The bizarre disappearance of Stacey Arras from Yosemite National Park

October 27, 2017 StrangeOutdoors

Stacey Arras disappeared July 1981, Sunrise High Sierra Camp / Sunrise Lakes area, Mariposa County, Yosemite National Park, California

Revised September 2024

In July 1981, 14-year-old Stacey Arras went on a four-day group horse-riding trip with her father, George, to Yosemite National Park in California. Stacey and the rest of the group stopped for an overnight stop in the Sunrise Meadows area of the park. At some point in the late afternoon, Stacey decided to go for a short hike without her father to take some pictures of nearby lakes. She was never seen again.

David Paulides has extensively covered the story in his 411 books, videos, and radio interviews and it is considered a cornerstone 411 disappearance. Paulides has also heavily criticized the National Park Service (NPS) for failing to release the report on the case and has appealed for its release via a Freedom of Information Appeal (FOIA) which was unsuccessful. The Arras case report is around 2000 pages long and despite 40 years having passed it has never been released despite it being unlikely that the authorities are actively pursuing leads. Therefore Paulides claims that a cover-up has occurred for reasons unknown and he is correct that after such a long passage of time it is puzzling.

Stacey’s disappearance is a baffling case because, after a huge search in a relatively defined area, only a lens cap was found. No evidence of her skeletal remains, clothing or camera after decades have passed has ever turned up. Given the scale of the NPS case file that remains under wraps, was it just simply that she went off-trail and got lost in the wilderness? The area around Sunrise High Sierra Camp and Sunrise Lakes is rugged (see pictures below), with granite boulders everywhere, and it can be treacherous if you hike off-trail to take a picture. Was criminal activity or something supernatural involved?

Many questions remain about this disappearance and StrangeOutdoors hopes that one day the park service will release further information to allow more detailed theories to be assessed and even a potential resolution to be proposed. For now, the case remains somewhat of an enigma.

The trip to Yosemite

George and Stacey had planned a four-day horse riding trip in the Yosemite area for some time. It was not unusual for the family to go hiking in the national parks and after some personal troubles for Stacey, it may have been an opportunity for father and daughter to perhaps fix a strained relationship.

They traveled to Yosemite on July 17, 1981 and met up with the other horse riders at Tuolumne Meadows, together with the group lead, Chris Grimes. The group size is uncertain with reports between 7 and 20 people. From there they rode around 4 miles to the Upper Cathedral Lakes area using the John Muir Trail and stopped for some food at around 3 pm.

After riding for a few more hours, they stopped at some Sunrise High Sierra Camp cabins, around 3 miles southeast of Tenaya Lake and 1.5 miles from Sunrise Lakes. The group decided to freshen up after the ride, having planned to stay the night. Sunrise Camp is 9,400 feet above sea level and the last one on the fifty-mile High Sierra Camp Loop. Nine cabins provide beds for thirty-four guests, and they are set against a lovely alpine meadow facing Mt. Florence and Mt. Clark.

Sunrise Meadows area of Yosemite National Park

Sunrise High Sierra Camp cabins

Who was Stacey Arras?

Stacey Arras

Stacey (or Stacy in some articles) Anne Arras was 14 years at the time of her disappearance in 1981. Her parents were George and Carol and she had two sisters, Sandra and Stephanie and a brother called George. The Arras family lived in Saratoga, California, just to the south of San Francisco.

The Stacey Arras disappearance

Stacey cleaned up, showered and changed clothes. Stacey told her Dad she would go for a walk towards the Sunrise Lakes to take some pictures with her Olympus camera. She was keen to stretch her legs after the horse ride as she had spent most of the day in the saddle. An older member of the group, Gerald Stuart (70-77 years, age unclear), was sitting on a boulder about 100 feet away from the cabins and Stacey thought it might be an idea to go walking with him. The relationship with Gerald is unclear, but it is likely that they had just met that day. However, he was also a Saratoga resident, so perhaps they knew each other before the horse riding trip.

She asked her Dad if he wanted to go with her, but he said he'd pass. Her last conversation with him related to her footwear, where he advised her to change from her flip-flops (thongs) to hiking boots. She agreed that would be a good idea. She was wearing an off-white pullover windbreaker, white jersey blouse, leggings, and grey hiking boots, and she also had metal braces on her teeth.

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Everybody saw her walk over to the boulder with Gerald and take some pictures. Subsequently, she told him she was keen to go to a nearby lake for some more shots and he offered to accompany her. This was either a few hundred yards to the flooded (lower) Long Meadow or the longer walk to Sunrise Lakes, 1.5 miles away (the exact destination is unclear), which is at least 40 minutes from the camp.

