Comments by "possumverde" (@possumverde) on "EXPLORE WITH US"
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They reached the summit an hour ahead of what they had planned and decided to go looking for waterfalls, though they had been advised not to. (They both had extensive search histories concerning the location of said waterfalls in the week leading up to their disappearance, but assured those who warned them not to look for them that they wouldn't... but they did end up with around two extra hours they weren't expecting to have by reaching the summit early...) The gullies they photographed themselves in were not all along their original path and have since been identified. As has the dirt trail they were on a week later. What most likely happened was that they realized they weren't going to be able ro make it back to the summit (and thus the only path back to town) before it got dark and were going to have to spend the night on the mountain. In that gully area, the only cleared ground suitable for setting up any sort of makeshift camp would be one of the gullies themselves. They made their first attempts to contact help around an hour before dark which makes sense. The temperature was in the mid to upper 50's at night, and they were in shorts and tee shirts, so they would have wanted shelter. The debris formations they took pictures of themselves in front of would have seemed ideal for that. Such gullies are dangerous (especially before the rainy season is fully under way) since blockages can form and hold back water, leading to a very strong surge with debris down the mountain when the blockage gives. It likely rained that night, and they got hit by such a surge with nowhere to go inside the debris tunnel they were in. I've seen such surges, and they would definitely have been injured to some degree and washed along for a bit. Had one or both been carried to where the incline steepened, it would have led to significant injuries and no viable way back up.
They would have had to travel down the gully, which would have taken them to the river. There, they would have had water, but nowhere to really go (especially if one or more were injured) and would likely have decided to wait and hope a boat would go by (highly unlikely), or searchers would find them. You can go quite a while without food, but after about a week, you'd be pretty desperate. The dirt path they were on in their week later photos has since been identified via drone, and when you see it, things start to make sense. It ran along a gully and from the bottom likely looked like it went all the way up. It didn't. About halfway up, it essentially ran into a wall of dense foliage with nowhere to go. That would have been the last of their energy and the point at which at least one was likely to more or less give up. They probably went back down the mountain to their water source to wait for help, one died, and the other was too weak to make it for much longer. The only way back up would have been a gully, and by then, there was likely a good bit of water flowing down, so the survivor would have had no options. Nature took care of things from there.
The concerned looks on their faces in some of the gully photos were likely the result of their realizing they weren't going to get back in time but might as well take the pictures since that's what got them into the mess in the first place. While the night photos were likely just them using the flash as a flashlight. The head photo makes sense if you have an injured half starved person going up an incline with the person behind them taking periodic pictures to see where they were going. A stumble and fall would bring the person behind down as well, and a photo could easily have been snapped in the process. The photos aimed upwards were probably an attempt to signal a drug plane heard but not seen (as they run without lights) which regularly fly over that area at night. (Somewhere down there, there's probably such a pilot who saw those flashes but can't say anything about it because then they would have to explain why they were flying over that area at night with no flight plan registered anywhere.)
The physical evidence all makes sense as remains and items will get washed into the river during the rainy season. Also, the people in the village were not informed of the missing hikers until quite a while afterward and their stories as to where the evidence was found and it's initial condition were different depending on which villager was asked. They had probably already found the stuff, cleaned it, and were using some of it when they found out, and just threw it all back together to turn it in. The phones and camera were damaged and not in working condition with quite a bit of garbled data on them. The investigators were simply able to retrieve some of the data from them. The oddities of missing photos etc. could easily be explained by that. The "famous" missing photo had a registry entry but no trace of the actual image file. That can happen from a glitch. The investigators merely said that the only way it could have manually been removed was via PC, not that it had been removed so. Anyone smart enough to remove the image file would have purged the registry entry as well and attempted to adjust the numbering to completely cover it... or just destroyed the camera (and phones) to make sure there was no evidence to begin with. The foot in the shoe is perfectly natural when it comes to human remains. Shoes slow the decomp process down which leads to the feet eventually falling off. Shoes are somewhat buoyant, so if they end up in the water, they'll travel along. The "sun bleached" bones were most likely not truly or fully sun bleached. A couple of species of the last stage decomp beetles in the area excrete phosphates as they do their work. Such phosphates easily and quickly leech into the bone and turn it very white (they even have a slight glow in the dark for a bit after prolonged exposure to sunlight.)
I think that covers most of the "mystery."
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