The statistics that are recorded also only reference those incidents that clearly occur within delineated national park, forest, or wilderness areas, so they don’t include crimes that occur in forests and deserts just outside of park borders, nor do they account for crimes in places like state parks, state forests, or locally conserved land. They also don’t include the people who disappear from parks without a trace. Most of these cases fly under the radar—so much so, in fact, that the NPS can’t even say for sure how many people have gone missing on its eighty-four million acres of public
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