Imagine this: A stormy summer night in the heart of the American West, where thunder cracks like a bullwhip and rain lashes the earth like an unforgiving spur. A young man, fueled by frustration and a belly full of beer, storms away from a family gathering, his boots kicking up dust on a lonely road. He glances at his phone, taps out a cryptic message, and vanishes into the void. For six agonizing years, his loved ones cling to fading hope, plastering his face on billboards, chasing shadows across state lines, and begging the windswept plains for answers. Then, in a twist straight out of a frontier ghost story, hikers stumble upon bones at the base of a sheer cliff – and the mystery unravels. Or does it?

On October 10, 2025, beneath the crumbling red sandstone spires of Scotts Bluff National Monument, a pair of avid trailblazers made a discovery that ripped open old wounds and ignited fresh suspicions. Scattered skeletal remains, picked clean by scavengers and weathered by relentless prairie gales, lay hidden in a remote crevice some 290 feet below the monument’s jagged rim. Personal effects – a weathered wallet, a rodeo buckle etched with the initials “C.L.E.,” and fragments of clothing stiff with six years of dust – told a tale of tragedy. DNA tests, rushed through labs in Texas and Nebraska, confirmed the unthinkable: These were the bones of Chance Leslie Englebert, the 25-year-old rodeo phenom who had evaporated into thin air on July 6, 2019.

The official verdict? Accidental death by catastrophic fall. A “pattern of blunt force trauma most consistent with a rapid deceleration event,” as the Douglas County Coroner so clinically put it – in plain English, a plummet from heights ranging from 130 to 290 feet that turned a vibrant life into a shattered heap. But as the sun sets over the bluffs that have stood sentinel for millennia, Chance’s family and a cadre of skeptical locals aren’t buying the clean closure. “This is never going to be closure for us,” his mother, Dawn Englebert, told investigators in a voice laced with six years of hollowed-out grief. How does a headstrong cowboy, hell-bent on hitchhiking home through a biblical downpour, end up tumbling off a sheer drop-off that’s not even on his mapped route? Was it a tragic misstep in the dark… or a push from the shadows?

To unravel this saga, we must ride back through the dust-choked trails of Chance’s life – a story as rugged and untamed as the Wyoming plains he called home. Born on December 2, 1993, in the tiny ranching town of Moorcroft, Wyoming (population: barely 1,000), Chance was the epitome of Western grit. With his easy grin, tousled brown hair, and a build honed by years of wrestling steers, he was the kind of guy who could charm a crowd at a county fair or outride a storm on horseback. Rodeo wasn’t just a hobby; it was his bloodline. His grandfather had been a circuit champion, and Chance followed suit, dominating bareback bronc events across the Dakotas and Nebraska by his early 20s. “He lived for that rush,” his childhood friend Matt Miller recalls, his voice catching over a crackling phone line from his ranch in Sundance, Wyoming. “The crowd roaring, the dirt flying – Chance was alive out there. Untouchable.”

But life off the arena was a different beast. At 25, Chance was navigating the choppy waters of young adulthood. He’d married his high school sweetheart, Baylee, in a simple ceremony under the Big Sky, and their son, born just months before his disappearance, was the light of his world. “He’d FaceTime me every night, cooing at that baby like it was the only thing that mattered,” Dawn says, flipping through faded photos in her cozy living room in Spearfish, South Dakota, where the family relocated after Chance’s vanishing act upended their world. Work was steady but brutal – a coal mine gig in the Powder River Basin that paid the bills but gnawed at his soul. Then, in early July 2019, the axe fell: layoffs hit hard amid a slumping energy market. Chance landed a new job at a construction firm, a silver lining he texted to friends with fist-bump emojis. “Finally catching a break,” he wrote. Little did he know, that break would be his last.

The Fourth of July weekend was meant to be a reset – a family escape to Gering, Nebraska, about 100 miles southeast of Scottsbluff, where Baylee’s relatives hosted barbecues and golf outings under the endless blue. Chance, ever the family man, tagged along with Baylee, their infant son, and a gaggle of in-laws. But paradise cracked on July 6, a muggy Saturday that started with nine holes at the local course. Beers flowed freely – light lagers to beat the heat – and banter turned barbed. Someone, accounts vary, cracked a joke about Chance’s fresh unemployment, a casual dig that landed like a boot to the gut. “It wasn’t malicious, but to a guy down on his luck, it stung,” Miller says. Words escalated into shouts. Chance, red-faced and fuming, grabbed his phone and bolted. “I’m walking home,” he snapped to Baylee, who pleaded with him to stay. Home meant Moorcroft – a 200-mile trek across barren highways and badlands. Undeterred, he texted her: “I’m heading to Torrington,” a closer waypoint about 35 miles north, where he figured he’d thumb a ride.

