In December 1928, searchers in the Grand Canyon found a wooden boat floating in calm water near the bottom of the canyon.
It was upright and fully loaded, and a young bride’s diary was still on board, but the newlyweds who owned it were gone.
By number one, you’ll understand why the last man who waved them goodbye became part of this mystery.
These are 12 real discoveries from the Grand Canyon’s [music] caves, creeks, river, and sky.
And the first one begins with a dead mountain lion.
Number 12.
In late October 2007, a wildlife biologist at the Grand Canyon picked up a radio signal that could only mean one thing.
One of his collared mountain lions had stopped moving.
His name was Eric York and at 37 he had already spent years tracking the big cats in and around the park.
He followed the signal down into rough terrain below the rim and there he found the lion, a female the team called P13 curled up in a rocky al cove.
There wasn’t a mark on her, only dried blood under her nose.
York wanted to know what had killed her, so he carried the 90 lb animal out of the canyon himself and examined her body.
On November 2nd, 2007, Eric York was found dead in his home on the South Rim.
When the results came back from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, they named a disease most people think belongs in history books.
Plague, the same bacterium behind the Black Death.
Tests showed that York and the mountain lion carried the same strain.
His symptoms matched pneumonic plague, the rarest form of the disease and the most dangerous because it attacks the lungs.
A park service review later found that he hadn’t worn gloves or a respirator while handling the lion and that he had never been trained on that risk.
Here’s the part that stays with you.
Plague never left this region.
Health officials consider it endemic in northern Arizona above about 4,500 ft carried by rodents and their fleas.
And the south rim sits well above that line.
There was no outbreak after York’s death and park officials stress that visitors probably hadn’t been exposed.
But the park changed the way it works and its wildlife staff now carry cards that warn doctors they may have been exposed to diseases most physicians never see.
That danger was hiding inside an animal, but the next one was hiding inside a park building in plain sight for 18 years.
At number 11, the first witness was a teenager with a Geiger counter.
In March 2018, the son of a park employee carried his radiation detector into the museum collections building on the South Rim.
It’s where the park keeps its scientific specimens and artifacts.
In the collection room, the counter started reacting.
The readings were traced to three plastic 5gallon buckets full of uranium ore.
One bucket was reportedly so full that its lid wouldn’t close.
The ore samples had spent decades in a basement at park headquarters before they were moved into the new collections building around 2000.
And there they stayed.
Tours passed through that building and according to the park’s own safety manager, children on those tours sometimes sat near the buckets for half an hour.
In June 2018, technicians finally removed the ore and dumped it into the orphan mine, an old uranium mine on the South Rim.
Remember that mine?
Oddly, the empty buckets were brought back to the building afterward.
The story only went public in February 2019 [music] when Ston Stevenson, the park’s safety, health, and wellness manager, emailed every park service employee.
Anyone who had been in that building between 2000 and June 2018, he wrote, had been exposed.
He claimed adults near the buckets could have [music] received 400 times the safe limit and children 4,000 times.
And he accused officials of keeping it quiet.
Those figures are his estimates and they’re disputed.
The Interior Department said a latest survey found radiation at normal background levels with no current risk to the public.
Experts pointed out that the danger from raw ore depends on how close you are and how long you stay.
Whether anyone actually received an unsafe dose has never been determined.
So, no one can tell you how much radiation those visitors absorbed.
And no one has fully explained why three buckets of uranium sat in a museum building for 18 years until a teenager noticed.
That building was full of things taken out of the canyon, but some of the strangest are still sealed inside the canyon walls.
Number 10 takes us to a creature with hundreds of teeth around its mouth.
Those teeth branched like tiny combs, and they ringed a mouth that could push outward to rake in food.
The animal they belong to lived here roughly 505 million years ago.
Its name is Cratrico Spectatus and scientists [music] named it after the crate dragon from Star Wars because of its fiercel [music] looking jaws.
It was a priapulid, a type of marine worm sometimes called [music] a cactus worm and it was only about 4 in long.
In July 2025, a team led by researchers at the University [music] of Cambridge described it in the journal Science Advances.
They had broken down [music] samples of shale from the canyon’s bright angel formation.
Rock that once formed the floor of a shallow sea.
Out of that shale came more than500 tiny fossils.
What made them remarkable was what survived.
Most fossils this old are shells and other hard parts, but these kept their soft tissue.
Almost every famous site like this, such as Canada’s Burgess Shale, formed on a low oxygen seafloor where little could rot.
These came from a shallow oxygenrich sea, which makes [music] their survival even stranger.
