Two Friends Vanished on a 2022 Camping Trip — A Year Later, Their GoPro Revealed Chilling Footage

A GoPro recovered from a river in 2023 reignited a cold case, showing fragments of a night that began with laughter and ended in panic—and left investigators torn between accident and something darker.

They were 22 and inseparable. Alex, the planner who double-checked trail maps; Ryan, the improviser with a joke for every wrong turn and a single white AirPod habitually tucked in his ear. Their summer 2022 overnight into a Pacific Northwest forest should have been forgettable in the best way—another small adventure folded into the scrapbook of early adulthood. By Monday, they were expected home. By Wednesday, their families were standing at a dirt pull-off staring at Ryan’s old Subaru, still parked where the boys had left it.

Searchers found the campsite just off a river, the kind of place that sells itself—tall pines like cathedral pillars, a flat patch for a tent, running water for ambience. The green tent still stood. Sleeping bags lay half unzipped, as if an argument with sleep had been abruptly abandoned. Snacks and bottled water sat on the scarred picnic table beside a phone charger with no phone. A GoPro tripod remained, but the camera was gone. In the fire ring, a bed of ash had cooled—not fully doused.

It was the small details that set teeth on edge. One of Ryan’s sneakers sat neatly beside the tent; its mate waited inside. A flashlight lay on the ground with its dead beam aimed into the trees. The final Instagram story on Alex’s account, time-stamped 11:42 p.m. on Saturday, showed a glowing campfire and Ryan in silhouette. Then nothing. Ryan missed work. Phones went dark. The river, swift but not bottomless, gave up no bodies.

The year of silence

Weeks became months. Helicopters thundered above the canopy. Volunteers called names into the green hush. Dogs flirted with a scent along the riverbank and lost it where the water turned quick and cold. Online, rumor filled the void: cult whispers, nighttime figures, things not human. Families held vigils under paper cups of candlelight, voices shaking through requests for any information at all. Eventually, the case cooled. Everyone waits until something floats.

Gasoline on embers: a GoPro resurfaces

In late July 2023, two kayakers paddling a remote bend spotted a scuffed, moss-filmed object wedged in the mud—a waterproof GoPro. Its faint red light flashed once and died. Back at the sheriff’s office, technicians coaxed the memory card back to life. Against expectation, files appeared—corrupted at the edges, but intact. Laughter came first. Alex and Ryan traded the camera like a toy, mugged at the lens, panned over the river flashing in late daylight. They teased Ryan about the ever-present AirPod. They set a time-lapse on the fire. It looked like a hundred other vlogs: young men collecting moments.

Then the tone shifted.

Sometime near midnight, the lens woke to darkness. The tent glowed faintly from within; someone whispered. “Did you hear that?” Ryan’s voice, sharper than before. The camera swung toward the tree line—black shafts of bark and a pair of distant eye-shines from some nocturnal animal. The microphone, unforgiving, netted a low, rhythmic murmur—not wind, not water. The clip stuttered, then returned inside the tent. The GoPro sat canted against a sleeping bag; both faces were in frame, pale in a headlamp halo. “Voices,” Ryan breathed. Alex tried logic: echoes, the river carrying sound. His eyes kept darting to the zipper.

The next seconds are why seasoned detectives shifted in their seats. Something pressed the nylon from the outside—five blunt ovals like fingertips, there and gone. The camera tumbled; the world turned to angles, muffled shouts, breath and branches. Flashlights knifed through trees. “Who’s there?” “Don’t run—stay together!” The murmur grew louder, moving, circling. The final fragment fixed on frothing water as beams jittered across the current. “Alex!” Ryan shouted. A splash. The camera fell—water, mud, a chaos of motion—and then, in a single haunting tableau, a pair of heavy dark boots hovered at the frame’s edge. Not sneakers. Not theirs. Cut to black.

The footage offered dread but not resolution: no faces, no blows, no clear crime. Only the suggestion of pursuit, a hand at the tent wall, and those boots beside the river.

