Missouri Prosecutor Found Alive After Vanishing Near Summit of Wyoming's Highest Peak
Shaun Mackelprang, a 55-year-old Missouri deputy attorney general, was pulled off the mountain dehydrated and disoriented six days after setting out to summit 13,804-foot Gannett Peak — found only after a passing hiker photographed his name in the summit register.
A Missouri prosecutor chasing a bucket-list mountaineering goal is recovering Thursday after search crews pulled him off Wyoming's tallest peak, dehydrated and disoriented, nearly a week after he vanished into the Wind River Range.
Shaun Mackelprang, 55, a deputy attorney general in Missouri's Criminal Division, set out from the Green River Lakes Trailhead on Aug. 20 aiming to summit Gannett Peak, the 13,804-foot high point of Wyoming and one of the most remote summits in the Lower 48. It was peak number 45 in his personal quest to stand atop all 50 state high points, according to Cowboy State Daily.
He reached the top and signed the summit registry on Friday, Aug. 21. But he never made it back to his campsite, and when he missed his expected Saturday return, thunderstorms delayed any alarm. "We didn't really get real concerned until Sunday," his brother, Romel Mackelprang, told Cowboy State Daily. "By Tuesday, by yesterday, we knew something was wrong."
The Sublette County Sheriff's Office opened a search Tuesday after his rental car was found still parked at the trailhead with no confirmed sightings of him since he'd left it days earlier. Ground teams, the sheriff's office drone unit and a helicopter crew from Tip Top Search and Rescue combed the rugged terrain between the summit and his last known camp, according to KOMU.
A stranger's photo cracked the case
The break came when another hiker who'd summited after Mackelprang photographed the register and confirmed his signature was in it — proof he'd made it up, narrowing the search zone to his likely descent route. Crews located him Wednesday morning near Scott Lake, weak but alert; rescuers started an IV before airlifting him out of the backcountry by roughly 9:45 a.m., per Cowboy State Daily.
"I think what happened is he ... clearly got disoriented coming back down," Romel Mackelprang said, adding that his brother's Christmas present this year is "going to be a Garmin GPS."
"If ever you wonder about the goodness of people, you don't have to go beyond the people up there in your community, because they have saved my brother's life."
Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway said her office was "beyond grateful" for the rescue crews, according to KOMU. Gannett Peak, on the Continental Divide inside the Bridger and Shoshone national forests, requires glacier travel and technical climbing skill and sees only a few hundred summit attempts a year, making search operations there notoriously difficult.