Teeth, feeding hairs, and even specks of food near the mouths of ancient [music] crustaceans were preserved.
Alongside the worm, the team found crustaceations with moike teeth and molllesks [music] with rows of scraping teeth.
The lead author said the canyon simply hadn’t produced a record like this before, and that’s what makes it unsettling.
These creatures weren’t hidden in some remote cave, but in canyon walls that millions of visitors have walked past.
[music] Which brings us to something stranger.
Not a creature in the rock, but a hole in time.
Coming in at 9 is a question geologists have argued about for more than a century.
Where did a billion years go?
In 1869, John Wesley Powell led the first known expedition down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon.
[music] And along the way, he noticed something wrong in the rock.
In places, a layer of sandstone sits directly on top of far older crystalline rock.
[music] And from a distance, the line between them looks like a simple seam.
It isn’t simple at all.
The sandstone above that line formed around 500 million years ago, while the rock below it can be more than a billion years older.
Everything that should sit between them is gone.
And in parts [music] of the canyon up to about 1.2 billion years of Earth’s history is [music] missing.
Geologists call it the Great Unconformity, and it was first named here, though similar gaps appear on other continents, too.
So, what took it?
Something [music] stripped away rock as much as 3 mi thick.
Researchers at Dartmouth College argue it was ice.
During a period called Snowball Earth, roughly 700 million years ago, glaciers may have covered almost the entire planet and ground the rock away.
Another team, including geologists at UC Santa Barbara, argues the loss began earlier as continents collided and tore apart.
The Dartmouth researchers say both forces may have played a part.
Nobody has settled it.
You can put your hand on one rock in the Grand Canyon and touch a gap of up to a billion years that science [music] still can’t fully explain.
We’ll come back to Powell’s voyage later in [music] this list.
Something else moves through these layers, and that’s water.
[music] In one creek, it carries something it shouldn’t.
Number eight is where it changes.
On one of the most popular backpacking loops in the Grand Canyon, hikers get a warning about a single creek.
Don’t drink from it.
In a canyon where summer heat can kill, telling people to skip a water source is serious.
So, why would hikers be warned away from Horn Creek?
Follow the creek uphill toward the south rim and about 2 mi northwest of Grand Canyon Village, you’ll find it drains the slopes below an old mine.
It’s the Orphan Mine.
The same mine where technicians dumped those buckets of uranium ore back at number 11.
The orphan mine began as a copper claim in 1893 before this was even a national park.
In 1951, a large uranium deposit was found there.
And during the nuclear arms race, it produced uranium ore right on the canyon’s edge.
The mine closed in 1969, but the uranium didn’t stay put.
Dissolved uranium has leeched down the Horn Creek drainage ever since.
The US Geological Survey measured it in Horn Creek at between 18.9 and 67.8 micrograms per liter against a federal drinking water limit of 30.
At its worst, that’s more than twice the limit.
And nearby Salt Creek carries a warning, too.
Levels change from season to season.
And when a Berkeley radiation researcher sampled a trickle of Horn Creek in 2016, his reading came in just under the limit.
Even so, the warnings stand.
And according to reports, cleaning up the old mine site has already cost more than $15 million.
One widely quoted piece of hiking advice sums it up.
If Horn Creek is flowing, don’t drink from it unless the only other choice is dying of thirst.
So, that’s where the museum’s uranium went back into the ground above a creek that hikers are told not to drink.
If you’re enjoying seeing how these stories connect, consider subscribing because there’s a lot more of this canyon to come.
Seven.
In 1976, a river ranger named Scott Tyony was on his last trip of the season down the Colorado when he discovered something no ranger expects to see.
It was a fire burning inside a cave.
The cave was Rampart Cave high above the river near the western end of the Grand Canyon.
And what was burning [music] wasn’t wood.
It was dung, left by animals that had been extinct for thousands of years.
When scientists first investigated Rampart Cave in 1936, the floor was carpeted with dried balls of it.
And in some sections, the deposit ran nearly 20 ft deep.
It came from shasta, ground sloths, bare-sized relatives of today’s tree sloths that grew to about 9 ft long and roughly 550 lbs.
Between about 40,000 and 11,000 years ago, generations of them sheltered here.
The cave preserved more than dung because bones, skin, and [music] hair survived in the dry air.
Scientists also found fossils [music] of an extinct vampire bat, and Rampart became one of the richest ice [music] age fossil sites in North America.
The park service had installed an iron gate to protect it.
But in July 1976, [music] intruders bent that gate and set the deposit on fire.
There were almost no flames, so the dung simply smoldered for months.
By the time it was out, roughly 70% of the deposit was gone.
