A foggy forest scene with tall, bare trees surrounds an isolated cabin. A weathered bench sits on a cracked path leading to the cabin, its eerie silence reminiscent of tales where pct deaths linger in whispered legends.

List of Deaths on the Pacific Crest Trail

ByMac Hours
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Over the years, several deaths have occurred on the Pacific Crest Trail. With the trail’s growing popularity, people must realize that a PCT thru-hike does not occur in a controlled environment and that death on the PCT is an entirely realistic possibility for the ill-prepared (or even the well-prepared).

Not everyone who begins a Pacific Crest Trail thru-hike will complete their mission of traversing the country-spanning 2,660 mi / 4,280 km trail. Many will leave the trail due to injury, some due to weather, others for financial reasons, and, unfortunately, a tiny percentage will die.

Table of Contents
1 Fatalities by Cause
2 Pacific Crest Trail Hiker Deaths
3 Fatalities by Location
4 Other Hiker Deaths on the PCT
5 Unconfirmed Deaths

So you are interested in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail, but you don’t know if you’re quite ready to drag yourself across a continent for five months and probably die?

Need to come up with some statistics to put to rest your family’s fears that you will be dragged from your sleeping bag in the night by a bloodthirsty animal? Want to know how you can expect to meet your maker should this hike turn out to be your last? Not interested in any of this, and don’t know why you’re still reading?

Luckily for you, we have answers.

PLEASE, NOTE!

This is by no means a comprehensive list of all deaths that have occurred on the PCT or along the PCT corridor. If you have any fatalities (with sources) that you would like to see added, please leave a comment below.

What is the total number of thru-hiker deaths on the Pacific Crest Trail? As this post is being updated (as I update it whenever news comes in), the number stands at 15.

Fatalities by Cause

Here is a breakdown of what has caused them:

  • 6 – Falling
  • 3 – Heatstroke
  • 2 – Drowning
  • 2 – Cars
  • 1 – Falling trees
  • 1 – High altitude pulmonary edema (HAPE) (unconfirmed)
  • 1 – Unknown
  • 0 – Hypothermia
  • 0 – Lightning
  • 0 – Murder
  • 0 – Mountain lions
  • 0 – Bears
  • 0 – Snakes
  • 0 – Spiders
  • 0 – Alien abduction

Pacific Crest Trail Hiker Deaths

Here is a detailed account of each of the deaths noted above (in chronological order from earliest to most recent):

HAPE (unconfirmed) | Maddie Magee | May 28, 2022 | Twenty-three-year-old Maddie Magee died near the top of Forester Pass (the high point of the PCT) in California’s Sierra Nevada of (unconfirmed) high altitude pulmonary edema or HAPE (source)

Fall | Trevor Laher | March 27, 2020 | Twenty-two-year-old Trevor Laher slipped and fell on snow-covered ice near Apache Peak just outside Idyllwild, California (source)

Falling Tree | Finn Bastian | August 27, 2019 | In Stevenson (Washington), Finn Bastian, a hiker from Germany, died after being hit by a falling tree on the PCT. Officials reported that the tree had rotted at the base, causing it to become unstable (source)

Drowning | Wang Chaocui | Mid-July, 2017 | In Yosemite National Park (California), Wang Chaocui was discovered in a river in Kerrick Canyon. Many dangerous river crossings plagued the 2017 hiking season because of the unusually high snowpack from the previous winter (source)

Drowning | Rika Morita | Mid-July 2017 | In Kings Canyon National Park (California), Rika Morita was discovered in the South Fork of the Kings River. Many dangerous river crossings plagued the 2017 hiking season because of the unusually high snowpack from the previous winter (source)

Heatstroke (suspected) | Marvin Novo | May 29, 2017 | In the Mission Creek Preserve (California), Marvin Novo’s body was discovered along the West Fork Trail. It is suspected that his death was heat-related (source)

