Missoula Notebook

Where is Barbara Bolick?

By Sutton Stokes, 6-18-08

	A 2007 photo of Barbara Bolick.

In a perfect world, it would have been impossible to forget the name of Barbara Bolick, the Corvallis resident who disappeared while hiking near Bear Creek, west of Victor, almost one year ago. In a perfect world, Barbara’s name would have been kept in front of us all this time, because in a perfect world it would have been impossible to get over this kind of mystery. It would have been incomprehensible that a 55-year-old mother of two could end up in the wind like this.

Of course it’s not a perfect world, and people disappear all the time. Unable as I was at first to remember Barbara’s name or the name of the place she disappeared from or any other very specific details from the posters I noticed around town soon after my arrival last August, it was an education to see how little use it is to perform a Google search for “missing woman Montana.” There are a lot of missing people, especially women, including an Anaconda woman who vanished less than a month ago, leaving her car full of groceries parked behind a bar.

As for Barbara Bolick, here is a summary of what was reported in the local media concerning her disappearance. On the morning of July 18, around 9 a.m., Barbara left home for a hike with Jim Ramaker, a friend of her husband’s cousin; the cousin and Ramaker were visiting from California. The group had been up late the night before, and neither the cousin nor Barbara’s husband, Carl, felt like joining the hike.

Before leaving, Barbara told Carl that she and Ramaker were headed for Bear Creek Overlook, a favorite spot of Barbara’s where she often took visitors to show them the view.

According to Ramaker, he and Barbara took the planned hike and stopped at the overlook for a snack. They stayed at the overlook for about a half hour before starting back down. Ramaker says he took a last look at the view while Barbara started walking.

He turned to catch up with her less than a minute later.

Barbara was gone and has never been seen again.

Ramaker walked back down to where a Forest Service crew was doing road construction near the trailhead and asked if the workers had seen Barbara. He and a crew member walked back to Ramaker’s car — still no sign of Barbara. Ramaker says he then walked back up to the overlook; the Forest Service crew saw him return about 90 minutes later, when he reported that he still couldn’t find the missing woman, and so someone called a ranger.

The implausibility of Ramaker’s story is one of the marks in favor of its being the truth. The area around the overlook is described in one news article as “lightly timbered,” the ground covered in shale fragments. Every footstep makes a noise, and there are few hiding places. But if Ramaker had been responsible for Barbara’s disappearance, couldn’t he have come up with a more believable story? Why not say that Barbara had fallen and injured herself, and that she disappeared while he walked back down to get help?

The official position of the Ravalli County Sheriff’s Department is that Ramaker is not a suspect, though a detective named Perry Johnson gave the Missoulian the decidedly ambiguous statement that “until something else happens — we find Barbara or find her body — I think he’s just a witness.”

At the time of the disappearance and for at least several months afterward, investigators were looking for two additional potential witnesses, a pair of young men who passed through the Forest Service work site about an hour before Ramaker first appeared looking for Barbara. The men were driving a Chevy Blazer with Missoula County plates and had a black and white collie with them.

Ramaker says that he and Barbara ran into these men on the trail. If so, they are the only people who can confirm that Barbara was in fact on the mountain that day, because Ramaker’s car was already parked at the trailhead — next to the Chevy Blazer — when the Forest Service crew arrived for work. But if investigators have ever located these two men, I can find no mention of it on-line. Articles also mention a “mountain man” who had been seen in the area, although investigators are not reported as ever actively looking for him.

Barbara was a small woman, about five feet and 115 pounds, and — though she habitually carried a .357 Magnum while hiking — her habit was to keep it in her backpack, where it would have done her no good in an emergency. Still, given the terrain at the overlook, it is hard to imagine that someone was able to subdue Barbara without Ramaker overhearing.

Easier is to imagine Barbara sneaking away and hiding, although if she had decided to leave her husband and start over, why not at least take her wallet and identification, which she had left at home? People do sometimes run away and adopt new identities, but to do so requires not only strong motivation but some very specialized knowledge, neither of which Barbara seems likely to have had.

Perhaps Barbara snuck away as a prank, intending to surprise Ramaker later on the trail or at the car, only to meet with some misadventure along the way. I haven’t spoken to anyone who knew her, so I can’t say if this would have been in character. My guess from reading the articles about her disappearance is that it would not have been.

So we are left to wonder what happened that day and whether Barbara is alive or dead. Her story is a reminder that no one is promised tomorrow and that you never know when goodbye means goodbye.

For more like this, read the rest of the Missoula Notebook.

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