Three badly decomposed bodies have been found in and around a tent in the rugged Colorado wilderness.
A hiker came across a tent with a body outside of it in the Rocky Mountains of central Colorado on Sunday, Gunnison County Undersheriff Josh Ashe told USA TODAY on Wednesday.
The hiker reported the find to authorities, and the sheriff’s office found two other bodies inside the zipped-up tent the next day, Ashe said, adding that they appeared to have been dead “for a substantial period of time.”
There were no signs that a crime or a murder-suicide had occurred. An attack by an animal is unlikely because of how the two were zipped up in the tent. There is no known risk to others in the area related to the deaths, Ashe said.
Investigators hope that autopsies will help them determine what happened.
It could be that the trio got lost in the area in the fall and succumbed to the elements or starvation as winter arrived. The area experiences subfreezing temperatures and extremely deep snow.
Their tent was located in a secluded, heavily wooded spot about 350 yards from a campground that sits alongside a winding, dirt road. The nearest town to the Gold Creek Campground is the sparsely populated Ohio City, about 6.5 miles away.
“It looked to me that they set up camp there and wanted to be there and unfortunately, tragic events occurred,” Ashe said. “How they ended up there, why they chose that location, that’s still something we’re trying to decipher.”
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He said there are “lots of environmental factors when you’re camping in the wilderness in a place with a harsh environment such as Gunnison County, Colorado.”
“There are a lot of different variable outcomes,” Ashe shared. “There could be starvation, hypothermia, infection.”
The area has some popular hikes, including one that starts at the campground and ends 5 miles away at an alpine lake around 11,800 feet in elevation. The campground sits at an elevation just above 10,000 feet.
The names of the three people have not been released.