Jon Cicarelli still remembers standing on the ridge at night somewhere in the mountains outside of Laramie, Wyoming, in the summer of 2009. His longtime riding buddy Nash Quinn was standing next to him, and they were studying the landscape, trying to figure out what to do. They’d become disoriented on their mountain bikes and were now marooned with no headlamps or GPS and no idea how to get back to Laramie, where they were undergraduate students at the University of Wyoming. Clouds smothered the stars, but they had one way to orient themselves: Off in the distance they could see clusters of lights that could only be the cities of Cheyenne and Laramie.
Getting lost was sort of the point. The two men had met through a mutual friend the previous summer on a fishing trip in the Snowy Range Mountains, west of Laramie. They connected instantly, in part because they were both approaching their mid 20s, which made them older than the typical undergrads. Quinn had done a tour in the military, returned intact from Iraq, and was close to earning the first of two bachelor’s degrees on the GI Bill; Cicarelli had returned to school for a second degree after a stint in AmeriCorps. But even more than that, they shared a passion for testing their mountain biking skills, seeking out Wyoming’s most challenging trails.
Most often they headed to Happy Jack Recreation Area or Curt Gowdy State Park to bomb along the extensive cross-country system. But on days they had more time, they headed out on epic, aimless, all-day adventures like the one that led to being stranded in the dark that night. They’d ride into Medicine Bow National Forest, pedaling as far north as they could, picking random routes that sometimes dumped them out onto private land. They’d ride past century-old shepherd cabins on dirt roads and singletrack and sometimes no trail at all, just to see where they could go; that far from town, there are few fences or boundary markers.
This wasn’t the first time they’d ended up lost high in the mountains after sunset, but this was perhaps the knottiest situation they’d pedaled their way into. Staring into the void, they made the only call that made sense. “We ultimately decided that the dimmer light pollution was probably Laramie, so we’re gonna go that way,” Cicarelli remembers.
Wending their way down through sagebrush, they used whatever moonlight leaked through the cloud cover. They rode through an elk herd, the giant animals bugling back and forth. The outing could have gone sideways in any number of problematic ways; those mountains are notoriously unforgiving. But they clattered triumphantly home around midnight, nearly out of water and exhausted. “It was kind of exciting,” Cicarelli recalls; after that, they started calling those rides “bike safaris.” Instead of turning into a search-and-rescue debacle, the adventure served as proof of their invincibility and drew them even closer.
Cicarelli thinks back often on that trip—about how they were “young and dumb,” he says with a laugh. He thinks about how little time he has for that kind of thing now—he grew up, got married, landed a job, had a family. Cicarelli still rides hard when he can, which isn’t often enough, but rarely takes the same kind of chances. But at age 39, Quinn was riding with the same palpable hunger for adventure. The older he got, in fact, the more he seemed driven to revisit on a bike whatever it was they felt that night, when it wasn’t clear how or even if they’d get home.
It was a thoroughly unremarkable exchange, one of hundreds Doug Russell has initiated as head of UW’s Department of Visual Arts. At 8:47 a.m. on July 8, 2024, he emailed Nash Quinn, the visiting assistant professor heading up the metalsmithing program, to tell him a package had arrived for him. Quinn acknowledged the message at 5:35 p.m.
The two men had known each other since Quinn’s time as an undergrad at UW more than a decade earlier. He’d gotten his BFA in studio art in 2012—the second degree Quinn earned at UW—then headed east to graduate school before rapidly attaining success as a metalsmith.
Russell was thrilled when the department hired Quinn in 2023. There was an ease to their rapport, and he thought nothing of the email exchange until 12 days later, when the organizer of a workshop in Arizona reached out. Quinn was slated to teach that month, but no one had been able to reach him about travel plans, and could Russell help locate him? Such lapses weren’t unexpected at that time of year; summer was when professors did research, or residencies, or plunked down on the beach. Furthermore, Quinn sometimes dropped out of touch for brief periods, even with friends. Still, Russell “sent a barrage of things,” he says—a text, an email, messages on social media.
