Garrett Bardsley

Status:

Open

Jurisdiction:

Summit County Sheriffs Department (UT)

Missing From:

Cuberant Lake, UT

Summary:

Garrett Alexander Bardsley disappeared on August 20, 2004, aged 12, while camping at Cuberant Lake in the Uinta Mountains of Utah with his father and Boy Scouts. He was last seen at approximately 8 a.m. on August 20, 2004 at Cuberant Lake in the Uinta Mountains of Utah. He was fishing with his father when his feet got wet so he started to walk back to the campsite to change his shoes. He never arrived at the campsite. No trace of Garrett has ever been found.

Vital Statistics

Circumstances of Disappearance:

On August 20, 2004, Bardsley and his father got up early while on a Boy Scout camping trip. They headed down to a nearby lake called Cuberant 1 in the Uinta Mountains in Utah for some fishing. They were camping with eighteen scouts and six or seven adults beginning on Thursday, August 19, 2004, and had planned to leave on Saturday. He was fishing with his father when his feet got wet so he started to walk back to the campsite to change his shoes. He never arrived at the campsite. He was last seen wearing red sweatpants, a T-shirt, a black hooded sweatshirt, and Converse tennis shoes. The day he vanished, the temperature was near freezing and it rained and hailed.

Additional Details:

An extensive search turned up few clues as to Garrett's whereabouts. A Nike ankle sock was found in a field of boulders half a mile from where Garrett was last seen. Garrett's mother said the sock as Garrett's, but one of the searchers claimed it was his own. In the coming days, the Bardsley family, with the help of search and rescue team members and over 1,000 volunteers, tirelessly looked for Garrett. The official search for Bardsley was called after nine days. After the official search was over, the family and many dedicated friends and volunteers continued search efforts, returning at least two or three times each week until October. Further searches happened after the winter of 2004 but turned up nothing. Hundreds of volunteers on Saturday evening wrapped up the search for a 12-year-old boy who went missing here almost a year ago. There were a few scattered finds of bones and clothes but no clear signs of Garrett Bardsley. Saturday was the final day of the search organized by the Bardsley family, of Elk Ridge, Utah County, in hopes of finding some trace of their son, who disappeared Aug. 20, 2004, during a church campout. Family members joined the roughly 550 searchers who on Saturday volunteered to canvass the approximately 4-square-mile search area around Holiday Park and near Cuberant Lake, where Garrett Bardsley was last seen. In 2009, video evidence of a possible sighting of Bardsley in Elko, Nevada, was reviewed by Detective Ron Bridge of the Summit County Sheriff's Office, who reported that 'It's not 100-percent clear, but the possibility of it being Garrett Bardsley is very, very slim.' Police say there is no evidence that he was abducted; they believe he became lost on the way back to the campsite and died of exposure. His father, Kevin Bardsley, later founded the Garrett Bardsley Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to helping find missing persons and improving search-and-rescue efforts. Less than a year after Garrett disappeared, Bardsley was back in that same mountain range as a key figure in the search for another lost boy, Brennan Hawkins. Bardsley has also helped in the search for Destiny Norton, who was kidnapped last summer in Salt Lake City, and had offered the foundation's services to searchers looking for a lost young boy in North Carolina this week.

Case Last Updated:

Oct 31, 2026