TALKEETNA -- Life goes on, much as it ever did, in this small town just off the George Parks Highway, but many wonder about Melanie Gould -- gone missing now for more than a week. Uneasiness is not surprising in a community that has a permanent population of less than 1,000, many of whom know each other from work in the restaurants, shops and small hotels that line the main street.
The busy season is under way now. A jumping-off point for adventurers headed to the Kahiltna Glacier base camp on Mount McKinley, North America's tallest peak, the community is full of mountaineers who come to climb and tourists who come to get a taste of the atmosphere. Along the streets, craftsmen peddle their wares as busload after busload of tourists pours in to peruse paintings of the Alaska Range, or sign up for flightseeing tours or river guide services.
There's one thing different than in summers past, though. In doorways and windows, tacked to the walls of buildings and on public bulletin boards, there are the posters:
"Missing," they read, in capital letters. "Melanie Gould."
A blonde woman with a big smile gazes back from each poster, which features a description of the 34-year-old Gould, information on her vehicle, and what is known about her last whereabouts. Some of the posters, printed in black-and-white, look as though they've been faded by the sun, despite that they've been posted for less than a week.
Gould, a musher and top-20 finisher in the 2006 Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race, went officially missing May 31, the day after Memorial Day. That Monday, she clocked out from one of her two jobs at about 5:20 p.m. The job was at the Talkeetna Roadhouse, a popular dining and sleeping destination. Gould that evening offered to stay late and help out with some lingering work, but owner Trisha Costello told her it could wait until morning.
Gould didn't show up the next day. That night was the last time anyone in Talkeetna saw her. Then, she was gone -- the second mysterious disappearance of a longtime resident of the tiny town in less than a decade.
What is known
Gould didn't show up for work on Wednesday at her second job. She was scheduled for a shift at the Flying Squirrel Café near milepost 10 of the Talkeetna Spur Road. Alaska State Troopers were alerted of her absence. They went to her house to perform a welfare check.
Gould wasn't home. Her truck was gone. Food had been left out uneaten. The dozen dogs she keeps in a small kennel as a nod to her mushing lifestyle had been left unattended without food or water. Friends said Gould had on previous occasions left to spend some time alone, but if she planned to be gone long she always found someone to look after her dogs. Gould had told no one of any plan to leave.
"The cell phone was there," said Amanda Randles, a Talkeetna resident and acquaintance of Gould's. "A week before she'd left, she'd just bought a bunch of starts for her garden."
Troopers saw nothing in Gould's home to worry them, but they ran a check on her credit card. They got a hit from the gas station in Talkeetna. The charge had been made in the very early hours of May 31.
Videotape from the gas station indicated that Gould was in her truck and appeared to be alone. Given that Gould did not appear distressed and seemed to be acting of her own volition, troopers concluded Gould was OK and not a missing person.
Two days later, on June 3 -- with none of Gould's friends or employers having heard from her -- an official missing person's report was made. At the time, Megan Peters, the trooper spokeswoman, said that Gould was "on (the) radar," but troopers did not yet think she was in any real danger. Still, that day they attempted an aerial search along the Denali Highway -- a long, desolate, gravel road that runs for almost 140 miles along the south side of the Alaska Range between the tiny outposts of Cantwell and Paxson. A trooper helicopter was turned back by high winds.
The next day -- June 4 -- the search resumed. Around 12:30 p.m., troopers found Gould's truck about 18 miles east of Cantwell. It was parked, they reported, off the main roadway at the end of an old mining road that narrowed down to a four-wheeler path. "There were no signs of foul play," a trooper dispatch said at the time.
Troopers began a search nonetheless. About 20 people and a half-dozen trained search dogs joined a trooper helicopter and two fixed-wing aircraft in scouring the area around the truck.
Amanda Randles and Amanda Olson -- who, with Holli Papasodora, started a Facebook page that acts as a liaison between the public and the search teams -- described the search area as heavily wooded and thick with underbrush. The first day's search found nothing.
On June 7, troopers posted an update saying the search crew had increased to 34 people and 17 dogs, plus additional aircraft. On the ground were the Fairbanks chapter of PAWS, Alaska Search and Rescue Dogs, Denali State Park rangers, Mat-Su Search and Rescue and the "Alaska Mountain Search and Rescue," according to the update.
Searchers found "no sign of Gould nor have there been any scent hits by any of the K9 teams deployed during the search except in the direct vicinity of where the truck was located near the highway," the trooper report said. Gould's truck was found to be in working order, and it still had gas in the tank.
The truck was impounded. The search continued, but after four days of intense aerial and ground searching that eventually covered hundreds of miles and involved dozens of individuals and dogs, no trace of where Gould might have gone after leaving her truck was found. The search was called off on June 9.
'Theres just no information'
Randles, Olson, Papasodora and another Talkeetna resident who asked not to be identified have been sitting in front of their computers for several hours every day since Friday, monitoring the public discussion on the Facebook page "Have you seen Melanie Gould?" The page by Wednesday had more than 2,600 followers, including some from as far away as Australia.
Every few minutes, someone posts on the wall. Often it's a simple "Thoughts and prayers from Helena, Montana," -- or some other location -- post. Other times it's someone making a recommendation or suggestion, or asking a question: "Was Melanie's car in working order?" (Yes.) "Have they tried using any of her sled dogs to track her?" (No, huskies make bad trackers.)
And then there is the speculation. One post early on insinuated there might have been some connection between Gould's disappearance and the disappearance of another girl, 1,000 miles away, in Vanderhoof, Canada, on May 28. Another -- shortly after a trooper dispatch mentioned the lack of Gould's scent anywhere other than in the area immediately surrounding her truck -- pondered whether she might have gotten into another vehicle near her own.