Fall | Dawson Johnson | July 2014 | Dawson Johnson, a 75-year-old hiker from Redwater, Texas, fell and died while hiking down from the Mount Whitney Summit to Crabtree Meadow (source)

Heatstroke | Timothy Evan Nodal | April 24, 2014 | Near Lake Morena (California) Timothy Nodal began to feel sick and emergency services were summoned. When firefighters reached him, they were going over his symptoms when he suddenly went into arrest. Emergency personnel were unable to revive him (source)

Fall | Ray “No Way Ray” Echols | May 15, 2006 | Near Deep Creek in the San Bernardino National Forest (California), Ray Echols lost his footing and fell approximately 200 feet to his death (source)

Unknown | John Donovan | May 2005 | John Donovan died after becoming lost on Southern California’s Mt. San Jacinto in an unseasonal snowstorm. His body was not recovered until more than a year later. The cause of death is unknown, but hypothermia is suspected (source)

Fall | John Lowder | June 1999 | It’s thought John Lowder (69), a doctor from San Diego, slipped on some ice crossing New Army Pass in the Sierra and fell approximately 60 ft / 18 m off into a canyon in the Sierra Nevada. He broke one arm, both legs, and suffered a head injury. He succame to his injuries (which included internal bleeding and head trauma) before being found in his sleeping bag by hikers the day after his fall (source)

Hit by Car | Flicka Rodman | Nov. 19, 1995 | While taking a road walk detour down Highway 138 in Southern California, both he and Jane Rodman were struck and killed by a motorist who lost control of his vehicle after falling asleep at the wheel (he received a five-day jail sentence) (source)

Hit by Car | Jane Rodman | Nov. 19, 1995 | While taking a road walk detour down Highway 138 in Southern California, both she and Flicka Rodman were struck and killed by a motorist who lost control of his vehicle after falling asleep at the wheel (he received a five-day jail sentence) (source)

Fall | Jodi Zatchick | Winter 1983 | During a winter thru-hike attempt, Jodi Zatchick and her hiking partner Gerald Duran fell off a cliff face near Wrightwood, California after losing the trail and slipping on an icy slope (source)

Fall | Gerald Duran | Winter 1983 | During a winter thru-hike attempt, Gerald Duran and his hiking partner Jodi Zatchick fell off a cliff face near Wrightwood, California after losing the trail and slipping on an icy slope (source)

Hyperlite Mountain Gear Dirigo 2 Snow
Snow in the desert on the PCT – yes, it happens.
PCT Warner Springs Community Center
More dangerous than bears, mountain lions, and snakes? Cars.

Fatalities by Location

The Pacific Crest Trail is typically divided into five distinct sections: the Desert, the Sierra Nevada, Northern California, Oregon, and Washington. Here are the number of fatalities that have occurred in each section.

  • Desert: 9
  • Sierra Nevada: 5
  • Northern California: 0
  • Oregon: 0
  • Washington: 1

Other Hiker Deaths on the PCT

I also came across the following deaths which occurred on or near the PCT but did not involve thru-hikers:

Heatstroke | Hantae Kim (61) | July 6, 2024 (Approximate) | Kim was found at the bottom of a ravine near Snow Creek south of Whitewater in Southern California (source)

Fall | 30-year-old male | March 31, 2022 | A man’s body was recovered just north of Forester Pass on the Pacific Crest Trail/John Muir Trail following a fall in monsoon-type weather (source)

Lightning | Nicholas Torchia | July 30, 2021 | On the Sallie Keyes Cutoff near Muir Trail Ranch in the Sierra, Torchia was leaning against a tree for cover during a storm when the tree was struck by lightning (source)

Heatstroke | Melissa Koba | June 16, 2021 | Emergency services were called to aid a woman near Anza (California) suffering from suspected heatstroke. The woman was pronounced dead at the scene (source)

Fall | Wayne Paul Pferdehirt | August 26, 2019 | Wayne Paul Pferdehirt (67) died in a fall near Mather Pass (Sierra). His body was found just below the summit (source)

