What happened to Lynn Simmons? KSL uncovers forgotten cold case of surveyor lost in Uinta Mountains

EVANSTON, Wyoming — A mystery about a man’s disappearance in the Uinta Mountains during the summer of 1940 is receiving new attention, thanks to the combined efforts of KSL, the Summit County Sheriff’s Office, and the missing man’s relatives.

Lynn Simmons, 25, disappeared on the afternoon of Sept. 4, 1940, while working with a government survey crew in the High Uintas. More than 100 searchers mounted a nearly two-month-long effort to find Simmons, but failed to locate him.

The search received significant news coverage at the time, but the story soon fell out of the spotlight. Several of Simmons’ relatives told KSL they recalled hearing vague accounts decades later during family campouts in the Uintas. Those campfire stories didn’t include specifics about where or how Simmons went missing.

“There were little details that were ever talked about,” Simmons’ nephew Ron Loock said. “We knew little, other than that he was lost.”

The story faded further as Simmons’ parents and siblings aged, then passed away. Official records of the search were also lost or discarded.

Lynn Simmons’ story was not mythologized or covered in books, as happened with another unsolved disappearance from the same period, that of Everett Ruess. But Simmons’ story is no less dramatic or perplexing. No physical remains have surfaced in the 84 years since Simmons disappeared, leaving open the question of what happened to him.

KSL, in cooperation with Simmons’ niece Merrilee Petersen, has rediscovered many of the forgotten details by scouring archived news reports, Simmons’ personal letters, and old survey records. These sources have provided the location, circumstances, and story, allowing Simmons to be added to state and national missing persons databases for the first time.

“That’s what we as his family desire, is that he be remembered,” Loock said.

Lynn Simmons life story

Lynn Simmons was born in Payson in 1915. His parents moved to Salt Lake City when he was a boy. Simmons attended East High School, where his father worked as a teacher and coach, and graduated high school in 1933. He went on to attend Westminster College, where he played basketball and tennis and was a sprinter on the track team. Records suggest he later attended the University of Utah, but only briefly. It’s likely Simmons dropped out to seek work during the Great Depression.

At the start of 1939, Simmons married Irita “Rita” Fullmer. The couple welcomed a son, Lawrence, later that year. The young family lived with Simmons’ parents in Salt Lake City.

The following summer, in 1940, Simmons took a job working for a neighbor who was an engineer with the U.S. General Land Office, a precursor to today’s Bureau of Land Management. That man, Ralph Gentry, was conducting what are known as cadastral surveys of public lands, using tools to measure, mark, and map large parcels of federal property.

Survey notes, obtained by KSL from BLM archives, show Simmons served as an “axeman” on Gentry’s survey crew. That was a physically arduous job, involving the hauling of gear, clearing of trees and brush, and construction of stone monuments.

On Aug. 5, 1940, Gentry’s survey party established a base camp along the Hayden Fork of the Bear River, just above its confluence with the Stillwater Fork in the northwestern corner of the Uinta Mountains. That location is today alongside the Mirror Lake Highway, near the turnoff for Gold Hill Road.

The survey crew was assigned to measure boundary lines and subdivisions within a square 6 miles long and 6 miles wide, centered on the Christmas Meadows area. The 36-square-mile parcel extended from near the Whitney Reservoir road in the northwest corner, to Lamotte Peak in the southeast; and from what is today the Hinckley Scout Ranch on the East Fork of the Bear River in the northeast corner, to near Kletting Peak in the southwest.

Lynn Simmons letters to home

Simmons wrote a letter to his wife, Rita Fullmer Simmons, upon arriving at the camp on Aug. 5, 1940.

“Boy, this country up here is nothing but one cliff after another,” Simmons wrote. “I’ll be glad to get out of here, and we haven’t even started to work yet.”

The terrain in the survey area ranged from about 8,600 to 12,600 feet above sea level, with thick pine forest rising to about 11,000 feet. In subsequent letters, Simmons described life in camp and expressed an eagerness to return home to his wife and 8-month-old son. Simmons wrote of frosty mornings, of fast fishing at nearby lakes, and how spooked the party’s horses seemed to be.

“They can probably smell bears,” Simmons wrote. “When you are riding one of them alone, they will go down the trail shying at everything, from stumps to rocks, and sometimes they jump just to try and get rid of you.”

The letters also made it clear Simmons found being separated from his wife and young son difficult. Simmons often talked about his plans to visit home on weekends, when the work schedule allowed. Each letter with Xs and Os, and a request from Simmons to his wife that she kiss their son on his behalf. Simmons wrote the last of these letters home on Aug. 20, 1940.

“I am writing you from fly camp and I don’t know when this letter will be delivered,” Simmons wrote. “We are fourteen miles from the main camp, and we are supposed to stay out here until Labor Day.”

A fly or “spike” camp was a satellite camp away from the survey party’s base camp. Labor Day in 1940 fell on Monday, Sept. 2.

Simmons had previously sent money home to his wife, and asked her to use some of it to purchase him a new pair of boots suited for work in the rugged terrain.

