monitoring Sam’s phone for pings when the cellphone connected to nearby cellular sites. They’d had nothing since the afternoon of August 1, when Sam’s phone pinged near the summit, one of the only areas with limited cell service. Then, Sam’s phone pinged out of the blue, indicating it was on and working and it was in Seattle, in Belltown. Could she have arrived home by some chance?

But it turned out to offer false hope. The Seattle Police Department was dispatched to the coordinates, but Sam wasn't there when they knocked on Kevin and Sam’s apartment door.

The ping was caused by Kevin’s mother, Dawn, who’d flown in from Louisiana and spent the day working with the phone carrier to access information on Sam’s missing cell phone. The phone carrier company said the best they could do was load the SIM signature onto Dawn’s mobile, effectively cloning Sam’s iPhone. That was what had pinged.

Seventy searchers on foot, fourteen dog teams, and helicopters searched the Vesper area to no avail. At one point, drone operators and the sheriff’s Marine Unit were involved. In addition, volunteer searchers from around the state spent thousands of hours leaving bags with a note saying, "Stay Strong! We're looking for you. Everyone is thinking of you," with a poncho, socks, energy bars, compass, flashlight, fire sticks, and lighter.

The sheriff’s office spoke with witnesses who saw Sam the day she went missing, but none saw her come back down the trail.

Sam Seyers SAR unit briefing during the search

Her boyfriend, Kevin Dares, said she had lunch with an unidentified male before disappearing. This unnamed person checked in with searchers and reported that after seeing the news of the disappearance, he had lunch with Sam near the summit of Vesper Peak on that day at roughly 3 pm. He also said that after they parted ways, he saw her from afar, going down the mountain's west side towards Spada Lake. The witness said that by the time he saw her, she was too far away to try shouting, and he wasn't carrying a whistle, and he was immediately concerned for her safety as she was heading in the wrong direction.

Kevin Dares quickly posted about his missing girlfriend on Facebook, created a Facebook group dedicated to her, and started a GoFundMe that eventually raised $60,000. Volunteers photocopied posters of Sam and posted them from Seattle to Vesper Peak. Through Facebook, Sam’s mother, Lisa Sayers, still a resident of Girard, PA, found out about her missing daughter.

Search terminated

After three weeks, on August 23, 2018, the official search was called off with no sign of Sam. Search and Rescue Sgt. John Adams said, “We have exhausted all leads and tips. We’ve interviewed all witnesses who have come forward. We have checked and double-checked the possible routes we believe Sam could have taken. If there was a place we thought she could get to, we put people there to look for Sam, often putting our volunteers and personnel at great risk due to the rugged, remote, and dangerous terrain.”

The sheriff’s office said that since August 2, search operations have included 357 hours of air operations from the sheriff’s office and other agencies, 105 hours of drone operations in the search area, 82 hours for the marine unit to support search teams in Spada Lake, 329 hours for sheriff’s office search-and-rescue personnel, and thousands of volunteer hours from search and rescue teams around the state.

Vesper Peak Area, Washington state — View from Vesper Peak Trail (Kallen Tu Sept 2023) AllTrails

Unofficial search

Family members, however, continued the search with private helicopters, dog teams and a professional tracker using the money raised on the GoFundMe page. The family's Facebook group helped with tasks such as searching through hours of drone video for any signs.

The unofficial search began the day after the official search ended and continued until October, with Kevin coordinating efforts. Volunteers with drones, mountain experts, a woman with a search-and-rescue dog, and many of Sam’s friends also participated.

David Francis, from Minnesota, a man who’d lost his son 13 years earlier and who led a foundation to aid the families of adults lost in the wilderness, flew to Seattle to meet with Kevin and the county SAR team to make a plan.

His advice was to contact mountain man Bud Carr. An Eagle Scout who had earned almost every merit badge, Carr said, “I’m a militant. I’ve always been of a warrior mindset. Being proficient in anything is militant.”

With his survivalist rhetoric, Carr rubbed many the wrong way. Online, critics found evidence of past felonies, including that he helped burgle a gun store. In videos posted to his own YouTube channel, he was abrasive and confrontational. But to Kevin, Carr was a generous stranger turned close friend, willing to spend weeks in the area around Vesper Peak.

Impressed by Carr’s search experience, Francis recommended he be put in charge of the family’s search operations. Between Carr’s military mindset and Kevin’s own experience in the Navy, they approached the mountain with a military mindset, calling it “Operation Relentless Pursuit.” In Kevin’s Belltown apartment, they hung maps and wrote detailed operational plans, considering moon phases and water sources. Kevin asked his father, the command chief warrant officer in the Louisiana National Guard, to run the mountain camp.