Mountain Lion (suspected) | Diana Bober | October 2018 | Diana Bober (55) was found with a broken neck and more than a dozen puncture wounds to her nape near Mount Hood. Although the police report lists the cause of death as unknown, the medical examiner’s office said it “appeared to be consistent with an animal attack” (source)

Fall | Laurie Choate | September 5, 2018 | Laurie Choate died in a fall while hiking the Kendall Katwalk (Washington). She fell approximately 300 ft / 91 m and did not survive the fall (source)

Fall | Emily Lang | August 12, 2017 | Emily Lang (19) died in a fall along the PCT near Mount Hood (Oregon). Her body was found on rocks at the base of a waterfall about 6 mi / 9.6 km northwest of Timberline Lodge (source)

Fall | Emma Place | August 12, 2017 | Emma Place (19) died in a fall along the PCT near Mount Hood (Oregon). Her body was found on rocks at the base of a waterfall about 6 mi / 9.6 km northwest of Timberline Lodge (source)

Falling Tree | Phillip Crosby | December 11, 2014 | Camped off the PCT near Mt. Ashland Ski Lodge (Oregon), Phillip Crosby was crushed by a tree that fell on his tent in strong wind (source)

Fall | 20-year-old male | August 20, 2013 | A man free-climbing a rock face with friends near the PCT in Yakima County (Washington) fell to his death (source)

Hypothermia | Karen Tellez | December 7, 1997 | A woman out hiking became separated from her group and died of suspected hypothermia near the PCT near Pine Canyon Road in Southern California (source)

Suicide | Douglas Cracker | October 29, 1988 | A hiker on the PCT discovered the body of Douglas Cracker, who died of a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, half a mile north of Highway 62 in Crater Lake National Park (source)

Unconfirmed Deaths

Lastly, I have also had some reports of deaths on the Pacific Crest Trail, where I haven’t been able to find any source material. If you know of any sources for the below deaths or have any that may need to be added to the list, please let me know in the comments.

Unknown | Unknown Male | 2025 | There are reports of a hiker who passed away on the Pacific Crest Trail in 2025. If you have any information about this man, please pass it along.

Unknown | Park Sun Chil (Happy Days) | April 13, 2018 | A hiker from South Korea is said to have passed away on the trail in Southern California.

And that’s it! That is readily available via the internet, and that we know of.

It turns out that the Pacific Crest Trail is a safe place to be (and when the zombies, robots, or aliens finally decide to make their move, I’ll bet it’ll be even safer). Of course, there may be more deaths along the PCT than reported, but the reality is that there is little (but don’t trust me). So if you ever see a headline something like, “Hiker deaths on the PCT jump 200% in the National Scenic Trail’s deadliest year ever!“, know that this means ten people died doing something inherently dangerous (aka it’s clickbait).

So if you have some mental block about hiking the PCT because of all the scary things that are waiting for you out there, then know that despite those things existing, they are unlikely to kill you.

But also know that you’ll probably die out there.

Good luck!

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51 Comments

  1. Class of 1977 here. We should be on the list as well. We could easily have drowned tried to ford the Kings River. We were looking for a low elevation route around the Sierra after an early May snowstorm. We ended up road walking from Independence to Mammoth.

    When we hiked, there was a rumor of a death on the descent from San Jacinto to Cabazon (old route!) that had occurred in a prior year. As the story goes, the hiker broke his leg and was unable to continue on and was found several years later. He died while being able to see the lights of I-10 below. I have never been able to find anything on the internet about this, so I have no idea if this was true or not.

    Then, of course, there is Bill “AsABat” Jeffrey was found dead in his tent at Charlton Lake in Oregon. As I am sure you know, he was the co-creator of the PCT Water Report.

    When I hiked the AT in 2017, I was acutely aware of the sad case of Geraldine Largay who went missing in 2013 and wasn’t found until 2015. We camped not far from where she was found. The woods are super dense in that area, so I can understand how she got lost.