“I want a pair of 8 inch high tops,” Simmons wrote. “Everyone else seems to like those kind so I guess they are alright. … I want you to take them to the shoe shop and have him put some horseshoes on the heels.”

Simmons noted several younger members of the party were planning quit so they could return to school. Summer was coming to an end and cooler weather would soon bring snow, limiting access to the High Uintas. Simmons’ request for new boots, and his willingness to spend hard-earned money for them, was evidence of his intention to continue on with the survey work until weather made it impossible.

“It is really hard work up in here,” Simmons wrote. “All we do is climb up one steep mountain and then down over cliffs usually. And then when we do get down, we find another mountain right in front of us to go up.”

Lynn Simmons last seen

Lynn Simmons and three other members of the survey party visited the summit of Lamotte Peak, near the southeastern corner of their survey area, on Wednesday, Sept. 4, 1940.

Lamotte stands 12,720 feet above sea level, and is the highest point in the vicinity. It rises more than 2,000 vertical feet above the Amethyst Basin to the west and Priord Lake at the headwaters of the East Fork Bear River drainage to the east. The peak is bare of trees, as it is well above timberline.

According to archived newspaper reports, a storm descended while the four surveyors were on the mountain. They began to descend down Lamotte’s north ridge, headed for camp, but Simmons lagged behind. An article in the Ogden Standard-Examiner said the other three surveyors “kept looking back,” and at one point, “they waved and he waved back.”

The three men who were ahead of Simmons lost sight of him soon after they “crossed a knoll,” according to a story in the Wasatch Wave. The three reportedly made their way to a new spike camp, which only one of them knew how to locate. Multiple news reports said this camp was located near a lake at the head of “Boundary Peak.” [sic]

KSL has checked both current and historical maps of the Uinta Mountains and there is no place in the vicinity named “Boundary Peak.” The news articles were almost certainly referring to Boundary Creek, a short tributary of the East Fork of the Bear River that has its headwaters on the northern flank of Lamotte Peak, about two miles from the place Lynn Simmons was last seen. Boundary Creek was located within the survey area and was marked on the map later created by the survey team.

Simmons’ fellow surveyors became concerned when he did not arrive at the camp that evening. The Wasatch Wave reported they “searched all night, keeping big fires burning,” before going to summon help the following morning.

The search for Lynn Simmons

The sheriffs of Summit County, Utah and Uinta County, Wyoming, launched a joint search and rescue mission to locate Lynn Simmons on Thursday, Sept. 5, 1940. The two agencies enlisted help from a variety of sources, including U.S. Forest Service rangers, Utah State Road Commission laborers who were working on construction of the Mirror Lake Highway, Civilian Conservation Corp camp enrollees and Wyoming sheep ranchers.

Inclement weather hampered their initial efforts. Rain turned to snow, dusting the High Uintas with a layer of powder, forcing the searchers to pause their work. When the skies cleared a day or two later, Simmons’ father and younger brother joined the search parties.

The most promising lead emerged about a week into the search when the sheriffs learned of a strange phone call that occurred the morning after he disappeared. An unidentified man called Mann’s Mirror Lake Lodge a bit after 9 a.m. and reportedly told the chalet owner James Mann he was “stranded.”

Mann patched the call through to an operator in Kamas. According to an article in the Salt Lake Tribune, the caller asked the operator “where am I and what time is it?” An article in the Wasatch Wave noted the call had originated from a “telephone on a tree.” Neither Mann nor the Kamas operator considered the call unusual at the time, and only thought to report it after learning of Lynn Simmons’ disappearance.

At the time, the U.S. Forest Service maintained a network of phone lines linking its guard stations in the Uinta Mountains. KSL reviewed Forest Service maps published in 1937 and 1942 to determine the location of those phone lines. The maps showed the Forest Service phone line ran west to east, starting from the Whitney Ranger Station and following the route of the modern Wolverine ATV and Bear River-Smith Fork Trails east to the Hewinta Guard Station.

The Salt Lake Tribune reported the tree phone where the unidentified man called from was located at a sheep camp on the East Fork of the Bear River. That’s northeast of where Simmons was last seen, near the current location of the Hinkley Scout Ranch.

Search organizers expressed doubt that the caller was Lynn Simmons, noting he would’ve been able to make contact with sheep herders who were in the East Fork area at that time. Simmons would’ve also crossed established trails and a dirt road before reaching the tree phone.

In spite of those doubts, searchers focused their efforts along the Forest Service phone line after learning of the call. They followed the phone line east, over Deadman Mountain, into the West Fork Blacks Fork drainage. There, searchers located an abandoned sweater, with matches and raisins in one of the pockets.

Discovery of the sweater was at first heralded as an important clue, but Lynn Simmons’ father told authorities he could not say for sure that it belonged to his son. It remains unclear whether the call from the unidentified man or the sweater are relevant clues, or simply red herrings.

