Orange Shoes on Half Dome: A 13-Year-Old Cold Case Reopened
Summer 2010, Yosemite National Park — Jake Thompson, 28, drove alone into the shadow of El Capitan, the morning sun reflecting off the sheer granite cliffs. The East Buttress route had always been his favorite: technical enough to test skill, but manageable for a two-day push. Methodical, experienced, and cautious, Jake double-checked his gear at the trailhead while his friend Sam snapped a quick photo of him sitting on a boulder, his neon orange climbing shoes bright against the stone.
“You got this, man,” Sam said, tossing Jake a granola bar. “See you at the top.”
Jake nodded and waved before disappearing up the approach trail. He didn’t return that night, nor the next.
By late afternoon, Jake’s car was still in the parking lot, keys in the ignition, wallet and phone inside. Sam called the park rangers. Helicopters combed the cliffs, search dogs prowled the forest, and hundreds of volunteers scoured the valleys, but Jake had vanished without a trace. Ground crews followed every possible trail, yet the faintest clue of his presence — a piece of gear, a footprint, a rope snag — was nowhere to be found.
Weeks passed. Months. By the end of summer, the search was officially called off. Food still on the table in his campsite, sleeping bags unrolled, a half-read journal lying open on a rock — the scene suggested he had simply disappeared mid-breath. His family held a memorial two years later, unwilling to fully surrender hope.
For thirteen years, the case collected dust. Jake Thompson became another statistic: “vanished while climbing” — a cold case among cold cases, cataloged but unsolved.
Then, in August 2023, everything changed.
A group of climbers reached the summit of Half Dome for sunrise, exhausted but exhilarated. That’s when they noticed them: a pair of weathered orange climbing shoes, placed deliberately atop the cairn. The shoes were faded, but unmistakable. Inside one was a folded note, written in Jake’s handwriting: his name, the date he disappeared, and GPS coordinates leading to Mount Watkins — miles from El Capitan, across treacherous terrain he had never planned to traverse.
Park authorities were baffled. Records showed Jake had never checked in at Half Dome. No witnesses saw him climb it. The shoes’ presence was impossible.
Investigators who followed the coordinates discovered Jake’s journal, hidden under a pile of rocks on a narrow ledge. It was filled with meticulous notes and sketches. Early entries read like a typical climbing log: route descriptions, equipment notes, and daily observations. But then, around day seven, the tone shifted.
“I’ve been seeing them again,” one entry read. “Small lights in the forest at night. Not stars. Not fireflies. Moving. Watching.”
Day nine: “I found something. An access point. Or maybe it found me. Can’t tell which. I’m leaving markers in case I get lost. This is bigger than climbing now.”
Day thirteen: “Voices. Outside the cave, behind the ridge. I don’t think they know I see them. Emily would hate this, but I can’t stop. They’re showing me paths — doors I can’t explain.”
The final entry, day sixteen, was chilling: “Sorry, Emily. I have to see this through. If anyone finds this, don’t follow. Don’t try to understand. Just… let it be.” The page was smeared, as if hurriedly torn, and several pages after that were missing entirely.
Authorities never found Jake. His disappearance, combined with the odd journal, sparked theories: hallucination, abduction, secret climbing cults, or worse — something entirely unexplainable in the forest.
But then came the third twist.
A GoPro camera, miraculously recovered from near the Half Dome summit, had been set to record time-lapse. Investigators, replaying the footage, noticed a figure in the background — tall, thin, unmistakably Jake — standing beyond the cairn. He wasn’t climbing or hiking. He simply watched the climbers for a few seconds and then vanished. No footsteps, no sound, nothing disturbed around him.
A forensic analysis confirmed the timestamp: August 20, 2023 — the very day the climbers found the shoes. Thirteen years after his disappearance, Jake appeared, physically present, and then disappeared again.
The shoes were still atop the cairn, pristine compared to the surrounding weathered rock, almost as if someone had placed them deliberately for discovery. The journal, the GPS coordinates, the shoes, and the GoPro footage suggested one inescapable truth: Jake’s journey did not end at El Capitan. Something — or someone — had pulled him far off the known trails, across rugged terrain, and into a reality no one could explain.
And yet, there was more.
The journal contained sketches of odd symbols near Mount Watkins, geometric patterns traced in the dirt and forest floor. Lights, moving figures, and references to “the access point” became more frequent. One page, almost unreadable, had an illustration of a doorway — a doorway not built but grown, like the forest itself had opened to him.
Further investigation revealed local folklore of a “watcher” in the Sierra Nevada: a being that guided or trapped travelers depending on its whim. Jake’s entries, if taken literally, described an interaction — sometimes helpful, sometimes terrifying — with this entity.
Friends and family struggled to process the evidence. If Jake were alive, where had he been? Why leave only his shoes on Half Dome? And how had he traversed terrain considered impossible to cross alone?
The final eerie detail came from the GPS data itself. Mount Watkins, the endpoint in Jake’s notes, contains no official trails leading to the marked coordinates. Yet satellite imagery revealed a faint path, one invisible to the human eye at first glance, winding through dense forest and sheer cliffs — as if someone had walked it recently.
The mystery remains unsolved. Jake Thompson’s disappearance challenges both logic and nature. The shoes, the journal, the GoPro — all fragments of a story that continues somewhere in the wilderness, waiting for the next clue to emerge. Was it a hallucinatory journey? An encounter with the unknown? Or had Jake somehow become part of the forest itself, walking paths no one else could see?
