No central list of the missing in US national parks
The US National Park Service keeps no separate list of people who go missing in its parks; its incident database is not used consistently.
2014 CE · 38.89, -77.04 · status: official
The account
Paulides's central complaint is that no federal agency could tell him how many people had vanished on its land. The Park Service does not keep an independent list of missing persons; incident and criminal reports go into a database that is not widely or consistently used, and many searches are run by county sheriffs under local agreements, so their records sit with the county. Fewer than 2,000 rangers cover more than 400 park units. The gap is real and was later acknowledged in Congress; it reflects fragmented record-keeping rather than any evidence of concealment.
The sceptical view
The lack of a list is a bureaucratic gap, not a mystery: jurisdiction over a search often belongs to a sheriff, not the park.
Connections in the atlas
- Ranger Paul Fugate, Chiricahua
- The TRACE Act: counting the missing on federal land
- 'Dead Men Walking': search and rescue in US national parks
- The FOIA requests and the quoted fees
- 'Missing 411' and Yosemite