19-year-old who vanished in Colorado national park is found dead on cliff, sheriff says
Rescuers found the body of a 19-year-old college student who vanished in a Colorado national park on a canyon cliff, officials said.
Dallas Roberts was missing for almost a week inside Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, McClatchy News previously reported.
He was reported missing Oct. 28, Montrose County Sheriff Gene Lillard told McClatchy News on the phone.
As the agency organized search efforts for Roberts the next day, the National Park Service notified the agency that Roberts had raced through the park’s entrance in a truck that was later found about 150 feet down a hill into brush off a road that leads into the base of the Black Canyon, Lillard said.
The Montrose County Sheriff’s Office and Mesa County Sheriff’s Office then brought in a cadaver dog, Lillard said. A few days later, National Park Service officials found a sweater that Roberts’ family identified as his about half a mile from the wreck.
The agencies sent drones into the canyon’s south rim to check areas beneath deep drop offs into the canyon and found Roberts’ body lying in a sagebrush area about 200 feet beneath a bench midway down the granite cliffside, Lillard said.
Rescuers used ropes and pulleys to lift his body from the canyon, the sheriff said.
“It’s an absolute tragedy,” he said.
Roberts was attending college at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction on the western slope of the Rocky Mountains, about a 75-mile drive northwest from the park. He was local to Montrose, which is about a 12-mile drive southwest from the park and about a 65-mile drive west of the town of Gunnison.
Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park spans 31,000 acres of exceptionally rugged, remote terrain that surrounds part of a deep, steep-walled gorge carved into rock by the Gunnison River.
This story was originally published November 5, 2024 at 3:31 PM with the headline "19-year-old who vanished in Colorado national park is found dead on cliff, sheriff says."