Nobody was ever named as the culprit, though researchers believe campers or vandals were most likely responsible.
[music] Thousands of years of evidence about how these animals lived and how they disappeared went up in smoke.
There was one small piece of luck.
Decades earlier, a Smithsonian curator had collected specimens from the cave and taken them to Washington.
Some of the best evidence that survives [music] today sits in those museum drawers, far from the cave that made it.
Rampart Cave looks down on the Colorado River and the river has its own way of keeping things.
Sometimes it gives them back decades later.
We’re at number six now and it begins with a hiker on a beach.
In April 1975, someone walking along the Colorado River found human bones near the water.
The sheriff identified them as Bert Loper, a man who had vanished on this river 26 years earlier.
Loper was one of the great pioneers of river running and people called him the grand old man of the Colorado.
In July 1949, he was 79 and living with a heart condition, but he still set out on one more trip through the Grand Canyon to celebrate his 80th [music] birthday.
On July 8th, 1949, he rode his homemade boat into a [music] rapid at mile 24 and a half, slumped at the oars, and the boat flipped.
Loper was gone and his [music] companions believed his heart gave out just before the capsize.
They found his empty boat [music] downstream, hauled it above the water line and painted a memorial on it.
What’s left of that boat still [music] rests near a side canyon now named for him.
But his body was not found [music] that year or for many years after.
Then came 1975 when his bones washed up about 47 mi below the rapid where he died.
And here’s the detail that makes people go quiet.
His wife Rachel [music] had died just 2 months earlier on February 8th, 1975.
And Bert Loper was buried beside her.
It was a coincidence, of course, but it’s a hard one to forget.
There’s one more detail from Loper’s life you need to hold on to.
In 1923, [music] he expected to be named headboatman for a river survey of the Grand Canyon.
Instead, [music] the job went to a photographer who lived on the South Rim, a man named Emory Cobb.
Keep that name in mind because Emory Cobb isn’t finished with this story.
And Loper wasn’t the first man this river handed back his bones.
Halfway down the list at number five, a skeleton is identified by its boots.
In 1890, a survey [music] crew rowing through Marble Canyon, the upper stretch of the Grand Canyon, [music] found human remains on a beach.
Almost nothing was left to recognize, but the boots told them it was Peter Hanssbor, one of their own who had drowned the summer before.
The crew worked for the Denver, Colorado Canyon, and Pacific Railroad, whose president, Frank Brown, [music] dreamed of laying track along the bottom of the canyon.
In 1889, his survey party set out down the river, and against [music] the advice of John Wesley Powell and others, they carried no life preservers.
On July 10th, 1889, Frank Brown, drowned in Marble Canyon.
Days later, Hanssbro’s boat struck an overhanging cliff at a rapid and capsized, and Hanssbro and the Cook’s helper, Harry Richards, both drowned.
That was three men dead in less than a week.
Before he died, Hanssbro had carved a memorial to Brown into the canyon wall, and those words are still there.
The shaken survivors gave up, stashed their boats and supplies in a large cave about 145 ft above the river and hiked [music] out.
When Chief Engineer Robert Brewster Stanton returned to finish the survey, he found Hansbro’s remains and buried him nearby.
The point of land above that beach [music] still carries his name.
The cave became known as Stanton’s Cave.
But the railroad men weren’t the first people to leave things there.
Starting in 1934, explorers found small animal figures at the back of the cave.
Each was made from a single willow twig split and wrapped into the shape of an animal, most likely a deer.
Archaeologists later recovered dozens more and dated [music] them to between 3,000 and 4,000 years old.
And some are described as [music] pierced by tiny sticks like spears.
Archaeologists believe the figures were part of a ritual [music] possibly connected to hunting.
People climbed into the cave, left these little figures in the dark, [music] and walked away.
And why they chose this place, we may never fully know.
Stanton’s survey turned back after three deaths.
20 years earlier, the very first expedition through the canyon also lost three men in a way that had nothing to do with drowning.
Number four, if you’d been standing above a rapid in 1869, would you have gotten back in the boat?
On August 28, 1869, John Wesley Powell’s expedition had been on the river for about three months with battered boats and almost no food left.
Then they reached a rapid that looked like a death sentence.
A mess of rocks, falls, and churning water.
Three men decided they’d had enough.
Oreamel Howland, his younger brother Senica, and William Dunn chose to climb out of the canyon and walk about 75 mi north to the nearest settlements.
Before they parted, Powell gave Oreamel a letter for his wife and a copy of the expedition’s records.
Then the remaining men ran the rapid, and they made it through.
Because it turned out to be less fearsome than it looked.