The end of the search

The federal government took a more active role in the search as it stretched into its second week. The Interior Department, the parent agency of the General Land Office, deployed seven of its own investigators. Two of them traveled to Utah from Colorado for the sole purpose of finding Lynn Simmons.

That effort was again hampered by weather. Another significant storm arrived as the search entered week three, forcing the Uinta and Summit County sheriffs to abandon the mission.

The Interior Department investigators were not willing to give up. They returned to the High Uintas in mid-October, five weeks after Simmons disappeared. They assumed Simmons was deceased but intended to keep searching for his body before winter snow erased all hope of finding him. They reportedly dredged beaver ponds in the area of Christmas Meadows, but did not uncover any evidence.

The last-gasp search failed to turn up any new clues regarding Lynn Simmons’ whereabouts. All search efforts came to an end on Oct. 17, 1940. U.S. Interior Secretary Harold Ickes sent Rita Simmons a letter on that date, expressing his regrets.

“You have my deepest sympathy and I hope you will find comfort in the fact that Mr. Simmons lost his life in the service of his Government,” Ickes wrote.

A family story rediscovered

Merrilee Petersen grew up hearing about her uncle Lynn’s disappearance as a campfire story, along with her brother Ron Loock and other members of Lynn Simmons’ extended family.

“But we never really knew where, exactly, or any other details,” Petersen said.

Petersen said her grandparents — Lynn Simmons’ parents — were quiet people who never discussed the loss of their son. Petersen’s mother, Carole — Lynn’s younger sister — was only 14 when Simmons disappeared. As a result, Carole grew up with only a vague knowledge of the story.

When Petersen’s grandparents died in the 1970s, they passed down a box of family history papers to her parents, Carol and Donald Loock.

“And it went straight up into our attic and was forgotten,” Petersen said. “So then when my parents died … we found that box.”

Among the many documents in the box were personal letters Lynn and Rita Simmons exchanged during the summer of 1940, in the weeks leading up to his disappearance. Petersen didn’t at first understand their significance though, as she was still unaware of the time and place her uncle vanished.

“I’d look his name up different places and I never really found him anywhere on the internet,” Petersen said.

It wasn’t until 2020, during the COVID-19 lockdown, that Petersen started a more thorough search through the box of family history documents. She began building a timeline of Simmons’ life, and realized the letters contained valuable details.

“I had dates, I had names, I had what happened, what he was doing day-to-day,” Petersen said.

Petersen wrote a short paragraph summarizing what she’d learned and uploaded it to the genealogy website FamilySearch. KSL came across that summary while looking into the Lynn Simmons cold case in early 2024 and contacted Petersen. KSL provided Petersen with a collection of newspaper clippings, photos, and other records that filled in many gaps in her knowledge of the story, including photos of the precise location where Simmons was last seen on Lamotte Peak’s north ridge.

“It just started this craziness in my head, and I could not put this down for several months,” Petersen said. “It was feverish. I would dream about it.”

Petersen’s research revealed an oversight: Lynn Simmons was not listed as a missing person. The Summit County Sheriff’s Office, in response to a public records request from KSL, acknowledged it could not locate any official reports about the Lynn Simmons case in its archives.

“We decided that one goal we had was to get him on the missing persons list,” Petersen said.

Merrilee Petersen, Ron Loock and several other relatives met with a Summit County investigator in May of 2024. They handed over the documentation they’d gathered. They also provided DNA, in case unidentified human remains are ever located in the vicinity of Lamotte Peak.

As a result, Lynn Simmons was recently added to Utah’s cold case website and the national missing persons database, NamUs.

Lynn Simmons remembered

The most likely scenario to explain Lynn Simmons’ disappearance is that he suffered a fatal injury from a slip and fall while descending from Lamotte Peak, or that he failed to find the survey party’s spike camp and succumbed to hypothermia on the night of Sept. 4, 1940. If either of those hypotheticals are accurate, it would mean Simmons’ remains are still on the mountain.

“It’s an intriguing mystery,” Merrilee Petersen said.

The odds of Lynn Simmons’ remains surfacing now are slim. Even durable materials, like boot or belt leather, would likely have rotted away after 84 years of exposure to sun and snow. But Simmons may have been carrying metal tools, including distinctive survey chains, that could survive the harsh elements.

If such evidence ever arises, it will come too late for those who knew personally Simmons. His wife, Rita Simmons, died in 2001. Their son Lawrence Simmons followed her in death less than a year later, in 2002. But Lynn Simmons’ memory is now carried on by his nieces and nephews, including Merrilee Petersen and Ron Loock, as well as their children and grandchildren.

“We’ve got him in our hearts,” Petersen said. “We know what kind of man he was. We learned his character.”

Several of Lynn Simmons’ relatives visited the High Uintas over Labor Day weekend in 2024, picnicking at a spot with a clear view of Lamotte Peak. They were able to share Lynn Simmons’ story in a new way, honoring the man they’d come to know.

“He was a young man trying to support his family,” Ron Loock said. “He was no different than all of us. We all never know what tomorrow will bring.”