After a little while down the hill, around 20 minutes after they’d set off, the elderly man felt tired and had to sit down to get his breath. This was not surprising after a long day on a horse and at an altitude of over 9000 feet. Chris Grimes back at camp was tending to the horses in a coral and happened to see Stacy taking a picture and he watched her as she went a little further down the hill before the trees obscured her and he lost sight of her. This was the last time she was ever seen.

The search for Stacey Arras

Sunrise Lakes Yosemite

Sunrise Lakes Trail Yosemite

Sunrise Lakes area Yosemite

After a while, when Stacey didn't return, Gerald got concerned, and he continued for a while in the direction that she had gone expecting to find her quickly. But she was nowhere to be seen, so he returned to the cabin area, and gathered the group for a search. The horse riding group had no luck and reported her missing to park rangers. Gerald told park officials that he had spoken to a group of people coming from the direction that Stacey had taken, but they had not seen her and that was very concerning - either she’d gone off trail to take a picture or something else had happened.

A very large search involving 100-150 people (including 67 Mountain Rescue Association (MRA) volunteers representing most of the Region's teams) and sniffer dogs were deployed over ten days starting on July 18, concentrating on a 3-5 square mile area around Sunrise Lakes. Three helicopters were also used in the search, with the park's contract chopper in the air for over 40 hours but these operations were scaled back on July 20, when it was believed that the area had been well covered from the air. Ground searches began to be reduced from July 22, and the official search finally ended after a week of activity on July 26, 1981.

Despite the efforts of SAR teams with over 8000 man hours and at a cost of $100,000, the only thing ever found was the lens cap from Stacey's camera, just inside the tree line from where she walked into the area by the lake. The SAR operation was one of the largest in Yosemite National Park’s history.

Sniffer dogs were unable to pick up any scent and this was blamed on a lack of rainfall at the time that made the ground very dusty. There were no footprints or any other signs Stacey had ever been in the area. Rangers and searchers were puzzled as after such a comprehensive search trying to look into every crevice, rocky outcrop and body of water there was zero evidence. The area is rugged and strewn with granite but even if she fell somewhere you would have expected the ground searchers or dog teams to find something like her Olympus camera discarded on the ground.

Stacey’s mother Carol was equally perplexed, saying that it was strange that even a small item like a gum wrapper or her wind cheater didn’t turn up after all the efforts.

Stacy Arras SAR

What happened to Stacey?

Misadventure

It is not inconceivable that Stacey having left Gerald behind decides to take a picture from an off trail area or rocky outcrop to try and capture Sunrise Lakes. Perhaps she needed to attend to a call of nature? There is a lot of timber and granite in the area that can easily cause injury.

But remains have never been found, even after so many years. She was wearing tooth braces so if anyone did come upon her skeletal remains it would make it easier to identify Stacey. Despite a very extensive search of the Sunrise Lakes area, no sign of her, clothing, or camera has ever been located.

Animal attack

An attack by a bear or mountain lion seems unlikely. There were no signs of a struggle, blood or evidence of disturbed ground.

About 300-500 black bears live in Yosemite’s 750,000 acres. But there are no Grizzly bears in California. The last hunted California grizzly bear was shot in Tulare County, California, in August 1922, although no body, skeleton or pelt was ever produced. Less than 75 years after the discovery of gold in 1848, almost every grizzly bear in California had been tracked down and killed.

A black bear’s diet consists mainly of berries, grasses, nuts, and insects. Black bears are naturally shy of humans but when they learn they are a potential source of food their behaviour can change and this can make them more dangerous.

Attacks are rare—nobody has been killed or seriously injured by a bear in Yosemite.

Foul play

It seems unlikely that Stacey was abducted or murdered in the Sunrise Lakes vicinity given the remoteness of the location. If an abductor wanted to take Stacey out of the park the nearest road was miles away. Burying a body could have been possible but would seem implausible. A member of the horse riding group, including Gerald, may have been the perpetrator but until the case files are released this is all guesswork.

Voluntary disappearance

The Fresno Bee reported on July 28, 1981, that Stacey was having some family or school troubles and was missing her boyfriend. Stacey’s mother, Carol, denied she had a serious boyfriend. But if she intended to disappear, why did she leave the camp in inappropriate footwear before her father intervened?

There was a highway 3-4 miles away from the camp, but was Stacey so fed up with being with her father that she concocted a plan to locate a nearby road, somehow contact someone to pick her up at the right time and then disappear completely?

Who did she go off with? Why had no sign of Stacey ever turned up? Again, this scenario seems unlikely.