Within days, the expedition reached the end of the canyon.
The three men who climbed out were never seen again.
On September 7th, 1869, a telegram arrived in Utah reporting that Pal’s three men had been killed by Shivitz Putes.
Pal was later told through the frontiersman Jacob Hamlin that the tribe had mistaken the trio for other men who had harmed a Shivitz woman.
For more than a century, that was the accepted story until a letter surfaced [music] written in 1883 by a Utah settler named William Lean.
It mentioned three men being murdered in his local community.
In 1993, a researcher named Wesley Len published the letter and argued that the Powell men may have been killed inside a Utah settlement, not by the Shivitz at all.
Other historians aren’t convinced, and the letter is open to interpretation.
What’s documented is limited to this.
Three men walked away from the river to save their lives, and the river turned out to [music] be the safer choice.
So, here’s what I want to know.
Standing above that rapid in 1869, would you have gone back into the boats or up the cliffs?
Tell me in the comments and tell me why.
The final three are different because they aren’t relics in the rock.
They’re a disaster [music] site you’re not allowed to visit, a couple who vanished, and a discovery that turned a famous man’s life into a question.
Number three, somewhere in the Grand Canyon, there’s a national historic landmark you’re not allowed to visit, and its exact location is kept secret.
The site covers about 1 and a2 square miles and has been closed to hikers since the 1950s.
Scattered across it are hundreds of pieces of wreckage that were never removed.
On the morning of June 30th, 1956, two airliners took off from Los Angeles, 3 minutes apart.
TWWA Flight 2, a Loheed Super constellation, carried 70 people bound for Kansas City, while United Airlines Flight 718, a Douglas DC7, carried 58 people bound for Chicago.
Their routs crossed [music] northern Arizona.
And along the way, the TWWA captain asked to fly above the clouds.
Both planes ended up cruising at 21,000 ft with no radar coverage watching them.
At a time when much of America’s airspace was uncontrolled at around 10:30 in the morning, somewhere above the Grand Canyon, the two airliners collided.
The [music] DC7’s left wing was badly damaged, and the Super Constellation’s tail section was later found far from the rest of its wreckage.
Both planes fell into the canyon and all 128 people on board were killed.
It was the first commercial air disaster in American history with more than 100 deaths.
The TWWA wreckage was found first and the United wreckage was found days later more than a mile away on steep and remote ground.
The terrain was so harsh that United brought in a Swiss mountain rescue team.
The recovery became one of the most dangerous operations in the history of the park service.
The civil aeronautics board reached a conclusion that was simple and chilling.
The pilots did not [music] see each other in time to avoid the collision.
In a sky that vast, two [music] planes found the same point.
That morning changed how the world flies.
In 1957, President Eisenhower signed the Airways Modernization Act.
And in 1958, the Federal Aviation Agency was created, the forerunner of today’s FAA.
Nationwide radar coverage, flight data recorders, and collision avoidance systems all trace back to the crash.
In 2014, the park service made the site a national historic landmark.
The first crash site ever given that status, and much of the paperwork is heavily redacted.
A year after the crash, one man even claimed he’d found a spoon from the TWWA flight and blackened coins among the debris.
Researchers who have counted every known death in the Grand Canyon found something unexpected, which is that more people have died here in air crashes than in falls.
The canyon sky took 128 people that day, but its river took two.
And they bring us back to where this video began.
Number two.
In 1971, a woman on a commercial rafting trip through the Grand Canyon made an announcement around the campfire.
She said she was Bessie Hyde and that she had killed her husband.
To understand why that stunned everyone, you have to go back to the empty boat from the start of this video.
Glenn Hyde was a 29-year-old farmer from Idaho, and Bessie was in her early 20s.
They married in 1928 and for their honeymoon they set out to run the Green and Colorado rivers in a 20foot wooden scowl that [music] Glenn built himself.
Glenn wanted to set a speed record through the canyon and Bessie would become the first woman known to make the run.
They launched on October 20th, 1928 [music] and in November they hiked up to the South Rim to resupply.
There they [music] stayed with a well-known river photographer and his family, a man named Emry Cobb.
Yes, that’s the name from number six.
Culp had run the river himself, and he urged the couple to take life jackets, but Glenn refused.
On November 18th, 1928, [music] the Hides walked back down to their boat, pushed off, and were never seen again.
When they didn’t return, Glenn’s father launched a search and a search plane spotted the boat in the lower canyon.
Emory Carb and his brother Ellsworth reached it just after Christmas near Diamond Creek.
The Scow was upright, floating in calm water and fully loaded with supplies with Bessie’s diary still on board.
