The man who found them almost didn't stop
The man who found them almost didn’t stop. He was a trail maintenance volunteer for the Willamett National Forest, a retired postal worker named Gerald Fitch, 61 years old, bad knees, a thermos of black coffee strapped to his pack.
It was a Tuesday in late October, the kind of morning where the fog sits so low in the Douglas furs that you can’t tell where the tree ends and the sky begins.
He had been assigned a threemile stretch of the McKenzie River Trail, section 7, the part nobody hikes in October because the ground turns to soup and the trail markers get swallowed by undergrowth.
Gerald was 30 minutes into his section when he smelled it. He said later that he couldn’t describe it as a bad smell.
Exactly. It was more like presence, like something large and warm had recently occupied a space nearby.
He stopped walking. He stood very still. The way you stand when a sound you haven’t consciously heard has already reached some older part of your brain.
He stepped off the trail into the ferns. 20 feet in he found them. Two young women sitting with their backs against the trunk of a massive old growth Douglas fur.
Their wrists were bound together not to the [music] tree but to each other with what appeared to be strips of their own clothing.
Their heads were tilted forward, chins to chests. The way people sleep on airplanes when they finally [music] given up trying to stay awake.
They were breathing barely but breathing. Their clothes were intact but saturated [music] with three months of rain, rot, and forest floor.
Their hair had grown. Their faces were thin in a way that didn’t look like starvation exactly.
It looked like time itself had carved something away. Gerald Fitch called 911, then sat down on the wet ground beside them and did not [music] leave until the paramedics arrived 45 minutes later.
He held their hands, he said later. I didn’t know if they could hear me, but I talked to them anyway.
I told them they were found. I said it over and over. You’re found. You’re found.
You’re found. This is the story of how two sisters named Mara and Claire Aldren disappeared into the Willilamett National Forest on the 22nd of July.
And what happened or what we think happened? During the 93 days they were gone.
Mara Aldren was 26 years old when she vanished. The older of the two by 3 years, she worked as a graphic designer for a small branding agency in Eugene, Oregon.
She was the kind of person people described in that specific way that reveals everything.
She was just always there. Her coworker Denise Parr said like when Mara was in a room, the room felt accounted for.
She had dark auburn hair that she kept in a braid when she worked and loose when she didn’t.
She wore wire rimmed glasses that were slightly too large for her face, which gave her a perpetually searching expression.
She drove a 2014 Honda Civic the color of old moss and kept a specific brand of spearmint gum in every pocket of every jacket she owned.
She called her mother every Sunday. Not texted, called 15 to 20 minutes without fail.
The last call was July 20th, 2 days before the disappearance. Clare Aldrin was 23, studying environmental science at the University of Oregon.
The younger one, the louder one. Not loud in a disruptive way, but loud in the way that small things sometimes hold more energy than their size suggests.
She laughed at things a half second before other people understood why they were funny.
She had a field journal she carried everywhere, a battered green LO term 1917 filled with plant specimens, soil composition notes, and handdrawn maps of trails she had hiked.
She was, by every account, genuinely passionate about forests in a way that wasn’t fashionable or performative.
She loved the specific weight of old growth trees. She could tell you the age of a Douglas fur by the texture of its bark.
The trip was Clare’s idea. She had been planning it since the previous spring, a 5-day backpacking loop through the Three Sisters Wilderness Area, roughly 40 mi of trail through some of the most remote terrain in Oregon’s Cascade Range.
She had filed a trip plan with the Forest Service. She had waterproofed her maps, calibrated her compass, packed enough freeze-dried food for 7 days in case of delays.
She had hiked sections of this route before, alone and with others. She knew this forest the way some people know a city neighborhood, not perfectly, but intimately.
Mara had never backpacked [music] overnight before. This was acknowledged by everyone later, not as criticism, but as context.
Mara was not outdoorsy in any particular way. She could walk for miles. She walked to work every day, but technical wilderness travel was something else.
She agreed to go because Clare asked her and because their relationship had always operated on a specific frequency.
When Clare was enthusiastic about something, Mara wanted to be part of it. Simple as that.
They left Eugene on the morning of July 22nd, a Saturday. Clare drove her 2009 Subaru Outbacked with gear.
They stopped at a gas station outside Springfield where surveillance footage shows them at the register at 7:14 a.m.
Clare buying energy bars and a paper road map, even though she had three digital backups.
Mara buying a coffee and what appears to be a celebrity gossip magazine. Holding it up to Clare with an expression that says, “I know, I know, but let me have this.”
The Subaru was left at the Southsister Trail Head parking lot at approximately 9:30 a.m.
The lot attendant, a seasonal employee named Brandon Cole, remembered them. Two girls. One looked like she knew what she was doing.
One looked like she was dressed for a picnic and confirmed they headed north on the main trail at what he estimated was between 9:45 and 10 a.m.
After that, nothing. The trip plan Clare had filed indicated they would exit at the Obsidian Limited entry area trail head after 5 days on July 27th when the Subaru was still in the parking lot on the morning of July 29th.
And no one had heard from either sister. Their mother, Diane Aldrin of Corvales, Oregon, called the Lane County Sheriff’s Office.
