Josh Hall

Search and rescue operation underway near Nederland, Colorado.

Hiker information: Josh Hall, 27, from Arvada, Colorado. Hiker’s vehicle was found at the Hessie trailhead, a cell ping put his phone near the Continental Divide Trail (CDT) around noon on Wednesday, February 3rd, with the hiker departing for his hike around 9:30a that morning.

The search includes Boulder County Sheriff’s Office and the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group on skis, snowshoes, and snowmobiles. Update: “After multiple days of searching,” the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office stated in a press release, “we have made the difficult decision to suspend ground search efforts, until such time as new information surfaces, or until snow melt occurs.

Searchers have checked accessible cabins and mine shafts…that they were physically able to reach.” Seventy searchers accumulated more than 650 person-hours between Wednesday night and Saturday evening, BCSO stated. — A search and rescue operation is underway for an overdue hiker near Nederland, Colorado.

Around 6:18p on Wednesday, February 3, 2021, Boulder County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) Communications Center was notified of a 27-year-old male hiker who had not returned from a hiking trip. BCSO reported that around noon on Wednesday, the hiker’s phone pinged near the Continental Divide Trail (CDT), a trail that stretches across the United States some 3,100 miles between the borders of Mexico and Canada.

The location of the ping was not made public. According to Missing NPF estimations, based on the time Josh left the area and the cell phone ping, he would have had to make it to the CDT within about 3 hours. The quickest, most effective route he could have taken to get near the CDT within this amount of time is to head due West, which is in agreement with circulating speculation that Josh’s last known location may have been around Devil’s Thumb Trail that is, according to All Trails, a 12.1 mile heavily trafficked out and back trail. We have not, however, been able to confirm that this is an area of interest to search and rescue teams at the time of this publication, beside this note from Out There Colorado, which suggests that “many use [Hessie Trailhead] to access the Indian Peaks Wilderness, Devils Thumb, Lost Lake, King Lake, Woodland Lake, and Diamond Lake trails.”

The search and rescue teams include the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office and the Rocky Mountain Rescue Group on skis, snowshoes, and snowmobiles. A large area of terrain was covered, but high winds and weather conditions have made continued operations difficult. The search is expected to continue.

If you have any information pertaining to the whereabouts of Josh Hall, you are asked to contact the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. The file attached to this record is a trail guide provided by the Boulder Ranger District of the Department of Agriculture, Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forest, which highlights the trails from Hessie Trailhead.