Grand Junction – Searchers on Wednesday retrieved the body of a snowshoer missing since January from a rugged drainage on Grand Mesa, less than a mile from where his wife and daughter were rescued.
Dan Walker, 54, disappeared Jan. 10 after being trapped in a fierce winter storm while on a family cross-country ski and snowshoe outing.
The previous day, the Grand Junction man, his wife, Deborah, and daughter Camille had taken off from a parking lot along Colorado 65 near the Mesa Lakes Lodge for a Sunday excursion. They headed into an area they had skied many times before. But a storm that moved in that afternoon obliterated familiar landmarks for the trio, and they became lost.
Deborah, 50, and Camille, 18, spent two nights huddled under a tree with their dog while Dan Walker set out to find help. The two women were found by searchers about 3 miles from their car and not far from the trail they had lost in the storm.
A dogged search for Dan Walker in sometimes blizzard conditions that week turned up his discarded ski poles and tracks that wound in circles. But that search was suspended after five days and heavy snowfall that buried any other clues to Walker’s whereabouts.
Jerry Nolan said not a day went by in the last five months when he hadn’t thought about his former co-worker, buried somewhere in the snow on Grand Mesa.
“He was probably so cold. He was probably so disoriented, he couldn’t travel in a straight line,” said Nolan, who also is president of the Grand Mesa Nordic Council. “When you’re lost, you’re lost.”
Walker’s body was found in an area searchers had concentrated on in the week after his disappearance.
He had slogged through deep snow into a drainage called Bull Basin where lights from Colorado 65 or Mesa Lodge would not have been visible, said Susan McBurney, a spokeswoman for the Mesa County Sheriff’s Office.
His body was first spotted Tuesday from a helicopter that flew over the area after searchers, who periodically went out on the ground over the past five months, discovered one of his snowshoes.
He was found lying on his side in a fetal position in a tiny stream that had been covered by snow until recent spring thaws. His other snowshoe was found close by.
Mesa County Coroner Rob Kurtzman said Walker’s body was positively identified through dental records and that the cause of death was consistent with hypothermia.
Staff writer Nancy Lofholm can be reached at 970-256-1957 or nlofholm@denverpost.com.