There was no reply, and Russell noticed Quinn hadn’t left a digital breadcrumb on social media since logging into WhatsApp on July 8, the same day they’d emailed. Unsettled, Russell asked the police to do a wellness check, but Quinn had recently moved to a new apartment in Laramie, and the university didn’t have his new address. Russell then reached out to their colleagues, along with Quinn’s mother and sister and some friends, to answer what had become an increasingly pressing question: Had anyone heard from Nash lately?
No one had—and his failure to reply to the workshop organizers was worrisome and out of character. He could be socially distant, but he was always on point with professional communications. When the police finally visited his new address, they found Quinn’s car parked near his apartment; his wallet and phone were inside. Only three of his possessions were missing: his cycling shoes, his helmet, and his mountain bike.
It’s not hard to connect the dots on Quinn’s love of bikes and adventure. His father, Eddie Quinn, was the gardener and handyman on a 4,000-acre ranch at the mouth of Goose Canyon, in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains. The ranch was hard up against Bighorn National Forest, home to mountain lions and moose. Nash and his older sister, Tess, were “free-range kids,” says their mother, Liz Quinn. “They walked out the door,” she recalls, “and it was as close to living in the wilderness as you could get and still have electricity.”
Nash was a child of unusual focus and maturity; Liz says the best gift she ever gave him was modeling clay, which he molded into intricate sculptures. He didn’t like attention, so she and her husband would sneak into his room to look at his creations. “He was like a little da Vinci,” she says, “sketching things out, trying to figure out how the world was working.” By the time he was 3, he would sit still for hours, drawing or building.
Before they’d had children, Eddie and Liz had tackled some ambitious bike tours; once the kids were old enough, they bought tandems with attachments to accommodate a child. On trips with long climbs, like on Canada’s Icefield Parkway, Liz would call back for extra power. “They had to help us out; we were loaded down with panniers,” she says. “They were good troopers on the back of those bikes.”
They rode in this fashion in Hawaii and across Vancouver Island and to the Grand Canyon, where a spring blizzard surprised them; lacking gloves, they wore socks on their hands. “People I worked with used to ask us what we were going to do to our kids this year for vacation,” she says, laughing.
But Nash loved it; during one trek he sculpted a tandem bike out of gum wrappers; another time, after a stop at a diner, he taped a restaurant creamer container to spokes to see if he could make butter (it worked). It was the beginning of an enduring passion. During a visit with his mother in Montana as an adult, he rode 30 miles on a singlespeed in flip-flops. On another ride, she seemed to be climbing with less effort than usual, even in her easiest gear. She looked back and saw that Nash was pushing her frame along using a forked stick.
After a stint in Iraq, Quinn arrived at UW steel-cable lean at 5-foot-11 and 165 pounds. He entertained friends with a dry but raunchy sense of humor, grew his blond hair nearly down to his shoulders, and shredded drops and technical terrain on a mountain bike. No matter how hard Cicarelli rode, Quinn—often wearing soccer shorts and a T-shirt—always surged ahead, then waited at trail junctions. “He couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the latest bike, or bike geometry, or carbon fiber or anything like that,” Cicarelli says. “He wasn’t doing it to be ironic and cool; that’s how he was hardwired.” Quinn also had a singlespeed Bianchi commuter, which he pedaled everywhere, refusing to drive even during the notoriously fierce Wyoming winters.
When Quinn was finishing a psychology degree, a friend saw his drawings and suggested he stop by the visual arts department. He took some introductory classes and something clicked. Ashley Hope Carlisle, who teaches sculpture, had Quinn in a cast-form class and soon found he had both a wicked sense of humor and preternatural talent. On the first day, students were given clay and taught how to warm it up using their hands. After class, Carlisle noticed a tiny sculpture where Quinn had been sitting with a friend. “It was the most meticulously modeled little penis,” she says, laughing. “It was probably like half an inch tall. And next to it was a little piece of paper that said, ‘Brandon’s wiener, full scale.’”