    One final tidbit. You may have heard about the 1990 murders on the AT just outside of Duncannon, PA. I remember hearing about the case at the time, it made the national news. Well, fast forward to late 2016 when I was prepping for the AT. I discovered that my future daughter-in-law would have been the niece of the female victim (she was born two years after the tragedy.) I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe that when I stopped at the Cove Mountain shelter. (The Thelma Marks shelter was torn down and a new shelter constructed a short distance away.) I felt the presence of Geoff and Molly’s spirit. It was eerie, but also very spiritual. Molly’s Dad met me later that day for lunch at the Doyle.

    Reply

  2. I was a member of the Kittitas County Search and Rescue in the early 80s. We went on a body recovery on the Kendell Katwalk of a man who had fallen to his death. His car was in the parking lot at the Kendall Katwalk trailhead on the Snowqualmie Pass summit in King County, but his body was about 100 feet into Kittitas County, so he was our retrieval.

    Reply

  5. I was at the top of Forrester Pass on 28 May at about 11:00am. I spoke to an Australian man who attempted to resuscitate the young woman, he said, for 2 hours. I passed her covered body just past the crest. And later saw the helicopter land at the bottom of the pass and then proceed to remove her body and fly away. My sincere condolences to her family and friends.

    Reply

  6. I was on the trail in 2018. Around mile 33 I saw a couple Korean guys round a corner ahead of me, then shortly after heard shouting. When I got there one of them was laid out on the trail, the second was doing CPR.
    This was on April 13, 2018. Friday the 13th, around noon.
    The hiker who was lying on the trail, Happy Days, ended up dying. I believe the official COD was a heart attack.
    Had to leave the trail around mile 530 for family reasons. Planning another attempt in 2023.

    Reply

  10. Although they are not confirmed deaths, the missing thru hikers should be included with a separate section. Kind of common sense. There are still vital lessons to be learned from the circumstances they went missing in, and their stories. There should be more than morbid fascination to this information.

    Reply

    1. Not sure I agree with your common sense sentiment, but I can do a section (or separate post) on missing hikers.

      Care to start us off with some names?

      Reply

  11. I hiked the PCT in 2014. After helping a friend with cellulitis in his foot get medevaced to Victorville, I spent the next 10 days with a husband and wife team from Texas. Sandra and Dawson were doing the PCT together and having the time of their life. They wre going slow, but making steady progress. I got ahead of them by a week before I reached Whitney Portal and didn’t expect to see them again. When I arrived in Tuolumne Meadows, I got a text from a new hiking friend that Dawson had solo climbed Whitney while Sandra waited in Lower Crabtree Meadows and had fallen to his death. Whitney is a side hike, but one taken by most PCT hikers. Sandra reported him missing to rangers. His body was recovered a few days later. Nowhere in the reporting of his death does it say they were hiking the PCT, but they were. Perhaps that’s why Dawson didn’t make your list. He was the oldest through-hiker I met that year. I met a few others doing the JMT in their 70s and one woman in her 80s who was about to climb Whitney with her son! I struggled with Dawson’s death and talked to him a lot as I continued north through CA, OR and WA.

    Reply

    1. Hello, friend, thank you for bringing this to my attention. I found an article to confirm your account of Dawson and I’ve added it to the list.

      Reply

  12. I think this list is very misleading. Although a lot of people are missing, so we can’t confirm they are dead, most of them are. That trail isn’t easy and a lot of accidents happen.

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  15. This needs to be updated. In addition to Strawberry, Tree and Marvin, two day hikers fell to their deaths recently on the PCT.

    Reply

  16. Class of 2017 – there have been 3 deaths this year. Strawberry (Rika Morita from Japan),Tree (Choacui Wang from China) and Marvin Novo (USA)
    In the last 2 weeks Strawberry and Tree died in two separate incidents during river crossings in the Sierras. Marvin Novo died near whitewater preserve, may have been heat related.
    David O’Sullivan (Ireland) has been missing since April, around Mt. San Jacinto.

