A 37-year-old Washington County man who went missing in May was found dead Wednesday at the bottom of a ravine near Mount St. Helens, officials announced.
In June, the Washington County Sheriff’s Office asked the public for help locating Benjamin “Ben” Curtis Andersen. In the original release, deputies said Andersen’s GPS last pinged him at NFD Road 25 near Mount St. Helens on May 18.
The search team found Andersen’s body with his car near the national forest road in Skamania County where he was last traced, deputies said. The FBI Criminal Investigations Division and U.S. Forest Service assisted the sheriff’s office with the search
The 37-year-old was believed to have been training for the Bigfoot 200, a grueling 200-plus-mile ultramarathon through Washington state’s Cascade mountain range that’s held in August.
The race’s organizers said that runners on the punishing route climb a cumulative 45,563 feet of elevation gain over the course of the route, which frequently results in hallucinations from exhaustion and sleep deprivation.
The Washington County Sheriff’s Office has not released the cause of Andersen’s death and said Skamania County Search and Rescue is helping to recover the body.
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