On June 4, 2003, two businessmen from Fort Collins were hiking off the main path of Colorado’s Big South Trail when one of them spotted something that did not belong on a mountainside. A child’s sneaker. Then a second one. Both barely weathered, sitting roughly 500 vertical feet above the trail below. Robert Osborne and Gary Watts had discussed the Jaryd Atadero case just a week earlier while walking that same trail. They knew immediately what they were looking at.
Jaryd Atadero had been missing for nearly four years.
A trip no one had planned
On the morning of October 2, 1999, Jaryd Atadero was three years old. His family described him as adventurous, energetic, and impossible not to laugh at. He loved the movie Godzilla, played obsessively with Star Wars toys and army soldiers, and cheered for the Oakland Raiders with the total conviction only small children manage. His father, Allyn Atadero, a physical education teacher, was raising Jaryd and his six-year-old sister Josallyn on his own at the Poudre River Resort in Colorado’s Poudre Canyon, a property he co-owned with his twin brother Arlyn.
Eleven members of the Christian Singles Network, a group Allyn had joined after his divorce, were staying at the resort that weekend. Both children asked to go along on the group’s planned trip to a nearby state fish hatchery, two miles from the lodge. Allyn was hesitant, particularly about Jaryd, but the group assured him they were only going to the hatchery. He trusted them.
They did not keep that promise. At some point during the hatchery visit, the group made a spontaneous decision to take an unplanned hike along the Big South Trail, 15 miles west of the resort. No one told Allyn. With both children in tow, the group parked at the trailhead and set off along the track.
The last time anyone saw him
The group spread across the trail, faster walkers pulling ahead, slower ones lagging behind. Around 11:30 a.m., having walked roughly a mile and a half, Jaryd broke away from the adults near him and ran forward. He stopped briefly to speak with two fishermen, asking them whether there were any bears around. The fishermen noticed a group of adults approximately 50 to 80 feet down the trail and assumed the boy was with them. They did not intervene.
That was the last confirmed sighting of Jaryd Atadero alive.
Shortly after, members of the group, including Josallyn, heard a scream from somewhere further along the trail. Josallyn later described it as difficult to read, sounding to her like “somebody getting attacked or somebody playing with someone.” The group searched the vicinity for roughly an hour before returning to the resort to tell Allyn his son was gone. Allyn broke down. He got into his vehicle, beating his chest and repeating, “they lost my baby, they lost my baby.”
The resort manager called the Larimer County Sheriff’s Office. By 6:30 p.m., a 65-person search and rescue team had arrived at the lower trailhead.
Searchers found nothing
What followed was extensive, and by any measure, disastrous. A helicopter deployed to assist in aerial search operations encountered severe difficulties in the rugged mountain terrain. On the afternoon of October 3, it stalled mid-air and fell approximately 100 feet before crashing along the trail. All five crew members survived, but two were seriously injured. One search and rescue member suffered a fractured eye socket, three broken vertebrae, a broken shoulder, a laceration that exposed his femur, and a concussion. The crash destroyed the helicopter and consumed resources the operation could not replace.
Ground teams, dive teams, canine units, and a second helicopter continued the search over the following days. The media arrived in force, with television trucks lining Colorado Highway 14 and reporters drawing comparisons to the then-recent JonBenét Ramsey case. Psychics called in with theories. An American Indian performed a ritual at the search site, asking the mountain to return the boy. Allyn faced the cameras repeatedly and appealed for help. He wanted his son back.
On October 8, six days after Jaryd disappeared, the search was suspended. No trace of him had been found. No blood, no clothing, no signs of a struggle. Nothing.
Clothing on a mountain ledge
Beyond the two barely-scuffed Disney’s Tarzan sneakers that Osborne and Watts found that June morning, they also discovered a brown polar fleece sweater and a pair of blue trousers, one leg mostly torn away. The trousers were turned inside out. Both men photographed the items and reported their findings to authorities the following day.
On June 14, Larimer County Search and Rescue personnel returned to the area and located a human molar and a large piece of fractured human skull on elevated terrain above 9,000 feet, in a section that had been on the intended flight path of the helicopter that crashed four years earlier. Allyn Atadero confirmed the clothing was his son’s. Initial DNA testing indicated an 86 percent likelihood the skull fragment belonged to Jaryd. Modern retesting later confirmed a 100 percent match. In October 2003, the Larimer County Coroner’s Office signed Jaryd’s death certificate, ruling his cause of death as “probably caused by a mountain lion.”
For many, that seemed to close it.
Evidence that raised more questions
It did not close it. Big cat experts consulted by the family noted that a mountain lion typically attacks the stomach first, targeting internal organs. Jaryd’s sweater showed no evidence of any such attack. It was intact. Testing found no mountain lion hairs on the clothing, no blood, and no DNA of any kind. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation ran independent tests and reached the same conclusion.
The sneakers presented a separate problem. Dragging prey 500 vertical feet up steep, rocky terrain should have destroyed them. They showed only minimal wear. The torn trouser leg was attributed not to predation but to birds and rodents pulling at the fabric for their nests. The clothing, in short, showed no physical evidence consistent with a mountain lion attack.
The trousers turned inside out remained the detail no one could adequately account for. A mountain lion would not have done that.
Abduction was considered and not dismissed. Members of the Christian Singles group and the two fishermen were all questioned. Nothing pointed to any of them. Years later, Allyn was harassed by a man who claimed to be Jaryd himself, prompting Allyn to seek a restraining order. When the man violated it, he was arrested. The DNA match made his claims impossible.
The cause of Jaryd Atadero’s death remained officially undetermined, the mountain lion attribution on his death certificate qualified with the word “probably” rather than confirmed.
What Allyn kept
Rather than bury or cremate the remains, Allyn Atadero chose to keep the skull fragment. He preserved Jaryd’s old bedroom exactly as it had been in 1999, with the fragment placed among his son’s toys and belongings. In his book on the case, he described his certainty that his faith would one day reunite him with the boy. “I am at peace and I know I am going to see Jaryd again one of these days,” he wrote. “I’m going to look at him and say, ‘Jaryd, what happened?’ He’s going to look at me and say, ‘Dad, does it really matter?'”
Every January 2, Jaryd’s birthday, his family marked another year. When Josallyn married, an empty seat was left at the reception with his Oakland Raiders cap on the chair. Allyn made the hike up to the spot where his son’s remains had been found and left Jaryd an invitation to the wedding.
Allyn Atadero died in 2025. In 2007, Governor Bill Ritter declared September 8 Recreational Safety Awareness Week in Jaryd’s honor.
Jaryd’s case remains officially unsolved. No animal was ever linked to his death. No person was ever charged. Whatever happened to a three-year-old boy on a Colorado mountain trail on October 2, 1999, happened in the minutes between the last time the fishermen watched him walk up that path and the moment Josallyn heard a scream she could not quite name. Everything found afterward raised more questions than it answered.
