Lost in the Valley of Death Read online

  Dedication

  For Élise

  Epigraph

  Death is not extinguishing the light; it is only putting out the lamp because the dawn has come.

  —Rabindranath Tagore, Indian poet

  Map of the Parvati Valley

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map of the Parvati Valley

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part I: The Way

  1. Trailhead

  2. Visions

  3. Let It Go

  4. First Steps

  5. Alobar

  Part II: The Road

  6. Pilgrims

  7. Solitude

  8. The Valley of Death

  9. The Cave

  10. Finding Freedom

  Part III: The Path

  11. Searching

  12. Alarm

  13. Into the Mist

  14. Stone Valley

  15. Footsteps

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes on Sources

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Harley Rustad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Author’s Note

  I began investigating the disappearance of Justin Alexander Shetler shortly after he vanished in the Indian Himalayas in the late summer of 2016. I had come across one of the first news articles written about him, published in the Times of India newspaper that October, and was immediately drawn into his story. He was American, thirty-five years old, and had traveled around the world extensively before he had arrived in India. He was a trained survivalist and had tens of thousands of social media followers. And he had disappeared while on a pilgrimage led by a Hindu holy man to a sacred lake deep in the mountains in a remote corner of India called the Parvati Valley.

  Over the following four years, I conducted hundreds of interviews with Justin’s parents, close friends, and acquaintances—from those who had known him as a teenager to some of the last people to see him alive. I wanted to know who he was, what had brought him, eventually, to India, and what he had been searching for. Some of the direct quotations I use in this book are taken from podcasts and interviews that Justin participated in as his status as a minor travel social media star grew. Some dialogue and scenes are pulled from videos shot by Justin and posted online or filmed by fellow travelers or friends. Any other re-created dialogue comes from the recollections, often corroborated, of these sources.

  I traveled to the Parvati Valley twice—initially six months after Justin vanished and then to mark the three-year anniversary of his disappearance—to interview local police, mountain guides, guesthouse owners, holy men, and shepherds: anyone connected to the path that Justin had taken in his final two months. I interviewed people in the United States, Canada, Philippines, Thailand, Nepal, and India who had shared a meal or a moment with him, who had known him for years or had encountered him briefly. I tracked down backpackers who had met him on the road, each one returning to his or her home country around the world with a memory of a man they couldn’t shake.

  He was born Justin Alexander Shetler. That was the name on the passport under which he traveled until he disappeared. But most people who had come across him online had known him by his social media profile name, Adventures of Justin. Many with whom I spoke, acquaintances as well as some close friends, had known him only as Justin Alexander. For the last decade of his life, that was the name he preferred in person and online. I was told that Justin had intended to legally and officially drop his birth surname. Those who crossed paths with him on the road—as travelers, tourists, pilgrims—knew him simply as Justin.

  Prologue

  The traveler had all that he needed inside his cave. It wasn’t much but enough to survive. He reclined against the granite wall, bare back meeting cold stone. He had collected fallen wood, anything half dry, from the forest around his cave, stripping some logs into kindling with his machete, and set about lighting a fire. He positioned it near the mouth of the cave so the noxious smoke would dissipate into the night and animals would be deterred from entering. He opened a book; there was just enough light in which to read. It was a book about the search to find happiness in the world.

  His cave lay in a forest deep in the Indian Himalayas, a half day’s walk from the nearest village or the nearest road, near the head of a slender valley. There were dozens of caves in this forest that had formed in the lee of boulders or by great stones fracturing apart to create caverns. Many caves were tall enough in which to stand and long enough in which to lie down. Some boulders were said to have been dropped by the gods, as who else could move such colossi of stone, while others had been left behind by similarly powerful forces of nature, great glaciers that had retreated up the valley long before. Many people had walked by these caves without a second glance. But over the years, pilgrims and travelers of a certain type had found sanctuary in them, refuge from the elements or the world beyond. This traveler had sought out a cave. It was why he had come to this valley: to find a place in which to retreat and think about his life.

