Before you head out on a hike, Cynthia Boucher urges you to let somebody know where you’re going.
The Vancouver mother has spent the past four-plus years wondering where her son went. She had clues and suspicions, but now she’s found peace.
The body of Boucher’s 31-year-old son, James Dutton, was discovered on Aug. 24 by a hiker in the Three Sisters Wilderness of Central Oregon. All of his equipment was with or near the body, she said — his backpack, bear bell and bear spray — and his shorts were on. The body was about 4 miles from the French Pete trailhead, where his truck had been found weeks after he disappeared in June 2012.
Boucher said she was told that a medical examiner examined “every bone,” and there was no sign of gunshot wounds or trauma. The authorities’ best guess is that Dutton died of hypothermia, she said. While it’s still puzzling that an experienced outdoorsman would meet such an end, she said, it’s also a great relief to know that he didn’t die violently.
“It’s the answer to a prayer. Now we can get on with the right kind of grieving,” she said. “Unresolved grief is what we had before.”
Boucher said her son was a Lincoln neighborhood kid and Eagle Scout, and was elected president of his Lewis and Clark High School class. He also graduated from Lane Community College in Eugene, Ore., she said.
Dutton spent four years in the Coast Guard, she said, and then traveled around the West engaged in environmental activism. In 2012, Dutton was living in Eugene and studying alternative medicine. He was set to come north to meet his teenage nephew and take him on a wilderness trip, but never showed up, Boucher said. She said she was sure something wasn’t right.
“He’d never change his mind on his brother and nephew,” she said.
Boucher has been living in suspense ever since.
“Four years, two months and four days,” she said. “It’s been pretty crazy-making. I’d hear in my dreams him banging on the front door. ‘Mom, I’m home.’ I’d hear the shower in the basement, and him singing. There was nobody in the basement. It was all in my head.”
Boucher gave the Lane County Sheriff’s Office high marks for handling the case and her with care. And she has this to say to all hikers:
“Let people know where you’re going. We didn’t even know where to start looking.”
