Kayaker Disappeared on Arkansas River, 2 Years Later His GoPro Was Found Underground – News

“Jesus, how’d he get past the sensors?”

Marcus ran for nearly 10 minutes, the camera bouncing with each step, his breathing becoming increasingly labored as he navigated the complex cave system by memory and failing light. Several times he took wrong turns, ending up in dead-end chambers or passages that looped back toward the sounds of pursuit. His amateur knowledge of cave navigation, sufficient for simple exploration, proved inadequate for escape under pressure.

Finally, exhausted and with his headlamp dying completely, Marcus took refuge in a narrow side passage barely wide enough for his shoulders. The GoPro continued recording as he tried to control his breathing, listening to his pursuers search nearby chambers.

“He’s got to be close,” came a voice from somewhere to his left. “Battery’s probably dead by now. He can’t see shit.”

“Check every side passage,” Briggs ordered. “We find him tonight or this whole operation is fucked.”

Marcus waited in the darkness for what the time stamp showed to be 47 minutes before moving again.

When he finally emerged from the side passage, he moved more carefully, feeling along walls with his hands, using the camera’s small LCD screen as a source of dim light. For the next 3 hours, the footage documented Marcus’s increasingly desperate attempts to navigate the cave system in near total darkness. He found passages he had explored earlier, recognized chambers by their acoustic properties, and slowly began to build a mental map of the underground maze.

But his pursuers knew the cave far better than he did.

Around hour 14, as Marcus felt his way along what he hoped was a passage leading toward the entrance, his camera’s audio picked up the sound of someone breathing directly ahead of him.

“End of the line, photographer,” Briggs said.

What happened next occurred largely in darkness.

Marcus’s camera recorded the sounds: a brief struggle, voices giving orders, footsteps on stone. The visual record showed only brief flashes of light from other people’s equipment, disorienting glimpses of cave walls and faces. The last clear image on the recording was of Marcus’s own face illuminated by someone else’s flashlight as they removed the GoPro from his helmet. He was still alive, still conscious, but restrained with what appeared to be zip ties around his wrists