Surveillance cameras at a Sinclair gas station in Terrytown – a gritty hamlet just a mile and a half from the in-laws’ doorstep – captured his final strides around 8:45 p.m. Hoodie zipped against the gathering storm, Chance trudged along Highway 26, head bowed to his glowing screen. Rain began to pelt, thunder rumbling like an approaching stampede. At one point, he paused, squinted at his phone – likely Google Maps, piecing together a pedestrian route – and veered sharply right, vanishing into the gloaming. Friends later theorized he was rerouting toward a truck stop for a better hitchhiking shot. Then, at 9:08 p.m., his phone pinged one last time: a garbled text to Dawn, a string of nonsensical letters trailed by a lone smiley face. “Mom? What the hell does this mean?” she texted back, heart pounding. No reply. The signal died in the deluge, and so did the trail.

Panic set in by midnight. Baylee, frantic, rallied the family for a frantic sweep of nearby roads. By dawn on July 7, law enforcement swarmed: Gering Police, Scotts Bluff County Sheriff’s Office, Nebraska State Patrol – a veritable posse of badges and badges-to-be. Chance’s truck, parked at the in-laws’, held clues: his wallet, keys, and phone charger untouched. But his cell’s last ping? A desolate spot near the North Platte River, miles from any logical path. “We thought abduction at first,” Detective Matt Holcomb of Gering PD later confided in a rare interview. “A guy that built, that pissed off – easy target for opportunists.”

What followed was a six-year odyssey of desperation, a search that scorched the earth and strained souls. The first week was frenzy: Helicopters thumped overhead, divers dragged the river’s muddy depths, cadaver dogs sniffed scrub brush from dawn till dusk. Volunteers – ranchers in Stetsons, church groups with walkie-talkies – combed 50 square miles, their calls of “Chance! Chance Englebert!” echoing off the bluffs like prayers unanswered. Tips flooded in: A trucker swore he saw a hitchhiker matching Chance’s description thumbing near Laramie; a casino bartender in Deadwood claimed a lookalike cashed a traveler’s check. Each lead was a lifeline, chased with search warrants for phone records, social media deep-dives, and financial traces. Polygraphs for family, friends, even distant acquaintances. Nothing stuck.

Agencies piled on like riders in a relay: Local outfits like Scottsbluff Fire Department and Banner County CERT/SAR; state heavyweights including Nebraska Game and Parks; feds from the FBI and National Park Service. Out-of-staters joined the fray – K-9 teams from Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico; sheriffs from Fall River and Crook Counties. NamUs, the national missing persons database, blasted Chance’s mug – that million-dollar smile – across digital wanted posters. Rewards swelled: $50,000 from anonymous donors, ballooning to $200,000 ponied up by his grandmother, Linda Kluender, a steel-willed matriarch who bankrolled a billboard on Highway 26 screaming, “Have You Seen Chance? $200,000 Reward.” It loomed like a ghost over the very road he’d last walked, its message fading as hope did.

For Dawn, the void was visceral. “Every morning, I’d wake up and forget for a split second – then it hit like a freight train,” she says, her eyes – the same piercing blue as Chance’s – misting over a cup of black coffee in her Spearfish kitchen. Photos line the walls: Chance at 5, gap-toothed on a pony; at 18, hoisting a trophy under arena lights; at 24, cradling his newborn son with a tenderness that belied his roughneck exterior. Baylee, shattered, poured her grief into advocacy, co-founding a Wyoming missing persons nonprofit. But rumors festered like open wounds – whispers of marital strife, in-law feuds, even cartel ties (debunked early). “People love a villain,” Dawn sighs. “They pinned it on Baylee at first. Broke my heart – she’s family.”

Matt Miller, Chance’s rodeo running mate, became a one-man tip line, fielding calls at all hours. “He’d light up a room, man. Jokes, stories, that laugh like thunder. Gone? It don’t compute.” Miller drove the four hours from Sundance that fateful night but arrived too late, kicking himself for the party that kept him away. “If I’d been there…” The guilt gnawed, fueling his role as the family’s unofficial sleuth, cross-referencing maps and weather reports obsessively.

Years blurred into a haze of false dawns. In 2020, a bleached skull surfaced in the Platte – not his. 2022 brought a “credible” sighting in Montana – a hoax. By 2023, the $200,000 reward lapsed on what would have been Chance’s 30th birthday, a milestone marked by a candlelit vigil at the Moorcroft rodeo grounds, where friends released lanterns into the starry sky. “We’re not giving up,” Baylee vowed then, her voice steel amid sobs. But privately, cracks showed. Divorce filings surfaced in 2021 (later withdrawn), and Baylee relocated to Colorado with their son, now 6, seeking normalcy in the shadow of abnormality.