  There is power in the Himalayas’ many mountaintops. They are purpose made stone, offering paths to realization and a sense of profound achievement of strength, determination, and will at their tops. Mountains have long served as endpoints of pilgrimages: to Mount Everest straddling the Nepal–China border, to Mount Kailash on the Tibetan Plateau, and to Mount Meru in the Indian Himalayas, often called “the navel of the universe.” Summits offer perspective, a chance to look back down at your footprints with clarity. Yet for every mountain there is a valley residing below. If the expanse of a desert humbles and the restriction of a forest disorientates, the intimacy of a valley comforts—providing tranquility and a shield from the forces of exposure. In valleys, thoughts don’t float away across an ocean or a plain, never to return; they remain to be incubated. Around the world, seekers climb mountains to achieve that clarity or to be closer to their gods, but it is the valleys below in which their intentions solidify and from which they take their first steps. In these sanctuaries pilgrims can bask in the possibility of what lies ahead and above.

  In his cave in the valley the traveler crossed his legs and warmed his feet near the fire, drying his black leather boots at the same time. He drank water that he had collected from a nearby spring out of a metal mug, one of the few items he had brought with him. He ate some nuts, dried fruit, and oats that he had purchased at a market down valley and threw a log on the fire. Beside him lay a long bamboo flute that he played during the daytime while sitting in a meadow overlooking the valley below; throughout his travels in India, he had carried it wherever he went. On a rock shelf next to him was a bull’s horn that he had collected from the forest outside, as well as a large black feather that had fallen to earth from a Himalayan condor. Not long before, the traveler had tattooed the outline of an eagle in flight across his chest.

  Eventually, he lay down on a bed of collected tree needles. Inside the cave there was light, a warm orange glow from his crackling fire and a single candle that he had melted onto the rock by which to read. But the world outside was dark. Thick canopies of pine, walnut, and deodar, a species of aromatic Himalayan cedar, blocked the moon; only the rain found a way through the branches. It was late summer, and the monsoon, in an instant, would shift from a drizzle to a torrent, pelting the mountains and blanketing the valley in heavy mist.

  Every year, as consistent as the monsoon, pilgrims and travelers had come to this remote corner of India. They had come to find peace and tranquility, what a Hindi speaker calls shanti. They had
come to breathe mountain air, to walk ancient forests, and to hike through a valley in the most storied mountain range on earth. They had come to be closer to the gods in a place where Shiva, the most iconic deity in the Hindu pantheon, the great master of yoga and asceticism and the supreme transformer of the world, is said to have meditated for three thousand years. Some of the visitors had traveled peacefully, departing satisfied with their experience and keen to tread elsewhere. But others had not.

  The Parvati Valley is a seemingly idyllic corner of Himalayan India, with its big mountain vistas, forested glens, and quaint timber-framed villages clinging to its hillsides. It splinters off a part of the Kullu Valley, also known as the Valley of Gods. Named after a goddess itself, the Parvati Valley hosts its own compendium of legends and mystical stories, a place where gods manifest as dynamic rivers and their actions bring hot springs from deep underground to the surface. But the Parvati Valley has earned its own nicknames: the Valley of Shadows, the Valley of Death. It is a place where every movement exists on a knife edge, where a wrong turn tips a vehicle over an unbarriered cliff edge, a wrong step pitches a traveler into the churning maelstrom of the river, a wrong turn sends a hiker to ranges unknown. Since the early 1990s, dozens of international backpackers have vanished without a trace while traveling in and around the Parvati Valley, an average of one every year, earning this tiny, remote sliver of the subcontinent a dark reputation as India’s backpacker Bermuda Triangle. The circumstances of each disappearance are different—the tourist’s country of origin; villages visited or paths walked; last known location—yet eerily similar. All feature a spirited backpacker seeking an off-the-beaten-track adventure, a collection of anecdotes from fellow travelers relating the backpacker’s final days, a family’s anguished search, and thousands of unanswered questions.

