Family still seeking answers after survivalist mysteriously vanished in ‘Valley of Death’ eight years ago
The family of a survivalist who went missing in 2016 are still seeking answers after his mysterious disappearance.
Justin Alexander Shetler had been travelling in the Parvati Valley - dubbed the 'Valley of Death' due to the large number of foreign tourists who have vanished there - in Himachal Pradesh in Northern India.
When he disappeared, Justin had been carrying just a woollen wrap and a walking stick which he had fashioned into a kind of flute.
No trace of Justin has ever been found since he disappeared, and his mysterious case is now the subject of the Tenderfoot TV podcast Status: Untraced.
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Host Liam Luxon is now trying to figure out what could have happened to Justin, who was known to be a survivalist.
Luxon told Fox News Digital: “Justin is a survival expert, so if somebody was living off the grid, it would be him. He has all the training for it.
"He knows how to speak bird language, which is crazy. He lived in a cave. He can start a fire from anywhere.”
But there was one part of Justin's missing person case which has people especially flummoxed.
That is one of the last things which the survivalist wrote on his social media page.
Luxon said: “It was weird – everything was really, really weird.”
Justin wrote before his disappearance: "I should be back, but if I’m not back by then, don’t come looking for me."
While on the journey, they found that Justin had been staying in a cave which was just outside an encampment.
Luxon said: “In the last month that we know where he was, he was living in a cave… which is in a camp in the Himalayas. It’s gorgeous. It looks like this medieval, military town.
"He was staying just outside this camp, but it was four hours from the nearest road. You have no choice but to hike there.”
Luxon is not the only one who has been trying to get answers about what happened to Justin.
He described how Justin's mom as well as a friend of his had flown over to India to get more answers about what had happened to him.
They claimed that people had passed him while he was on the trail, saying that where he was going there was 'only one path going up and down'.
Luxon said: "I’ve made the trek now, and it certainly seemed like he would’ve made it back to the camp. And again, this guy is a survival expert."
The Parvati Valley is known to be a hotspot for international travellers to go missing, with around two dozen foreign visitors having died or disappeared in the area in the last 25 years.
Topics: News, US News, World News, India, Travel
Kit Roberts