These Hunters' Deaths Hit Me Hard

Search and rescue volunteers are briefed before heading out.
(Conejos County Sheriff's Office)

The search for two missing bowhunters, Andrew Porter and Ian Stesko this past week in southwest Colorado really got under my skin. Obviously I did not know them. I have have messed around on the upper Los Pinos River drainage just a little, but they went in farther. 

Their bodies were discovered on September 18, 2025, and on the 22nd the Conejos County coroner declared that they had been killed by a lightning strike.

The bodies were found seven days after families of the hunters reported Porter and Stesko missing to Costilla County authorities on Sept. 11. Martin said the two hunters, both 25, were the first to be killed by lightning in the county that he’s investigated in his 20 years as coroner. 

The bodies were in good condition when Colorado Search and Rescue volunteers found them on Sept. 18, Martin said. They were discovered two miles from the Rio De Los Pinos trailhead on the Colorado side of the San Juan Wilderness area, according to Conejos County Sheriff Garth Crowther. 

Martin said the two hunters were in camouflage laying [sic] down in a lightly wooded area.

At first I wondered, as I am sure others did too, if they had succumbed to hypothermia. But what I read suggested that they had the latest high-tech gear and should be have been pretty well prepared for changing weather — which it was.

In my early 20s, I would have gone in with blue jeans with an Army-surplus poncho. I lucked out. And I did several backpack deer hunts, not quite at that altitude, but still in the mountains. My friend Ed and I picked one NW Colorado location off the map, and it turned out to be a reliably good one

"Ca-clunk Ca-clunk," he chanted as we hiked in "It's the deer factory!"  (That is what some wildlife biologists called the area.)

One year my dad came. He was the man who taught me backpacking, but he was now in his mid-sixties and had been living at sea level, so the packing in nearly flattened him. But once he recovered, he assessed the area and directed us: "This evening, you sit over there. You go up there higher." 

Bang. Bang.

Another year I was alone, and it snowed, about collapsing my cheap-o tent. But I walked out with meat.

The last time, M. was with me, not hunting herself, but just for the trip. I was not seeing the deer, and again, the weather was moving in. Hiking out in a couple inches of snow, coming down through an aspen grove, I saw a buck mule up ahead, slipping through the gray-white trunks. I leaned into one to get the pack's weight off my shoulders and brought up the Mauser. 

Still in the snow, we had to hike out, unload the packs and go back in for the meat. 

That reminded me of another of Ed's sayings, as we carried out meat an earlier year: "This is what primitive people do -- just carrying stuff from one place to another."

No doubt that is what Andrew and Ian had in mind to do.