Given a dearth of information, speculation flows in to fill the information vacuum. The mysterious circumstances surrounding Gould's disappearance and the lack of regular updates from search parties operating in a remote area where communications are spotty combine to churn people's imaginations.
The page administrators are constantly trying to quash rumors.
"Because there is nothing solid, because it's so nebulous, people think we're keeping things from them," Randles said Wednesday. "But we're not. There's just no information."
And while they are working hard to keep online speculation to a minimum, there's not much they can do about smalltown gossip. A rumor circulated Tuesday that Gould had been seen in the area. Olson and Randles aren't sure how it started, but Randles has a guess.
"Somebody says something in the bar," Randles said. "It's always in the bar."
Olson agreed. "Everybody's got their ideas," she said, "and they want to share them with you."
One of the more troublesome rumors they've heard has to do with a report that the owner of the Tangle River Inn saw Melanie on Tuesday.
"This is a guy that knows Melanie," Randles said. He reported her eating a burger in his restaurant, alone, on May 31 -- the day after the last person in Talkeetna saw her. The Inn sits on the opposite end of the Denali Highway from where Melanie's truck was found, and the Inn owner reported seeing Melanie get into a white truck -- not her light-blue, 1989 Toyota, which was found by troopers.
It is confusing, and all Gould's friends can do is wait for more from troopers. There are some hoping troopers will ask for additional search help. Then, Olson said, "half the town" is going to be up there off the Denali. Much of the town turned out earlier in the week for a meeting with a trooper representative. In the crowd were the parents of another tragically famous missing person from the Talkeetna area.
Two disappearances in a decade
Bethany Correira, a 21-year-old student who grew up near Talkeetna and moved to Anchorage in May 2003, disappeared a mere four days after first arriving in Alaska's largest city. For one year, there was little information on what had happened to Correira, and the community of Talkeetna rallied around the missing girl, posting fliers and reacting to a shocking disappearance in the best way they could.
The Correira case was eventually solved when the brother of Michael Lawson -- an apartment manager in the building where Correira lived and the man eventually convicted in 2008 of killing her -- led police to the gravel pit where he'd helped dump her body. By coincidence, that gravel pit was just across the Susitna River from Talkeetna, at milepost 129 of the Parks Highway.
"For so many of us, there are so many eerie similarities between what happened when Bethany disappeared and Melanie," Randles said. Olson and Papasodora agreed.
"People have suggested that we put the fliers up in the back windows of our cars," Olson said, "but that brings up a lot of memories of when Bethany went missing."
Correira's parents, who have been through this experience all too intimately and who still reside in the Talkeetna area, have been offering advice from their own onetime search for their missing daughter.
"Bethany's parents have been helping us," using their experience and knowledge on the subject, Randles said.
"It just sucks that a town this size has to deal with something like this again," Papasodora said.
Melanie's motivations
With the sudden nature of Gould's departure, friends and acquaintances were left reeling in the wake of her disappearance. But why would Gould leave? Were there any indications that she was going anywhere, any underlying problems?
The plans that Gould made, and her actions prior to her vanishing gave no indication to friends that she was troubled or looking to go anywhere. The lack of arrangement for her dogs seems evidence enough for many that her departure was an unexpected one. She made no adjustments to her upcoming work schedules, and -- as suggested by the garden starters -- Gould had been planning for at least the near future.
On the Friday that official search efforts for Gould began, Heidi Sutter, a mushing acquaintance of Gould, said that she wasn't aware of any personal problems that Gould was having, and she was living alone.
"I know that she's kind of a quiet person," Sutter said.
That word, quiet, comes up often when people talk about Gould. But Olson, Randles and Papasodora agreed that this shouldn't imply that she was shy.
"She's just not a crazy, extroverted partier," Papasodora said.
Shandi McEwen, a Talkeetna Roadhouse employee who saw Gould briefly on the Monday she disappeared, also said that Gould was "very quiet."
"The whole entire time I knew her," McEwen said, "she was pretty quiet, not very social."
This isn't to say Gould was antisocial -- she had friends, as the community involvement in her case attests. Some friends, like Anita Golton, the owner of the Flying Squirrel Bakery where Gould worked, have had an especially hard time with Gould's disappearance, as revealed in a heartfelt blog on Tuesday.
Gould had left at times before but always found someone to look after her dogs. Earlier this year, she had gone to visit her family in Colorado, but ended up extending that trip without telling anyone. McEwen said she'd heard Gould had been in Hawaii, but Olson said that wasn't the case, just a rumor.
Still, even McEwen agreed that Gould wouldn't have left without her dogs. "This is unusual," she said, "it doesn't make any sense that she would leave without the dogs."
Whatever the motivations, people are hoping that Gould turns up soon. Her toughness as a musher can't be underestimated, Randles said. She likes to hike, Randles added, and "she's really quite capable."
It's obvious in the way that people in Talkeetna talk about Gould that most believe she is still out there somewhere, whether it's in those woods off the Denali Highway or elsewhere. There's little speaking of Melanie in the past tense, no "Melanie was," or "Melanie had;" only "Melanie is" and "Melanie has."
For now, the community sits and waits for news, hoping for some kind of catharsis, some closure.
CORRECTION: This article originally reported that Gould was last seen fueling up in Cantwell, not Talkeetna. We regret the error.
Contact Ben Anderson at ben(at)alaskadispatch.com.