Questions remain in death of Dustin Self

BEND, Ore. (AP) - What exactly drove an Oklahoma teenager to travel to Oregon, leave his truck and survival gear behind and disappear on Steens Mountain will remain a mystery.

But at least friends and family of Dustin Self know what happened to the 19-year-old after he was last seen in March 2013.

A hunter, trying to cut through an aspen thicket to pursue a deer, found Self's remains Oct. 7 on a remote section of the mountain southwest of Burns. His remains showed the young man had hunkered down in the trees and stripped his clothes before he died. The find ended the hope his parents held that Self had slipped "off the grid" and would someday reach out to them again.

"It is comforting to have some closure to it," Victor Self, Dustin's 50-year-old father in Piedmont, Oklahoma, said.

More than 1,500 miles from his home in the Oklahoma City suburb, Self disappeared on March 16, 2013. His last contact that day was a phone call to his ex-girlfriend, during which he described being lost in the Oregon outback. The day before, a gas station worker in Fields, a tiny Oregon town 22 miles north of Nevada, fueled up Self's truck.

For a month there was no trace of Self. Then the foreman of a ranch near Steens Mountain came across his two-wheel-drive 1999 Toyota Tacoma, hanging off an embankment along a rarely used road passing through Stonehouse Canyon on the east flank of the massive, fault block mountain.

As soon as Jeffrey Neal, 55, of John Day, reported he had found human remains near Riddle Creek on Steens Mountain, about 9 miles from where the truck was located, Harney County Sheriff David Glerup said he was sure they belonged to Self.

"We had only one missing person up there," he said.

Steens Mountain is remote, and the particular corner where Neal found Self is rarely, if ever, visited.

"It was a miracle that anyone found him where he was at," said Darrell Williams, president of Harney County Search and Rescue. "He was 100 yards from a little two-track road."

Hunting alone, Neal had spotted a deer and was trying to sneak up on it, Williams said. He cut through a grove of 8-foot quaking aspens. First he found a coat, then a pair of pants and then a leg bone. Neal called the sheriff's office .

Glerup responded to the call with a deputy, and in dwindling daylight, found more remains in the grove as well as items that helped determine it was probably Self. The coat contained a Toyota key connected to a skull key chain, a cellphone and cash, according to a Harney County sheriff's report. As nightfall came, they called off the search until the next day.

Victor Self confirmed with the sheriff's office that the key chain matched his son's, according to the report. The next day's search of the 50-by-100-yard grove yielded more items, including Dustin Self's Oklahoma driver's license and a credit card in his name.

Williams said the recovery team did not find a tent or subzero sleeping bag Self was thought to have with him when he left his truck, with his GPS and laptop, behind. There was no indication of him setting up camp.

"He'd crawled into a little kind of hole in the brush and that's where he died and his body had decomposed," Williams said.

Williams said Self probably suffered from hypothermia. "As far as we could tell he had no clothes on," Williams said.

A low body temperature can affect someone's brain function, even making them think they are very hot when they are actually cold. In December 2006 James Kim, a San Francisco writer, also died of hypothermia after he, his wife and two children became lost in the mountains of Southern Oregon. Williams said Kim was also found with his clothes off.

The Oregon State Medical Examiner's Office listed Self's cause of death as exposure, said Dr. Karen Gunson, the state medical examiner. She said he probably suffered from hypothermia and his death appeared accidental.

"There is no evidence that he committed suicide," she said. "There is no evidence of any injuries to his bones."

She said the office was not able to determine exactly when Self died. "I mean sometime after he was last seen that is as good as we can do," Gunson said. "There is no way to tell with the remains that we have."

Victor Self says he still has a million questions about his son's disappearance.

"I can't figure out what happened," he said. "There's no logical reason why he would have gone up the mountain. There's no logical reason why he didn't use his vehicle for shelter or find shelter down lower. He knew the first rule of survival is shelter."