Other theories

Some have proposed that the most likely theory is supernatural or an unexplained physical phenomenon like a portal. Others propose a bigfoot attack. The fact that foul play and misadventure theories are not perfect, adds credence to more unlikely scenarios.

The case file

On February 22, 2011, David Paulides requested the Arras case file from the National Park Service whilst researching his early Missing411 books. He asked for 10 categories of documents. He was denied this request on the grounds that it may “Interfere with future law enforcement proceedings” (FOIA exemption (7)(A)). Subsequently, according to Paulides, an unnamed NPS Special Agent called him and said he would never get Stacey’s file and it was being treated as a missing persons case.

David Paulides

On May 16, 2011, Paulides requested a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) Appeal (No. 2011-107) and the Office of the Solicitor based in Washington DC, issued a response on September 2011, denying this appeal. They stated that:

Exemption (7)(A) permits the withholding of “records or information compiled for law enforcement purposes, but only to the extent that production of such law enforcement records or information…could reasonably be expected to interfere with enforcement proceedings”. The exemption is intended to prevent premature disclosure of the investigatory materials that might be used in law enforcement action.

“In this case, Congress has given the Secretary of the Interior, through the NPS, express law enforcement authority to “maintain law and order and protect persons and property within areas of the National Park system” and the records at issue in the appeal were compiled for this purpose. Therefore, the department concludes that the withheld documents were “compiled for law enforcement purposes”.

Additionally, the NPS has advised the Department that its criminal investigation into the incident is still ongoing. Disclosure of the documents at issue in the appeal could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings because their premature release could:

Afford a virtual roadmap through the government’s evidence, which would provide critical insights into its legal thinking and strategy and could jeopardize the proceedings by more fully revealing the scope and nature of the government's case and assist in circumventing investigation;
Prematurely reveal the full scope of the evidence obtained, the assessment of the evidence, reveal strengths and weaknesses of the NPS’s evidence and case, and the progress, status, direction and limits of the NPS’s investigation;
Hinder NPS’s ability to further control and shape the investigation, would enable targets of the investigation to elude detection, create defenses, or to suppress, fabricate, or temper with evidence;
Create a great potential for witness intimidation, expose actual or prospective witnesses to undue influence or retaliation, could deter their cooperation, and create the potential for interference with them.

Further, a review of the withheld materials reveals that there are no exempt categories that can be released to you without causing one of the harms to the NPS’s investigation of the incident articulated above. Therefore, based on the foregoing, the Department concludes that the NPS properly withheld the documents at issue in the appeal in their entirety under exemption (7) (A).

Paulides then claimed that former National Park Ranger, Charles R. Farabee, who co-wrote the 2007 book, “Off the Wall: Death in Yosemite” together with Michael P. Ghiglieri, must have had access to the Stacey Arras File and if this was the case then the NPS would have been unable to withhold information from others that requested it. He argued that because the book had a substantial section covering the case, he should also have access to the relevant Arras files. But the NPS reviewed the book in question and concluded in a response to Paulides that:

“In this case, you have not met your burden of establishing that a waiver occured. The section in Mr. Farabee’s book regarding the incident that is the subject of the FOIA request is not “lengthy”, as you describe. Rather, out of the 600-page book, the discussion regarding this incident consistant of one and a quarter pages of text and a reference to the incident in a table. The short, general discussion in Mr. Farabee’s book regarding Ms. Arras disappearance does not reflect the detailed information continued in the nearly two thousand pages that comprise the case file that you seek.

In light of this, there is no basis for the Department to conclude that any record in the public domain duplicates that being withheld by the NPS in this case. Thus, you have not met your burden of establishing that a waiver occured.

As to your allegation that the NPS allowed Mr. Farabee to review the case file, the NPS has advised the department that this did not occur. Additionally, after speaking with Mr. Farabee, the NPS reports that the few paragraphs in his book regarding the incident derived from his personal knowledge he gained about the incident when he participated in the search activities. The department has no reason to question the NPS on its statements on this issue.

Accordingly for all the above reasons, the Department concludes that the NPS properly involved exemption (7)(A) to withhold the documents at issue in the appeal and you have not established that it has waived its ability to do so. Therefore, your appeal is denied. This completes the Department’s response to your appeal.”

It is interesting from the response to Paulides that the case file is over 2000 pages long which is very large for a missing persons case. They are generally up to 100 pages and many are 10-20 pages. It is also being treated as a criminal investigation. The big question is if foul play is involved, why has the case not been closed after so long since she disappeared in 1981? That is a long time to keep the case open.

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