She and much of the rest of the faculty quickly took to him. As Quinn became a fixture there and aimed for a second degree, Carlisle cast that original sculpture in bronze and made it into a keychain to present to him at the department’s senior dinner, which usually took the form of a roast. Art is a notoriously tough field to break into, so much so that 90 percent of art majors don’t practice their craft again after graduating, Carlisle says. But with his metalsmithing work, Quinn soon emerged as an exception—someone who could slip through that fine filter on the strength of technical precision, whimsical imagination, and ferocious work ethic. “He had a very meticulous style—a… perfectionist in his artwork,” Carlisle says. “He was extremely talented.”
If Quinn was flourishing at UW, though, he was the only one who didn’t seem to notice. He was painfully self-deprecating, insisting he was bad at whatever he tried; Cicarelli observed that he genuinely had no clue when girls were interested in him. While this telegraphed shyness, Quinn had a harsher view; in a video shot while he was in graduate school, he describes his artwork as “basically a complex examination of what it’s like to be a…rather socially inept individual making work that forces you to interact socially with someone through this physical object.”
David Jones, Carlisle’s husband and a fellow UW art professor, taught Quinn in an introductory 3-D design class; they later bumped into each other at the Laramie Mountain Bike Series—Quinn in the advanced group and Jones in intermediate. Jones describes the now-defunct series as a “Tuesday night let’s-go-out-and-give-it-hell kind of thing” in which people competed hard, practically marinating in lactic overload, despite the lack of any stakes. One night, while chatting afterward, Quinn and Jones likened the event to Fight Club—everyone suffering together but feeling keenly alive.
“He would talk about kind of thriving on that…like, ‘I love it. It’s so brutal and painful going so hard, but it’s fun,’” Jones says. “I remember thinking, Man, you’re right. I never really thought about it quite like that.” Quinn grew stronger as the 2011 season passed; by the final two races, he placed fifth, then fourth, in the advanced division. But Quinn was oblivious to his burgeoning talent. “I drink too many beers and I’m fat and slow” is how Jones recalls Quinn describing his exploits. “I’m like, ‘Your idea of fat and slow is like the fastest I’ll ever be,’” Jones says.
In 2012, after graduating from UW, Quinn enrolled in graduate school at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania (now Pennsylvania Western University), where he met Jera Lodge, a 26-year-old metalsmithing student. Soon they began dating, and they remained a couple even as Lodge bounced around the country on residencies and crafts-school-related jobs while Quinn finished his degree. When he graduated, they moved to Philadelphia. Quinn’s art projected his quirky sense of humor and pathos: He crafted boxes and enameled vessels made from brass sheet and copper plumbing pipe, and jewelry with surreal functionality. There was a ring that featured a miniscule working crossbow. He created something he called a “vile vial”—a vessel pierced with dozens of swear words. There were miniscule pistols that actually fired, which he pivoted away from after accidentally shooting tiny projectiles into his finger and calf. (He also decided not to sell them, for liability reasons.) “They work well, but they’re way too dangerous,” he told Jones. As a party trick, he would pick up a magnet with his fingertip, which still had steel shot lodged in it.
“When he would get excited about something, he would just light up,” Lodge says. “And you really see that in the things he did, particularly with his enamel work. Those are just fun, joyful pieces.”
He became a sought-after leader of workshops, some of which are posted on YouTube. One class on spring-based mechanisms shows the depth of Quinn’s immersion in his craft. He speaks in a slightly singsongy way, a little surfer-dude-ish, and seems a bit pained by the small talk at the start and finish. But his passion for his work is unmistakable. Largely overlooked in an era of jaw-dropping technology, springs are both simpler and more complex than you might imagine, he explains. One of their “most important but least glamorous functions,” he says, “is to make something work over and over forever by storing and releasing that energy, rather than that energy being used to wear out the function of an object.”