  This traveler had arrived in the Parvati Valley as many before him had: with a goal and a picture in his mind of what he could accomplish among the mountains and the mist. That picture, at least in part, came to life inside his cave when he carefully placed his phone on a rock, set the timer, and captured a self-portrait as he reclined with his book and his fire. It was one of the last photographs he shared online with his followers on social media. Shortly thereafter, the traveler’s name, Justin Alexander Shetler, would be added to the list of those who had entered the Parvati Valley never to be seen again.

  Part I

  The Way

  Rise, wake up, seek the wise and realize. The path is difficult to cross like the sharpened edge of a razor, so say the wise.

  —Katha Upanishad, Sanskrit text

  Tell me something you are dedicated to in life and a true test of that dedication is, Would you die for it?

  —Stalking Wolf, as quoted by Tom Brown, Jr.

  1

  Trailhead

  There is only one road into the Parvati Valley. It’s a narrow track—roughly paved in parts, washed-out dirt in others—along which rattletrap buses twist and swerve and screech to a crawl with inches to spare as they pass. At several points, vehicles drive under overhanging rock along a route blasted into the mountainside. On one side of the road, the cliff rises, an impassable plane of earth and stone that seemingly touches the clouds; on the other side, it drops precipitously to the milky blue waters of the Parvati River hundreds of feet below. It was at the end of this road but the beginning of a path that Justin set off on his final journey. The hillside hamlet of Kalga was as far as his Royal Enfield motorcycle could take him. He now needed to walk to reach the upper reaches of the valley. The trail into the mountains was clear before him: follow the godlike river that thrashed and thundered in his ears.

  On a warm August day, with blue sky and sun offering a welcome relief from the downpours that had drenched the valley and blanketed its forests in mist for much of the summer of 2016, Justin headed for a trailhead. He strolled along a dirt path through Kalga, between two-story wooden guesthouses and apple orchards, toward the edge of the village. Dogs barked, men and women tended their fruit trees in anticipation of the harvest, and multicolored prayer flags fluttered in the humid breeze. Beside Justin walked Andrey Gapon, a Russian man who had spent three months on holiday in the valley. The two had met several weeks earlier, and Gapon had been captivated by the thirty-five-year-old American, who had revealed that he was living in a mountain cave with minimal supplies.

  Now Justin was embarking on a four- to five-day hike to Mantalai Lake, a cluster of pools at the top of the valley and the frigid source of the Parvati River. For some, the lake is a place to pitch a tent as one stage of a Himalayan trek. For others, it is the destination—a holy site associated with Shiva. There, as across India, many elements are considered a manifestation of the divine. The very mountains that frame the lake, boasting peaks that pierce through clouds at 20,000 feet, are part of Himavat, the ancient king and personification of the great Himalayan range. He is the father of Ganga and Parvati, goddess daughters who take the form of rivers breaking free from their glacial states and flowing down from the great mountaintops to feed the land. Ganga takes form as the Ganges River, India’s singular waterway that believers see as pure no matter how polluted she is beneath the surface. But here the river is Parvati—the goddess of love, harmony, and divine strength; the wife of Shiva and the mother of the beloved elephant-headed god Ganesha. When the Parvati River is calm, it brings forth life and delays death; it nourishes and provides, cools and heals. But when the river turns fierce, it is a deadly force, battering mountainsides and consuming earth as it swells. This duality mirrors the goddess for which it is named. In some of her incarnations, she is benevolent and sustaining, an exemplar of life-giving love. In another, she wears severed heads around her neck, a ferocious and destructive divine power.