But criticism of the unofficial search efforts reached a fever pitch with posters online saying that Carr disregarded the “leave no trace” ethos. The U.S. Forest Service denied access to their helicopter, and Kevin had to persuade supporters to call USFS offices and politicians to get approvals moving.

Though Snohomish County had officially suspended its operation, Sergeant Adams returned to snorkel Lake Elan. He didn’t think it was likely Sam had ended up there, but he considered it worth a shot. But to no avail, “There was nothing down there. It looked like the moon.”

By mid-October, the snow began to fall, and temperatures dropped sharply, so Kevin and Bud Carr decided to pack up their camp and come down the mountain. Kevin made several more solo trips through mid-November 14. But nothing was found. Like the official search, there were efforts that came to nothing despite a huge effort from hundreds of volunteers.

Aftermath

Tips continued to arrive. For example, YMCA campers at Lake Elan, just below the peak, saw Sam climb up the peak but never come down.

Psychics contacted the sheriff’s office, saying her body was near rocks, trees, and water. One woman said her brother-in-law could’ve abducted Sam, given a coincidentally timed vacation. The woman told a deputy she, “had borrowed his vehicle once, and even though it was immaculate, it smelled of semen and dead bodies.”

No definitive signs of Sam were ever found. Some footprints on the southeast side of Vesper Peak could have been Sam’s, but they revealed nothing. Crucially, searchers looked at every place a hiker could have conceivably fallen, but some couldn’t be completely ruled out. Below the steep north face of Vesper Peak, the edge of a glacier formed a moat at the base of the cliff, its bottom impossible to reach beneath the ice.

The sheriff’s office reported sightings of bald women across Washington, several at various Walmarts. One witness claimed she saw Sam playing a TV show on her phone while hiking that day, an episode of The Bachelorette. “I do know that the season finale of that show happened after the hike, so it could point to her not planning on inflicting any sort of self-harm?” the witness wrote in an email to deputies.

Steve Monchak, an area drone photographer, reported that he’d been at the Big Four ice caves the day Sam went missing, just a few miles away; he told deputies he spotted two suspicious men there. Monchak would head up the amateur drone searches but later broke from Kevin’s search to run his own. He began a Facebook group called “The Truth of the Sam Sayers Case” where followers could swap theories; one made a timeline that runs more than 180 pages. Eventually, a breakaway Facebook group was formed called “The Truth of the Sam Sayers Case – uncensored” with even more wild rumors and conspiracy theories.

What happened to Sam Sayers?

Misadventure

She may have fallen into a river or slid off a cliff, or into a crevice on the glacier, but a fall from the trailside of the summit block is considered unlikely. The summit block is almost entirely overhanging, and a fall would result in a clean landing onto the center of the glacier, which would be easily visible.

Prospectors found gold and silver in the area in the late 1800s, and the Sunrise Mine was dug up around Wirtz Basin. It’s hard to say how many deep mine shafts and ventilation corridors, called adits, are dug into the mountain—often hidden in the underbrush. Could Sam have fallen into one of these?

Foul play

Through her live Facebook videos, Sam’s mother, Lisa Yax Sayers, has revealed that she and her husband have hired a team of private investigators. Lisa believes Sam was taken into a sex trafficking ring.

She told Dateline that for some reason, call it mother’s intuition, she was nervous about Samantha going on that particular hike.

In a story in the Seattle Times in 2019, Lisa said she refused to give up hope that her daughter was alive somewhere. “We’re not searching the mountain. We don’t think she stayed on the mountain.”

The private investigators had asked Lisa Sayers not to share what, if anything, they had learnt. “I’m not going to say who we’re working with. But we have not stopped. We still believe she is alive.”

Samantha Sayers with her mother, Lisa Sayers — Samantha Sayers, left, with her mother, Lisa Sayers

Lisa also dropped hints that she believed Kevin Dares may be behind the disappearance, even though it was reported that he had spent over 100 days on the mountain searching for Sam. She alleges Kevin may have been abusive towards her and has ceased all contact with him, as well as reporters who attempted to write articles about the disappearance and all Facebook users who speculate about what happened.

Lisa insists that she has information no one else has about the disappearance and Kevin’s possible involvement. Unfortunately, no one will know that information until, as she says, “the truth comes to light.”

Internet sleuths have reported that Kevin Dares is back using dating apps, where he met Sam in the first place. Some believe this is further proof that Dares is somehow involved, but this seems far-fetched, and you’d expect him to start a new life and relationships.