So was their camera, and its last photograph is believed to have been taken around November 27th.
Later, the Cole brothers cut the boat’s bow line and let it drift away, a decision they were criticized for.
Searchers found footprints on beaches upstream along with a few discarded tins and some scattered beans.
Then there was nothing, no bodies, no grave, and no message.
Most river historians believed [music] the river took them, probably in one of the rapids of the lower canyon.
Brad Dimmok, a river guide who wrote a book on the case, found little to support the darker rumors about Glenn.
But no remains have ever been found, and that left room for other stories.
The woman at the campfire in 1971 claimed she had stabbed [music] Glenn and escaped the canyon alone, but she later took the story back in 1992, when the famous river guide Georgie White Clark died.
Friends reportedly found papers linked to the hides among her belongings, including a marriage certificate.
Some decided [music] she had been Bessie all along, but no evidence ever proved it, and the [music] two women don’t look alike in photographs.
And one more question hung over the story.
What did the last man to see them alive really know?
48 years after the hides disappeared, his family started clearing out his garage.
And number one, Emory Cobb died in late 1976 at the age of 95 as one of the most famous figures in Grand Canyon history.
For most of the century, he and his brother had photographed visitors from their studio on the South Rim.
In early 1977, his family began clearing out his property.
Up in the rafters of the garage, an old boat was stored out of sight.
Nobody had thought much about it for years.
Think about who owned that garage.
This was the man who hosted Glenn and Bessie Hyde before their last day on the rim and the man who found their empty boat.
Someone climbed up to look inside it.
Inside the boat in the rafters was a human skeleton, and in the skull there was a bullet.
For a moment, it looked as if a nearly 50-year-old mystery had just ended in a garage.
Word spread fast.
The remains were male, about six feet tall, and roughly the build of Glenn Hyde.
To many people, the case looked solved, with Glenn Hyde found at last, and the man who had hosted him hiding him for decades.
Forensic specialists at the University of Arizona examined the bones and found that the man had been young, between about 18 and 22 years old, and younger than Glenn.
He had died from a gunshot wound to the head.
Later, the forensic anthropologist Walter Burkeby laid a photograph of Glenn Hyde over the skull, and the eye sockets, the jaw, and the chin didn’t line up.
The skeleton in the rafters was not Glenn Hyde.
So, who was he?
Part of the answer came from Cul’s own camera and part from his own family.
On June 4th, 1933, Emory Cold found the skeleton of a young man on a cliff near Shosonyi Point, east of Grand Canyon Village.
A pistol lay near the right hand.
It was a small pistol, either a 22 or a 32 caliber.
Cold photographed the scene and then he took the bones away.
According to a family account recorded by the Grand Canyon Pioneers Society, Cobb’s grandson had known about a skeleton in the house long before his grandfather died.
Cobb, the account says, kept the skull around the studio for a long time before the remains were bagged and stored in the garage.
Col’s 1933 photograph was later used to confirm that the skeleton in the garage was the same man.
He had been found 5 years after the hides vanished in a different place and in different circumstances.
But that answer opened a stranger question.
Why would a man keep a stranger skeleton for more than 40 years?
One researcher discovered the Cobb had served as a local representative on the county coroner’s jury.
He may have taken charge of the remains after the inquest and simply never let them go, but nobody knows for certain.
And the man himself still has no name because his case is still listed as an unidentified person.
The scene in 1933 pointed to a death by his own hand, but that has never been confirmed.
Nobody knows who he was, where he came from, or who once waited for him to come home.
In recent years, genetic genealogy has put names to many long unidentified people, and some hope it will one day name him, too.
So, this video began with a question.
Hiding inside [music] an empty boat.
Was the last man to see the hides alive hiding them?
The answer is no.
Emory Cobb wasn’t hiding Glenn [music] and Bessie Hyde.
He was hiding someone no one has ever been able to name.
The first boat in this [music] story was empty, and the last one wasn’t.
The honeymoon boat from 1928 still keeps its secret.
[music] The river most likely took Glenn and Bessie hide, but nobody can prove it.
And the boat in [music] Emery Cold’s garage turned out to hold a different mystery entirely.
Here’s my question for you.
Who do you think the man in Emery Cold’s [music] garage was?
And why did Col?
Leave your theory in the comments, and [music] I’ve pinned this question so you can see what everyone else thinks.
If the Grand Canyon’s hidden dangers [music] kept you watching, the Australian outback has plenty of its own.
Watch 12 [music] terrifying things scientists found in Australia’s outback that nobody expected, because it’s the perfect next stop.