  Gapon wanted to see off his new friend. As they weaved along the small village’s dirt paths, stooping under apple tree branches laden with ripening fruit, they were so deep in conversation that they took a wrong turn and ended up spun around. They laughed. “What an interesting way to start this journey,” Justin said, noting the omen of becoming lost before even setting out. When they found the path they knew led to the trailhead, Justin began talking about an idea he had been mulling over: he had been thinking about creating some kind of centralized online memorial for adventurers who have passed away, where their digital trails could serve as eulogies to their lives.

  Something wasn’t sitting right with Gapon. He could tell that Justin was anxious about the journey that lay ahead. He offered to accompany him to Mantalai Lake; the Russian man was familiar with the route, having just returned from a guided trek to the lake and over a high mountain pass into a neighboring valley. The trek had been challenging but profound, and he would be happy to do it all again, especially alongside someone like Justin. He was disappointed when Justin politely turned down his offer.

  Many pilgrims and travelers hire guides and porters to assist them on their trek to the lake, to cook meals and to set up camps, but Justin had been presented with a different opportunity. A sadhu, a Hindu holy man, had invited him on a pilgrimage to the sacred lake, where the man would teach him yoga and meditation and Justin could experience the ascetic life. Justin planned on staying at the lake for ten days, living off the few supplies they were taking and sleeping out under the stars or in boulder caves. It was a journey he wanted to do alone with the sadhu, he told Gapon. He had formed an image in his mind of what the journey would be like. Three days earlier, he had posted online about his plan to trek with the Hindu holy man. “I want to see the world through his eyes, which are essentially 5000 years old, an ancient spiritual path,” he had written on his blog and social media accounts. “I’m going to put my heart into it and see what happens.”

  Around midday, the two men reached the trailhead in a meadow strewn with granite boulders; from there the path snaked off into the forest. Gray langur monkeys with obsidian faces shook the high branches above them. Justin handed Gapon his iPhone and asked him to take his picture
to mark the “beginning of a spiritual journey.” The American man offered a soft half smile as Gapon took the photograph.

  Justin had displayed toughness and determination by spending the previous three weeks living alone in a Himalayan cave with little more than a sleeping bag and a machete. He had revealed trust in his bond with the sadhu who had promised to guide him on his pilgrimage. But it was his heart—his passion to better understand his place in the world—that Gapon admired most in his new friend. Still, even though Justin was clearly a seasoned traveler and an experienced outdoorsman, the Russian man was concerned. The plan was ambitious. Mantalai Lake lay nearly 13,500 feet in elevation in a broad, exposed saddle, with no trees for shelter or firewood to protect against wind and subfreezing temperatures. Justin was carrying neither stove nor cooking fuel in his small brown day pack, so Gapon pressed into his hand a parting gift fitting for someone who valued both practicality and minimalism: a water-resistant red butane lighter. Gapon had used it to light candles while he slept in his own mountain cave and to start the cookstove on his own trek to Mantalai Lake. Justin tucked it into his day pack.

  The two men hugged, and Justin turned and began making his way up the path, quickly disappearing into the forest. The Parvati River thundered below.

  2

  Visions

  Justin Alexander Shetler was born in the predawn hour of March 11, 1981, in Sarasota, Florida. The city, just south of Tampa, fringes the aquamarine water of the Gulf of Mexico and is shielded by a series of white-sand keys. Adventurous from the start, he began crawling early and adored the water—the bath, the lakeshore, the beach. His mother, Colette Susanne, who goes by Suzie, and father, Terry, enrolled him in toddler swim classes when he was three months old. Terry worked as a carpenter before eventually earning a master’s in Oriental medicine, and Suzie was a teaching assistant at a Montessori school, which Justin attended for several years. In raising her son, Suzie encouraged him not only to venture into nature but to be a part of it, to sense it. She taught him to be able to differentiate between a Casuarina pine and a palm tree by touching the trunk with his eyes closed. His first pair of shoes was a tiny pair of suede moccasins that his mother had bought for him; she wanted him to feel the earth under his feet. He collected rocks in an old fishing tackle box. His mother called him “Bear.”