Federal officials in Alaska have now joined those of the state in saying they will search the northwestern Brooks Range mountains no more for Thomas Seibold, a German hiker missing since October. But friends at the Teaching Drum Outdoor School in Wisconsin are vowing to try to press on with privately funded search efforts as best they can.
Many think Seibold's disappearance may forever remain an Alaska mystery.
National Park Service spokesman John Quinley said this week that Kotzebue-based park employees did look for Seibold after being asked to do so by Teaching Drum. "Our Kotzebue folks did some searching as part of three, regularly scheduled patrols, and Gates of the Arctic put up a flight specific to" Seibold, he said, but efforts ended for lack of any good information on where to look.
Alaska State Troopers faced the same problem and gave up the search at the end of November. The 31-year-old Seibold, a German national, was on what his American father-in-law describes as a "pilgrimage" to the wilds of Alaska when he disappeared.
An instructor at Teaching Drum, which schools people in living off the land in the style of the American Indians prior to White contact, Seibold had been staying in a cabin along the Ambler River not far south of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the adjacent Noatak National Preserve. His wife, an editor for Teaching Drum founder Tamarack Song, and others at the school had expected him home in November.
When he failed to return, they alerted authorities, who flew to Seibold's last known position at the old homestead cabin 30- to 40-miles up river from the tiny village of Ambler. There they found a running letter to his wife, Maggie, in which he mentioned leaving the cabin on Oct. 7 to explore the surrounding area. The letter offered search and rescue officials little guidance on where he might have gone.
Over the course of the next couple weeks, Alaska State Troopers flew six searches, but all they ever found was a circle of stones along the Ambler River they believe were placed by Seibold. There was no sign of him in the area, or elsewhere in the vast swath of emptiness that comprises Northwest Alaska to the east of the regional hub of Kotzebue, population 3,224, some 550 miles northwest of the state's urban heart in Anchorage.
Although Seibold is considered an expert in wilderness survival, there is little hope that he remains alive. Search officials are in agreement it's not worth the risk of asking people to search the rugged country for a body. Quinley reported the park service has taken the position of the troopers and does "not intend to do more absent new information."
Teaching Drum, which had lobbied public officials to try to keep the search going, has hired a Northwest Alaska pilot to keep flying and is trying to raise funds to keep him in the air.
The park service, the group noted on its Facebook page, "just like the Alaska State Troopers, (said) that they would continue the search if it was their loved one who was missing. So, the plan is to continue searching from the air until there is enough snow on the ground to do a search via snow mobile and tracking. Therefore we hired a pilot again. He also works for the authorities and is known to be a very safe and responsible flyer."
There is, as yet, little snow in Northwest Alaska, and travel by snowmachine is difficult. The conditions are unusual for the time of year and have further hampered search efforts.
Teaching Drum said it has set up a Recovery Fund for Thomas Seibold at First National Bank, PO Box 627, Three Lakes, WI 54562.