The class is ultimately a fascinating colloquium on the many ways springs can be deployed on pieces of art. He demonstrates how a spring works together with a detent—a small opening that receives the energy it creates—to create a distinct “click” when it’s opened or shut. “A detent will work without a spring,” he says, “but it will only work a few times without a spring. I think a lot of people have had that experience where you make what you think is going to be a very nice, secure clasp, and it works, and it clicks shut, and it’s fantastic. But then you cycle it a few times—you open and close it, whatever it is, and it stops working. The click goes away.”
When the pandemic slowed their career tracks, Lodge moved in with her parents in Pennsylvania and Quinn moved back to Montana to stay with his mom. The couple managed the distance for a time, but Quinn had a pessimistic side that exerted primacy over every component of his life. Lodge describes his outlook as often leaning toward “glass half empty, with the bottom cracked.”
“He was just always expecting the worst, and never expecting anything to work out,” Lodge says. “And I loved him so much, and it was so brutal to be in such direct proximity to that mindset about everything for so long.”
When Quinn moved to Houston for a residency, she made the painful decision to discuss ending their relationship after nine years. “He just accepted it,” Lodge recalls, “because I think everything that didn’t work out was a foregone conclusion for him.”
But then something unexpected did work out. In 2023, UW’s metalsmithing professor retired, and Quinn applied. That summer, he was offered the position. “He was pretty excited about having a job,” his mother says. “He’d been traveling all over the place to do workshops. So to just be settled in somewhere was a good thing.”
At least it seemed that way at the time.
When Jon Cicarelli heard that Quinn was returning to Laramie, he was excited. They hadn’t seen much of each other in the past decade, but in 2018 Quinn had flown west to take part in Cicarelli’s wedding. “He stepped up and gave a just off-the-cuff, hilarious toast, where he made sure to embarrass me,” Cicarelli remembers.
Cicarelli began sending him trail maps and updates. “I was like, ‘Dude, you’re gonna go riding with me,’” he says. There would be no more bike safaris—Cicarelli works as GIS manager for Wyoming State Forestry, and trespassing is out of the question—but the mountain biking scene had improved significantly, with the development of Pilot Hill and the Happy Jack Recreation Area and Pole Mountain. With near-constant bike advocacy and trail construction over the past decade, the area has blossomed into a massive network that includes Medicine Bow National Forest, mixing aspens, woodland, and open prairie with the signature vertical terrain. A new connector trail had opened in town, so that a cyclist could ride from UW and into the national forest without leaving public land or touching pavement.
Quinn initially seemed reluctant to resume his hard-riding ways; a bad crash could be a nightmare for someone making a living with his hands. But one ride to Pilot Hill was all it took. “He got the fever,” Cicarelli says, “and was shopping for bikes. He dove in headfirst.”
Quinn hunted online for singlespeeds, which seemed extreme for Wyoming’s multi-thousand-foot climbs and rough terrain. But Quinn didn’t mind suffering and liked that a rigid fork “wasn’t a crutch,” Cicarelli says. “He had to rely on skill.”
He eventually settled on an older Redline Monocog Flight, a fully rigid singlespeed, and immediately painted it white in case it’d been stolen. He bought a new saddle and clipless pedals and his first-ever disc brakes. “That was a big deal for him,” Cicarelli recalls.
Laramie sits at 7,200 feet, and Quinn needed a few weeks to adjust to the altitude. But he rode everywhere, just like the old days, all winter long. “I was probably riding stronger than him when he got here, but he quickly eclipsed me,” Cicarelli says. “He was a badass on his bike. He kept the seat really low because he was out of his saddle like 90 percent of the time.” During the winter they went out on fat bikes with headlamps and rode through snow-blanketed forest; sometimes they’d catch the eyeballs of moose staring back at them.
