Wetherton and Beverly disappearance - Media clippings

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The assorted clippings from new reports are a supplemental material for the unsolved Uinta Mountains mystery tale

It goes without saying that the media mountain accident reporting is notoriously unreliable. Nonetheless, these tidbits, and the dead hikers' last film of photograps, is all we can count on to reconstruct their route.

Sep 20 03 Deseret News

Carole Wetherton and Beverly, a registered nurse and experienced hiker, were last seen Sept. 9 at a Park City condominium.

Authorities don't know exactly when or where the pair started their hike. Both the Notch Mountain and Country Lakes trails start adjacent to the parking lot where a sheriff's deputy found the hikers' rented Jeep Cherokee on Sunday. The vehicle, with maps and food inside, was parked closer to the Notch Mountain trailhead. The pair did not write their names in either of the two registration boxes, [SAR Coordinator Jim] Snyder said.

July 10 04 Deseret News

Twice, in separate searches, teams were very close to the women and the shelter they had built. Last fall, a crew on horseback was within 300 yards. And just a month ago on June 5, a reconnaissance team checking the area was about 100 yards from where the pair eventually was found, Snyder said.

Oct 15 03 Naples Daily News, FL

(this is from AP wire and it already quotes Sheriff Edmunds "rough terrain" so this rough terrain statement must have been a guess made before the remains were recovered. Note also contradictory date for the hikers' disapperarance)

Carole Wetherton, 58, of Panacea, Fla., and her daughter, Kimberly Beverly, 39, of Tucker, Ga., were last seen Sept. 9 in Park City.

They were reported missing after they failed to make their Sept. 13 flights back home.

Their rented truck was found parked at the Crystal Lake trailhead, about 50 miles east of Salt Lake City. Maps in the truck seemed to indicate they were planning a day-hike to one of the many lakes in the area.

A forest ranger who saw the women near the trailhead on Sept. 8 told them they needed heavier clothing in case the weather turned, and it did.

June 27th 04 Salt Lake Tribune

The two Georgia women checked into a Park City time-share Sept. 6. After renting videos over the weekend, the women collected maps from a Forest Service station on Mirror Lake Highway en route to a day hike on Monday morning, Sept. 8.
A forest ranger who saw the women near the trailhead told them they were ill-prepared for possible severe weather. That afternoon, rain pelted the mountain trails, and temperatures plummeted below freezing that night. By the following night, several inches of snow had fallen. The women were not reported missing until they failed to return home the following weekend.

(Another Trib article says the ranger might have seen them on Sep 9th)

June 27 04 Atlanta Journal

The terrain is so rough, [County Sheriff] Edmunds has said the bodies could have been right under searchers' noses but they still wouldn't have seen them.

(altough the dateline is after the remains have been found, the quote is apparently lifted from a 2003 AP report)

Sep 28 06 KSL news report

A small piece of space blanket, found nine months after Kim Beverly and Carole Wetherton disappeared in the High Uintas, was the key that led searchers to their bodies. If they could have walked in a straight line, searchers say the women were only about a mile and a half from their car...

June, 2004. A helicopter takes members of the Summit County Search and Rescue team into the Middle Fork of the Weber River on a training mission. Not an hour into the exercise, someone finds a small piece of space blanket.

"The searcher that located that, basically if this were a criminal case, we'd say cracked the case," said Captain Alan Siddoway. The hikers' remains were found not far away, in some rocks.

(It is hard to take the mile-and-a-half claim literally since there are hardly any places within Mid Fork Weber watershed which are so close to Crystal Lake TH. The chopper reference may be an informative clue too, since most of the lower Mid Fork is a narrow, heavily forested gorge, which strikes me as an unlikely place to land helicopters or to conduct training exercises)

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