The puzzling disappearance of Jonathan Jetté and Rachael Bagnall near Valentine Lake
Jonathan Jetté and Rachael Bagnall, disappeared September 4, 2010, Spetch Creek Forest Service Road to Valentine Lake, British Columbia, Canada
Revised September 2024
On Saturday, September 4, 2010, Rachael (or Rachel) Bagnall and Jonathan Jetté left Vancouver early, before 7 am, for three days of hiking at Valentine Lake (Saxifrage Mountain and Cassiope Peak) near Pemberton in British Columbia, Canada. They were never seen again.
Who were Rachael Bagnall and Jonathan Jetté
25-year-old, Rachael Bagnall was planning to go to Columbia to do volunteer work for one year in underprivileged communities. She was training to be a doctor in UBC's Medicine Class of 2011. She was a painter and a pianist, inspired in her art by the beauty of the mountains. Her boyfriend, Jonathan Jetté, 34, worked for the government in Quebec as an Attaché.
They met at a climbing gym. Both were very fit. Jonathan ran the Grouse Grind three times a week and climbed competently. Rachael grew up in Prince George and has been hiking since she was five.
Jonathan Jetté and Rachael Bagnall
The trip to Valentine Lake
There are rolling alpine meadows next to Valentine Lake, where hikers can walk around in flip-flops. There are also steep mountainous routes in the high alpine, complete with crevasses that require crampons and ice picks to explore, and dense, wooded lower mountains with hidden vertical cliff bands and overgrown bush.
According to a bank card statement, Rachael and Jonathan stopped at Tim Horton's in Squamish at 7:42 a.m. on September 4 for coffee and hot chocolate. They then continued through Whistler, Pemberton, and Birken.
On Monday, September 6, 2010, Labor Day weekend, they were supposed to return to Vancouver as this was the couple's last few days together before Rachael moved abroad.
Jetté parked his car at the Spetch Creek Forest Service Road, and from there, it was about a five-hour hike to Valentine Lake, a heart-shaped lake under the peaks of the Saxifrage and Cassiope Mountains. Then nothing.
Valentine Lake BC
Valentine Lake BC
The search
On September 8, 2010, Rachael's sister, Elizabeth, notified the authorities that Rachael was missing with Jonathan when she became concerned she hadn't heard from her.
Up to 50 searchers, including police and SAR workers from around the province, combed the area on foot around Valentine Lake and its surrounding peaks led by Sgt Steve LeClair.
Police quickly found Jonathan's four-door Toyota Echo car parked 1.2 km up the Specht Creek Forest Service Road. The empty cups from Tim Horton's coffee shop and a cell phone were found in the vehicle. Records showed that Jonathan made no calls after September 3. The area around their vehicle was searched, but nothing unexpected was found.
Jonathan's four-door Toyota Echo
The RCMP climbing team went in by helicopter, set some fixed-line, and repelled down to search the area below the tree line. At the same time, dog teams searched the whole area, including cadaver dogs.
The Mounties put out a call for volunteers, and search and rescue teams from Pemberton, Whistler, Vancouver Island, and the lower Fraser Valley were soon combing the Cayoosh Mountains for any sign of the missing couple. Initially hampered by rain and heavy cloud cover, three helicopters participated in the search effort.
The official search was called off in October 2010, more than a month after the couple was reported missing. Snow was on the ground at that time.
Despite a thorough 10-day search comprising 2,000 man-hours, no clues were ever found regarding Jonathan and Rachael’s whereabouts. Staff Sergeant LeClair would later tell Alison Taylor of Whistler’s Pique Newsmagazine, who wrote about the case in September 2011, that the search for Jonathan and Rachael was “the first time he [had] been unable to find someone in the backcountry. And a lot of people get lost around Whistler”. Dave Steers, who led Pemberton's search and rescue team, later said that if the couple had become lost in the mountains or on the trail to Valentine Lake, they would have easily found their way back to civilization. “There’s not a lot of ways to go wrong. That’s what was so perplexing about the whole thing. Where could they have gone wrong?”
Following the end of the first search and rescue operation, the families hired professional mountain guides, including three-time Everest veteran John Furneaux, alpine guide Patrick Delaney, and Whistler-based hiking guide Eric Vezeau, to search crevasses and other technical, hard-to-reach areas on the slopes of Saxifrage and Cassiope into which the couple could have potentially fallen or become trapped. Despite searching an area of 175 square kilometres, they found nothing.
After the official search was over, the RCMP got a tip that witnesses in the Mount Currie new site had seen smoke on a heavily wooded cliff overlooking Peq Creek, on the southern slopes of Cassiope Peak, during the weekend during which the missing couple would have been camping The theory was they could have fallen and survived. The RCMP climbing team went in by helicopter, set some fixed lines and repelled down to search the area below the tree line. At the same time, dog teams searched the area from the bottom up. But nothing was discovered.