In June of 2024, they went camping, headed off on several rides, and gathered for barbecues at Cicarelli’s house. After a ride on Pilot Hill, Cicarelli left for a work trip to San Diego, so they didn’t talk for about 10 days. When Cicarelli returned, he texted Quinn about a newly completed trail they’d planned to ride.
There was no response, but Cicarelli didn’t think much of it; Quinn sometimes didn’t reply straightaway. That was just Nash, and everyone knew it. Cicarelli also recalled that Quinn had plans to teach summer workshops. “But then I hopped on Facebook,” Cicarelli says.
What he saw stunned him: It was a missing-person poster, and the person in the photo was Nash Quinn.
Wyoming is a place where people get lost. There are fewer than 600,000 residents spread across just over 97,000 square miles—the nation’s smallest population living in the ninth-largest state. Much of the empty space is comprised of high-altitude, unforgiving wilderness that experiences volatile and extreme weather and is home to predators like wolves and mountain lions. Wyoming search and rescue personnel conduct more than 300 missions a year—nearly one a day on average.
Even Laramie, the state’s fourth-largest city, can be a vortex. David Jones notes that although Pilot Hill essentially borders the town, there are many furrows and places to vanish because it’s such a vast area. “Once you start riding around up there,” he says, “you realize you could go missing and nobody would ever see you unless they stepped on you.”
Albany County Sheriff Aaron Appelhans says his office finds about three-quarters of people who go missing—lost or stranded hikers, snowmobilers, hunters, and elderly people with mental health complications, such as dementia. But he calls that a “very, very generalized statistic,” because the cases are so different. In Nash Quinn’s case, Appelhans faced a tough reality: Most people who disappear have only been gone for a day or two by the time they are reported missing. Quinn had by that point been gone for about two weeks—and no one knew where. Quinn was also a strong rider traveling by mountain bike, which expanded the potential search area exponentially. “If we don’t have a specific location, then we have a wide area to search,” Appelhans says. “And those are extremely difficult.”
Lacking intel, the sheriff’s office zeroed in on Pilot Hill, the popular riding area; Cicarelli thought maybe he’d had an accident there. “I had these ideas in my head where he might be,” he says. “And I tried to help, I guess, place people in those areas.”
Search teams comprised of six deputies and eight search-and-rescue volunteers fanned out on horseback, motorcycle, and ATV; some hiked with cadaver dogs. Appelhans’s personnel also flew drones over the area, hoping to catch a glimpse of Quinn’s white bike. At the county’s request, officials from the Wyoming Air National Guard sent over a Black Hawk helicopter.
Meanwhile, Quinn’s friends and family mobilized. His sister, Tess, created a GoFundMe for a second search effort, and Jera Lodge made up spreadsheets and recruited people to make calls and send out flyers and post on social media. Jones described Quinn and his bike on a web page about Laramie trail conditions. One of Lodge’s friends from Houston, Paul Middendorf, who has search-and-rescue experience, organized a parallel effort to the sheriff’s. Using a CalTopo digital map to track their efforts, they covered about 400 square miles over three days. “We scoured the area pretty good,” Cicarelli says.
Knowing Quinn’s preferences for big adventure, Cicarelli got permission to drive around private land on local ranches, some of which are 20,000-plus acres, racking up 150 miles on his Jeep. David Jones also tried a motorized search, but the enormity of the landscape was disheartening. “You’re not going to find him [by] driving around unless he just happened to be sitting there,” he says.
About six weeks after Quinn was reported missing, Cicarelli obtained his Google Pixel from the Laramie police; Tess Quinn gave her blessing to examine the phone’s contents. Cicarelli discovered that in the week before he disappeared, Quinn ran searches for Sheep Mountain, a remote peak in the Snowy Range Mountains west of Laramie.
Cicarelli had introduced him to Sheep Mountain. When Quinn had moved back, one of the first things they did was go to Cicarelli’s family cabin, at about 9,600 feet elevation in the Snowy Range, to perform an annual chimney repair. The next summer, they went again. On the way back, Cicarelli pointed out Sheep Mountain, which he described as a vast, roadless area known to be home to mountain lions. There’s one 12-mile-long trail slicing through it. “Maybe we should go ride that sometime,” Cicarelli told him. Quinn was excited to be so high up in the range, which was a notch wilder than the trails around Laramie. This was about two weeks before Quinn went missing.