    Reply

  18. Kris Fowler “Sherpa” is still missing from PCT 2016. Michael Fiery disappeared on the PCT in 2005 and was never found (his backpack was). There are a bunch of other disappearances. There have been a lot of people who have disappeared over the years in Yosemite (and all around the Pacific Crest. I agree the PCT is generally safe, but people should be aware that people just disappear all along the PCT.

    Reply

      1. Yeah but he was a known PCT hiker (I hiked with him for awhile actually) that went too late into the season and was likely caught in a storm. While it would be nice to think that he finished the trail and slipped off to Aruba, that is probably not the case.

        Reply

  19. What about all of the people who are reported missing and never found? I found stats that say over 189 people were reported missing and were never found in the State of Oregon’s national park since 1994. Now, I doubt all of these hikers were hiking the PCT trail, however, it’s interesting to note that unless you are confirmed dead, you are just added to a missing persons list and you remain a missing person but for some reason you aren’t considered dead and your aren’t considered as part of the stats of people who have died. I wonder why….maybe bad PR.

    Reply

    1. A staggering 189 men and 51 women officially remain listed as missing since 1997 by the Oregon Office of Emergency Management after trekking into Oregon’s wildest places, said Georges Kleinbaum, search and rescue coordinator for the office.

      Reply

      1. Yes, but we are talking specifically about PCT hikers here, not simply people who may have died/gone missing somewhere near the PCT.

        Reply

  21. Two young women died on the PCT in the 1990s I think, crossing a highway near the Canadian border… I think I read that in the old PCT guide, towards the last page.

    Reply

  22. So I was reading A Blistered Kind of Love and it mentions a death in 1999 that’s not listed here – John Lowder. There’s some debate about if he was a thru hiker or not but he started pretty close to Campo and was planning to go all way to Canada. No links on news sources that’s still up but here’s some PCT-L emails about it from the archives.

    http://www.backcountry.net/arch/pct/9906/msg00102.html
    http://www.backcountry.net/arch/pct/0001/msg00446.html

    Reply

    1. Thanks for pointing this out. May have to send an email to the authors of A Blistered Kind of Love to see if they can provide any more information (since the PCT-L isn’t usually the most reliable source of information). Thanks!

      Reply

      1. So I decided to look for more info about Lowder and peek at the Union-Tribute archives to find the obit that the PCT-L posted and here it is!

        http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives?p_product=SDUB&p_theme=sdub&p_action=search&p_maxdocs=200&s_dispstring=john%20lowder%20AND%20date%286/1/1999%20to%206/31/1999%29&p_field_date-0=YMD_date&p_params_date-0=date:B,E&p_text_date-0=6/1/1999%20to%206/31/1999%29&p_field_advanced-0=&p_text_advanced-0=%28john%20lowder%29&xcal_numdocs=20&p_perpage=10&p_sort=YMD_date:D&xcal_useweights=no

        That link should work, I hope. But if not, go to http://www.newslibrary.com/sites/sdub/ and do a search for John Lowder in June 15 1999. It’s not the full article since you need to pay for it but it’s got the relevant info (died on PCT, cause of death got cut off) that matches up with the obit in PCT-L.

        Reply

  23. Just found this on the Internets. Means it is true, right?

    “Since its formation in 1977, there has been only one known attempt to hike the PCT in winter, by couple Gerald Duran and Jodi Zatchick back in 1983. They were traveling south to north and were hiking towards Wrightwood, California, to resupply when they got lost. They had started down the wrong canyon and ended up on much steeper terrain than their intended Acorn Trail. As they were descending, they slipped on an icy slope and then fell several hundred feet off a cliff face to their deaths.” – http://www.outsideonline.com/1930861/first-ever-winter-thru-hike-pct

    Reply

    1. Very interesting! I did some quick more poking around the internets and couldn’t find anything else about these two. I’ll update with a reference to this article. Maybe I’ll get in touch with the author to ask about where this information came from.

      Reply

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