The search began July 30th, 8 days after they walked into the forest. The search was significant by any measure.
Over its first 2 weeks, it involved more than 200 volunteer searchers, six search dogs, two helicopters, [music] and a drone unit operated by a volunteer tech team out of Portland.
The Lane County Sheriff’s Office coordinated with the US Forest Service, the Oregon Department of Emergency Management, and briefly the FBI’s Portland Field Office, which was brought in to assess whether there was any criminal dimension to the disappearance.
There wasn’t, or at least nothing that could be established. What the search found in those first two weeks was this.
A campsite approximately 11 miles from the trail head, consistent with what Clare would have set up, containing the remains of a small fire, two bare canisters with food still inside them, and one tent.
A twoperson REI half-doome that had been staked and abandoned. Clare’s large pack was found near the tent.
Inside it, the Greenfield journal, partially water damaged but [music] readable, spare clothes, a first aid kit with two items used, a packet of moles skin and one blister bandage, a backup water filter.
Her compass was in the left hip belt pocket. Mara’s smaller daypack was not found.
The field journal became one of the most significant pieces of evidence in the investigation, such as it was.
The last entry was dated July 24th, two days after departure, one day before the planned date of reaching their first major campsite.
The entry read in part, “Longer than expected.” M doing well, but knees. Found an alternate.
C says she knows it. I trust her. Off trail maybe 2 miles then back.
Weather changing. Sky looks wrong. Sky looks wrong. Investigators would spend considerable time parsing those three words.
Wrong. How wrong in the way that means incoming weather, which any experienced hiker would recognize, or wrong in some other way that Clare, with her precise observational vocabulary, chose not to articulate further the alternate route mentioned in the journal, was never definitively identified.
The area where the campsite was found sits at the intersection of several informal social trails.
Unmaintained paths worn by years of foot traffic, [music] but not marked on any official map.
Claire’s map found in the journal showed a handdrawn line that diverged from the main trail and curved northwest [music] into a section of the wilderness that most hikers avoid.
A dense low drainage forest basin the locals [clears throat] called the sump. The sump was searched three times.
Dogs found nothing. The drone footage showed nothing but canopy. By the third week of August, the formal search was scaled back.
By September, it had effectively ended. The case remained open as a missing person’s investigation, but without new evidence.
There was no operational search to speak of. Their mother, Diane, continued to drive to the trail head every weekend.
She would walk the first two miles of trail and stand there and listen. She told a reporter from the register guard.
I kept thinking that if I was very quiet, I would hear something. I don’t know what.
Just something that would tell me which direction. Here is what we know and what we don’t.
The 93 days between July 22nd and October 23rd, the day Gerald Fitch found them, represent one of the most thoroughly investigated and simultaneously most opaque survival cases in Oregon outdoor history.
Both sisters were hospitalized at Peace Health Sacred Heart Medical Center in Eugene. Both were suffering from severe dehydration, significant malnutrition, hypothermia in Claire’s case, and what the attending physician described as a form of prolonged stress response that presented similarly to but was not clinically identical to PTSD.
They were alive. This fact stated plainly remains remarkable. 93 days in the Willilt National Forest, including the entirety of Oregon’s 2024 wet season onset, with whatever supplies Mara had in her dayack, which investigators later determined had contained a rain poncho, a half-used bottle of ibuprofen, two granola bars, a phone with a cracked screen and no signal, a tube of chapstick, and the celebrity gossip magazine she had bought at the gas station.
The question of how they survived is partially answered and largely mysterious. When Clare was able to speak approximately 4 days after being found, once the IV fluids and the warmth and the sleep had done enough work, she gave a statement to investigators that was described by lead detective Rosario Vega as lucid, specific, and deeply incomplete.
Clare said this. They had gotten turned around in a section of trail on the afternoon of July 25th during a period of rapidly dropping visibility.
A weather system had moved in faster than any available forecast had predicted. This was later confirmed by meteorological data.
The rain was torrential, the kind that doesn’t fall so much as arrive all at once, as if the sky had simply decided.
Claire’s compass was in her pack, which she had left at the campsite. Mara had the daypack.
They had a two-mile separation from their established camp and within approximately 45 minutes had lost all orientation.
Clare said she was not afraid at first. She had protocols. She knew the rules.
Stop moving, signal, wait. But the rain made signaling impossible. And stopping meant standing in a wet forest with air temperatures dropping toward 50° F, which is for reference cold enough to kill a person who is wet and immobile within a few hours.
So they kept moving. The next confirmed location they could describe was a creek unnamed on any official map that Clare identified as running roughly west.
Following water downhill is basic wilderness survival protocol. They followed it. At some point in the following 24 hours, neither sister could reconstruct the exact timeline.
They reached a natural shelter, a massive fallen old growth Douglas fur whose root ball torn from the earth created a protected cavity large enough to sit in.
They called it the den. The den became their home base. [music] Claire with her environmental science background and her fieldwork instincts began constructing a survival framework almost immediately.
She identified edible plants, wood sorrel, miner’s lettuce, young fern fronds, several species of mushrooms she was confident about, and several she refused to touch.