In December 2010, a Lillooet Indian man from the native community of Mount Currie, located about five miles southwest of Valentine Lake, went out to chop firewood when he spotted unusual bird activity on Cassiope Peak. After the long wait for the snow to clear, police met the witness on the ground and, in coordination with a helicopter, GPS'ed the area of the activity. Teams then searched for it. Again, nothing.
In 2011, Rachael Bagnall’s family erected a wooden cross on the shores of Valentine Lake as a memorial for the missing couple.
Jonathan Jette and Rachael Bagnall memorial Valentine Lake
The family of Jonathan Jette has never given up hope that their son and his girlfriend will be found, in one form or another, although some of them suspect the couple fell victim to foul play. Every fall, Jonathan’s younger brother, Miguel, and his father, Jean-Guy, travel from their home in Montreal, Quebec, to hike the area. Jonathan’s mother, Lise Grenier, maintains and regularly posts on a Facebook page called Jonathan Jette and Rachel Bagnall . Lise, who visited the site of the disappearance in the summer of 2011, stated that she “felt Jonathan’s presence” on the road on which his car was parked but not at Valentine Lake and expressed her belief that whatever happened to Jonathan and Rachael occurred at the beginning or end of their trip.
Both the RCMP, which operated under the direction of Staff Sergeant Steve LeClair until his retirement in June 2016, and members of the local Lillooet First Nation continue to search for the missing hikers occasionally. In a 2013 article for the Whistler-based newspaper Question, Miguel Jette expressed his gratitude for his family's support from the Lillooet Nation, declaring that the area natives “know the mountain inside and out. They’ve even gone on a few days, and multi-day hikes themselves, searching for clues. They have been amazingly supportive [and] when they have ideas, they send us notes.”
In the fall of 2018, a member of the Lillooet Nation discovered shreds of men’s clothing near the mouth of Peq Creek, not far from a pond called Eddy Lake. Cadaver dogs with the ability to locate old or buried human bones were brought to the scene but were unable to find a scent. Police later determined that the clothes did not belong to Jonathan.
In February 2019, another Lillooet man found bones on the mountain, which were later determined to belong to an animal.
David Paulides of Missing411 wrote, “I’ve read too many search and rescue reports to not know that there is something very wrong with this case. The parents have stated that they believe there may be foul play involved in the disappearance. They have also questioned whether their children are actually still in the area.”
To this day, no shred of evidence connected with the disappearance of Jonathan Jette and Rachael Bagnall has ever been found.
No equipment has ever been recovered, and apart from the abandoned car, there is no trace of them ever being in the area. Police looked through the couples’ homes, cracked Facebook accounts, checked cell phone records and computers, and checked their bank accounts and credit cards for any activity.
It's a case that has perplexed seasoned searchers as, almost always, the people are found alive, or the bodies are recovered. At least an item of equipment or clothing is located.
A few new pieces of evidence, like some nail clippers, were found and sent off to the lab for DNA testing, and an old fire pit near the Peq Creek area, which flows into the Mount Currie new site, was also discovered. They found a pair of women's sunglasses near Valentine Lake. A lead that could put Rachael at the lake at some point? However, another hiker contacted the police and described the sunglasses in detail as a pair she had lost while hiking in the area. Search experts from Parks Canada were called in to do a comprehensive overview of the search efforts to date to make sure nothing was missed. But these leads led nowhere.
What happened to Rachel Bagnall and Jonathan Jetté?
Rachel and Jonathan were equipped for a scramble rather than technical ropework. They did not pack a map, compass, or GPS. It's possible to get off track on the walk into Valentine Lake, where the pathway veers sharply uphill and to the left, but the natural inclination is to continue. That would have led to cliffs, but it would have been possible to turn around at any time.
Eventually, they would have found some form of civilization. The Duffy Lake Road runs along the area's eastern side, the road to Birken is on the west, Cirque Mountain borders the north, and the south eventually comes down to the new Mount Currie site. While it is a big area, they would have quickly come to something like a logging road.
LeClaire, the lead investigator, said, "When you ask me what my thoughts on this are, it's a catastrophic slip-and-fall accident, either below treeline where we have not been able to find them, or they've gone into a crevasse somewhere in the alpine area. There are not a lot of ways to go wrong. That was what was so perplexing about the whole thing. Where could they have gone wrong?"
With no physical evidence, it has been speculated that they may have walked over a cliff, been buried in a rockslide, attacked by bears or other wildlife, or met with foul play by someone or something sinister in the area. Some even believe that despite the car being in the area, they were abducted as the cell phone was left behind.
It just doesn't happen often that two people walk into the backcountry and seemingly disappear off the face of the earth with no clues as to what happened. But that’s what happened at Valentine Lake.
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Sources
https://www.piquenewsmagazine.com/cover-stories/missing-in-the-backcountry-2489240
https://mysteriesofcanada.com/bc/the-british-columbia-triangle-2-6-missing-411-canada/