Cicarelli only later realized the relentlessly steep and rugged trail is hard to navigate even on foot. Jones had hunted on Sheep but never took his bike up there. “I know somebody that did ride it,” he says, “and they got pretty jacked up coming down a hill, broke some bones and stuff, and had to limp out. I wouldn’t consider them bike-riding trails.”
That wasn’t necessarily a deterrent to Quinn, who was inclined to endure—and even invite—suffering. He often set out with little or no water or food and no repair kit, and rarely wore gloves, though for rougher trails he occasionally borrowed Cicarelli’s Carhartt-type work gloves. Once, Cicarelli admonished him after Quinn needed his tools to fix a flat. “I’m like, ‘Dude, I’m not gonna be your Sherpa and carry tools for you,’” he says. Quinn finally acquiesced and acquired a small saddlebag, but switched to tubeless tires so he could avoid carrying it.
Cicarelli recalls descending from Pilot Hill one day when a storm swept over. He couldn’t see and was pummeled by hail as lightning lit up the mountainside. When he told Quinn about it, his friend’s eyes widened. “Oh, man,” Quinn told him, “I wish I was with you. I love a good survival ride like that.”
One of Quinn’s mottos was “safety third”—which seemed only partly a joke, Lodge says, based on their many rides together. “He would use safety measures,” she says, “but there was this edge to things.”
Presented with the Sheep Mountain information harvested from Quinn’s phone, Appelhans mobilized another S&R effort. His teams combed the mountain for nearly two more days, covering 15 or so square miles, but came out empty-handed. Another search, in October, this time with cadaver dogs, also turned up empty. But the mountain, and the broader range, is massive and includes many overhangs, caves, and crevices where someone could have sought cover. “Ultimately,” Cicarelli says, “I think he’s up there.”
As Quinn’s friends and family dealt with the aftermath of his disappearance, they began to think back on his actions and behavior, hunting for clues.
The biggest question was his mindset. Cyclists and artists can be their own worst critics, but Quinn’s dry humor and humility sometimes tipped into something darker. “Literally everything he tried to do he was great at, but didn’t know it,” Cicarelli says. “He always thought that he sucked at things.” This was not unique to his life in Laramie. “Nash always downplayed anything he did,” says his mother, Liz Quinn. “No matter how spectacular it was, he just downplayed it to the point where I didn’t really know what he was up to.”
His last Instagram post before his disappearance was a series of “glamour shots” of the enameled vessels he’d made over the past year. “Instagram wants me to label these as made with AI,” Quinn wrote, “but these are very real, made with my own hands, and there ain’t nothing intelligent about me.” Quinn tended to be a loner, but his friends worried that Laramie was exacerbating his introversion. It’s a transient town, filled with people who were either college students or peers who, by his age, had coupled and had children. “I would say he wasn’t terribly social,” Cicarelli says. “He would spend a good amount of time alone. That’s just kind of how he was.”
Quinn didn’t seem enamored of the long winters and was perpetually worried about money; he was a struggling artist in a region with a nearly nonexistent arts scene. Lodge and several others discovered in his email that shortly before he disappeared, he’d been asked to cover hundreds of dollars in customs fees for a show in Finland.
Even before he vanished, she had worried about him from afar. “The thing about Nash is that he just kept everybody at arm’s length,” she says.
Metalsmithing is solitary work, and Carlisle recalls that Quinn was so dedicated that “he lived in the studios.” She and Jones tried to include him in gatherings, but they’re from a different generation, had different lives. When he came over, Carlisle says, he was “kind of in his own world.”
“Wyoming,” she says, “can be a very isolated place.”