Then, autumn 2025: A crisp October morning, goldenrod blooming defiant against the chill. Two hikers – avid souls from Alliance, Nebraska – veered off the Saddle Rock Trail, drawn by a raven’s caw to a forbidden ledge. What they found froze the blood: Disarticulated bones, a skull with a cowboy hat brim still tangled in hair roots, scattered like forgotten relics. “It was like the earth had swallowed him whole and spat out the evidence,” one hiker, anonymous for privacy, told local reporters, her hands trembling. The site? A vertiginous north-face drop-off, far from groomed paths – a crumbly sandstone shear plummeting into a thorn-choked ravine. Not a hiker’s haven, but a daredevil’s doom.

Park rangers cordoned the scene by noon. FBI forensics swooped in, their kits gleaming under the sun. Teeth matched dental records from Chance’s last checkup; DNA from the University of Nebraska Medical Center sealed it: 99.9% match. The coroner’s report, released November 26, painted a grim canvas: Skull fractures radiating like spiderwebs, vertebrae pulverized, limbs akimbo in eternal freefall. No defensive wounds, no foreign DNA – just the brutal math of gravity’s embrace. “Cerebral edema with herniation,” pathologists noted, brain swelling from the impact’s shockwave. Gering PD and the Scotts Bluff County Attorney’s Office issued a joint statement: “After a full investigation, there is no evidence that the death of Chance Englebert was anything other than accidental.”

Relief washed over some, but for Dawn, it was a bitter draught. “They say he chose that trail as a shortcut to Torrington,” she scoffs, poring over topo maps in her dining room, pins marking the improbable 8-mile gauntlet from the gas station to the bluff. “In pitch black? Pouring rain? That path’s a goat track on a good day – steep switchbacks, no signage, thick with cholla cactus. Chance was street-smart, not suicidal.” Detective Holcomb, she says, assured her the case was “closed, with minor follow-ups,” but her maternal instinct screams otherwise. “Someone drove him there. Why else no footprints on the access road? No tire treads matching his truck?”

She’s not alone in the doubt. Bridget Lehman, a local trailblazer dubbed “The Cadillac Cowgirl 308” for her vintage rides and ironclad resolve, retraced the route herself last week. “Steep as a bronc’s buck, and that’s in daylight,” she reports, her sun-leathered face creasing in disbelief. “He’d have needed a Sherpa and a prayer to navigate that in a storm. No way – this smells like foul play.” Kelly Mumm, a Gering lifer who’s fished every inch of the Platte, chimes in: “North side of the monument? You’d cross a 15-foot canal, bushwhack through mesquite thicker than my ex’s grudges. Longest damn way to Torrington imaginable.” Even the argument looms large – that offhand job jab, the in-laws’ pleas to stay. “Tensions were high,” Miller admits. “But murder? Over golf trash-talk? Nah. Still… questions.”

Online, the armchair forensics explode. Reddit’s r/UnresolvedMysteries, where Chance’s case simmered unsolved since 2020, erupts with 5,000 new comments: “Foul play 100% – who drops 290 feet ‘accidentally’?” TikTok sleuths overlay his last video stills with Google Earth flyovers, tallying improbabilities. #JusticeForChance trends, mingling memorial tributes with conspiracy threads. Baylee, silent publicly, faces the brunt; Dawn’s plea rings clear: “Leave Baylee and her family alone. The evil drama – it’s salt in the wound.”

Broader ripples stir. Scotts Bluff, a UNESCO hopeful for its Oregon Trail legacy, grapples with safety shadows. “We’ve upped signage, added glow-markers on rims,” Park Superintendent admits off-record. Missing persons stats nationwide – 600,000 reported yearly, per NamUs – underscore the abyss: 40% never found, accidents the quiet killer in wild spaces. For rodeo folk, Chance’s ghost haunts arenas; a Moorcroft memorial ride this weekend draws 500, chaps snapping in salute.

As winter whispers over the badlands, Dawn clings to rituals: Chance’s favorite Stetson on the mantel, his son’s first words (“Dada rodeo!”) etched in her heart. “He laid in Nebraska six years too long,” she murmurs, gazing east where bluffs pierce the horizon like accusatory fingers. “But his spirit? That’s in the wind, free as a mustang.” Closure? Perhaps for the badges. For the heart, it’s a cliffhanger – a fall that explains the how, but taunts with the why. Was Chance a victim of his own haste, or a pawn in a darker game? The monument keeps its secrets, but one mother’s roar demands: Who pushed him over the edge?

In the end, Chance Englebert’s story isn’t just bones and bluffs; it’s a raw hymn to resilience, the fragility of family, and the West’s wild indifference. Six years on, the search evolves – not for a body, but for truth. And in Gering’s dusty streets, eyes lift warily to the cliffs, wondering: What’s buried next?