Until the team found Dustin Self's personal items, his father still hoped he had made it off Steens Mountain and had stayed out of contact. "We had a hard time believing it was him until they identified his clothing and other things," Self said.

Information from his son's cell provider that it appeared someone was checking his voice mail after his disappearance fueled this hope, but turned out to be a false lead.

While Self was missing, his parents hired a private investigator from Portland, hoping to find new clues to his whereabouts, and even traveled to the Willamette Valley themselves in February. They talked with homeless young people close to the age of their son.

"We spent basically 18 hours a day around them, trying to see if anybody had seen him," he said. "We went to Portland, Salem."

They found no trace of Dustin Self.

When Self set out on his trip to Oregon he stayed in close touch with Sarah Baugh Tyler, his ex-girlfriend. Earlier stories about Self's disappearance, and even the Harney County sheriff's report list his last contact as a text with his ex-girlfriend, but Baugh Tyler, 19 and living in Austin, Texas, said the last she heard from him was a phone conversation.

The phone call came at 6:15 p.m. the day he would go missing, as she was preparing to board a 7 p.m. flight from Florida, where she had gone to Disney World with her family.

"He was getting worse and worse," Baugh Tyler said. "His conversations were getting weirder and weirder so I went into the bathroom to talk to him so my parents couldn't overhear what he was saying or anything like that."

She said he told her he had been driving around a town for five hours and could not figure out how to get out.

"He . said there were devil worshippers at every gas station that he stopped at to get help and that all the plants and animals were dead everywhere and he was trying to bring them back to life," Baugh Tyler said. "He was really, really upset and really scared. And then the line went dead."

She later found out that Self had not been in a town, rather in a remote section of Oregon. Part of Self's motivation to travel to Oregon was his curiosity about a church in the state that uses hallucinogenic mushroom tea as sacrament, but Baugh Tyler does not think what he described seeing resulted from illegal drugs. Throughout their relationship and friendship - they still talked every day - she said she saw Self slip into paranoia and that he sometimes abused prescription drugs designed to combat attention deficit disorder.

Before he left, Self watched the movie "Into the Wild," based on the true story of a young man who planned to live off the land in Alaska but died. But Baugh Tyler said Self's mission came more from the 2010 David Icke book "Human Race Get Off Your Knees," in which the author outlines conspiracy theories about government and society.

The book became a source of big fights between Self and Baugh Tyler. Building on what he read in the book, Self wanted to find a place off the grid where government could not track him, Baugh Tyler said. He decided to go to Oregon.

"He said he would only be gone for two years and that when he came back we would try again (to have a relationship)," Baugh Tyler said, "but I didn't think that he would really ever come back."

After sharing a photo of his son from February 2013, Victor Self said how he does not look like a drug user and said his son was not taking prescription drugs. Self said he had talked to his son about the Icke book but did not think it influenced his decisions. He also thinks reports about Dustin Self's interest in "Into the Wild" were overblown.

"I don't think that was his motivation," he said. "I think he was just out on a 19-year-old adventure. I don't think he intended to live off the land."

Victor Self said his family has yet to have a memorial service for his son. He hopes to do so early next year. And this coming spring he and some of Dustin Self's other relatives hope to visit Steens Mountain, trying to understand more what happened to him.

Reflecting on his son's disappearance, Victor Self said it appears his GPS may have lead him astray and if he had had a paper map, it might may have shown him how rugged the mountain was. He also wishes his son had taken a GPS messenger he tried to give him before he left. The device could send out a request for help and give his location with one push of a panic button.

While from the flatlands of Oklahoma, Dustin Self had camped in mountains like Steens Mountain in New Mexico, his father said. "We four-wheel as a family a lot," Self said. "And he's been in a lot worse positions than he was up there."

Self and Baugh Tyler are left to grieve and wonder about the unknowns. "He was a really intelligent kid," Self said. ". He would have thought things through before he just took off."

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Information from: The Bulletin, http://www.bendbulletin.com