Science meets superstition

Audio specialists stripped away the rush of water. What remained was structured: a repeating four-beat pattern almost like a chant. Linguists debated whether the cadence was human at all. Some heard guttural fragments not belonging to any language they knew. Others called it pareidolia—the mind’s pattern-making engine running hot under stress. The sheriff’s office called the video “inconclusive evidence of an encounter with unknown individuals or wildlife.” Off the record, a deputy said it looked less like two men blundering into an accident and more like prey being herded.

The internet saw a Rorschach. YouTube channels deepened the shadows until faces seemed to appear. Reddit spun forensic threads around the boots, comparing tread blocks to brand catalogs. Families, caught between relief and renewed anguish, watched only once or not at all.

Breadcrumbs from the river

The GoPro’s reappearance seemed to start a grim pattern. In spring 2024, as snowmelt swelled the banks, a hiker noticed a white plastic curve snagged below a footbridge. It was an Apple AirPod—waterlogged, engraved with a serial number that matched Ryan’s set. Weeks later, volunteers found a torn black hoodie pinned by a branch a half-mile downstream. Photos from Alex’s last Instagram story showed Ryan wearing the same hoodie by the fire. Lab work found only river water, mud, and faint pine sap. No blood. No fibers to tie to an attack. Artifacts surfaced; the boys did not.

A search group turned to an upstream cave system where floods deposit debris. Deep in a damp chamber, they found a scrap of green nylon later matched to the friends’ tent. Hydrology experts mapped the subterranean veins beneath the hills and offered a sobering possibility: objects—and bodies—can vanish into underground systems and never return. It was a theory that explained some things, and none of the worst things: the pressing hand, the midnight cadence, the boots.

A case that refuses to close

By autumn 2024, the sheriff’s office drafted a careful summary: a likely nighttime entry into a flood-swollen river under conditions of panic and disorientation. In the margins—literally—investigators scribbled doubts about the boots and the audio they couldn’t clean into harmlessness. Public fascination spiked then ebbed, then spiked again. Documentarians pitched limited series. Ghost hunters camped in the same clearing and whispered about bulging tent walls. Some campers said their nylon bowed inward under the weight of an unseen palm. Morning found no footprints—only pinched patterns where pine needles had been pressed and released.

January 2025 brought another cold snap and the kind of silence that magnifies the mind. A hiker, alone near the frozen river, paused at a low, layered hum that broke apart when he moved—a rhythm, he said later, that matched the leaked GoPro audio. In April, a battered AirPods case turned up, scuffed and powerless, miles from where the first earbud had been discovered. One bud remained inside. The symbolism was cruel: both earbuds found, months apart, the living owners still missing.

What the GoPro gave—and what it didn’t

The camera did what cameras do best: it captured evidence of experience without context. It preserved laughter and the first half of a weekend that should have folded into memory. It recorded fear with the same meticulous indifference, and then it stopped one beat short of the answer. The result is a case living in a borderland—too many ominous fragments to accept a clean accident, not enough clarity to prove foul play.

For the families, the borderland is a place they never imagined inhabiting. Alex’s mother leaves the porch light on against the rain. Ryan’s younger brother doesn’t hike anymore; at night, he sometimes replays the video, convinced the truth is hiding in plain sight. “They wanted to remember everything,” a college friend said. “Now it’s like they’re stuck in that camera.”

The battered GoPro sits today in evidence, its cracked lens like a blind eye. The faint red light no longer blinks, but for anyone who has seen the footage, the recording never really ends. It loops: the tent wall caving under a hand, the flashlight beam stuttering across water, the heavy boots at the edge of the frame. It loops because the story hasn’t found its last scene.

The forest keeps its counsel

What happened on that summer night in 2022 remains an unanswered question pressed between pages of facts and folklore. Maybe two young men misread a living landscape at midnight and paid a terrible price to a cold current. Maybe they stumbled into something human—and cruel—moving in the trees. Or maybe, as some insist in whispers that rise and fall like a chant, the forest held them and refused to give them back.

What is certain is only this: the land has rationed out just enough to keep the story alive—a camera, an earbud, a torn hoodie—and withheld the rest. Until it decides otherwise, Alex and Ryan’s disappearance will endure as a warning threaded into the pines: in some places, the water speaks, the trees listen, and the earth keeps secrets longer than we are willing to believe.