Friends noticed he was ramping up on what he called “survival rides”—like the mountain bike safaris, but solo, and on his singlespeed. On one, in March 2024, Quinn rode about 60 miles to Crow Creek Reservoir, gaining almost 2,000 vertical feet. “He was always going out and riding to the edge of his ability, to point where it was dangerous,” says Cicarelli.
None of this necessarily explains his disappearance, and until Quinn is found there will only be theories: He was hit by a vehicle, thrown into the back of a truck, and buried somewhere. Alone in the wilderness without a phone, he became injured, sought shelter, and never made it out. Liz Quinn says she’d heard that her son had canceled some classes during the one year he taught there due to a medical emergency, and in her grasping attempt to find answers, she speculates that some unknown health problem was a factor in his disappearance. “I thought, that is really weird, because he never had a medical emergency that he didn’t tell me about.” She says she planned to try to obtain his records. (Russell, the department head, says he recalls being told by a colleague only that Quinn had had a few doctor’s appointments.)
His mother also points out that some of Quinn’s friends felt that he was depressed. Could he have gone out intending to not come back? Depression “is such a prolonged and insidious thing that for it to be—whatever happened to Nash was abrupt and profound,” she says. “And that’s why I’m kind of leaning towards some kind of a medical diagnosis that was not okay.”
But she also admits her son wasn’t one to provide regular updates on his life. “We had to badger him a lot, but I would make sure that I would talk to him at least once a month,” she says. “And I was just not hearing back from him.”
His friends were indeed worried that Quinn was in a bad place mentally. “I knew he was kind of a private person, and I respected those boundaries,” Cicarelli says. “But I think him moving back to Laramie was a bit of a shock.” Quinn had built a community in Houston, and Lodge says she also had recently struggled with moving back to a place she’d spent many years previously, where the social dynamics had shifted. “When you come back, none of that is there anymore,” she says. “I felt intensely lonely at first.” Lodge thinks it’s meaningful that the disappearance happened during “this gap of time where he didn’t have any obligations. Nobody would know necessarily where he was or what he was doing.”
Depression is a fickle disease; there is no linear path with the disorder. “I’ve known clinically depressed people in my life,” Russell says. “They can be awfully good at hiding it, too. Like, sure, on the outside, on the professional side, everything is like this”—he holds his hand high—“but they’re not doing well underneath it.”
Russell, for one, ponders Quinn’s coinage of the term “survival rides,” which suggests a third option that involves neither foul play nor Quinn hurting himself. “I’ve known clinically depressed people who say, ‘I’m just going to get in the car and let go of the wheel,’” Russell says. “And you could tell that they’re in that space, where they’re not going to fight for it. They’re going to let fate take over.”
In other words, if Quinn was struggling, he may have set out for one of his survival rides and decided to leave his safety net behind. He may have simply figured, if something happens, it happens.
In October of last year, Quinn’s mother and sister came to Laramie to pack up his apartment and resolve some legal issues relating to his status as a missing person. (“After seven years, he will be declared deceased and then we will get some kind of closure,” says Liz Quinn. “May not happen in my lifetime.”) Before heading home, they held an informal gathering attended by about 40 people at Bond’s Brewing Company in downtown Laramie. Lodge contributed photos of Quinn’s art and cycling for a slideshow; several people stood to pay tribute.
For the first time, and likely the last, Quinn’s parallel worlds—the art and cycling communities, and his family and friends—merged to celebrate his life. Cicarelli brought in the Bianchi commuter Quinn had brought east after his UW graduation, where it was stolen twice and run over. Undaunted, Quinn welded the rear triangle back together and kept riding it. “To me,” Cicarelli said, “this bike represents Nash to a T, because Nash was a loyal friend; Nash was loyal to his bike; Nash loved metal.”
The gathering reminded Carlisle of the intensity with which so many people had come together to search for him. “Just the rallying,” Carlisle says. “I wish he could have seen that, known that—how much love, and how many people cared.”
For Lodge, Quinn’s disappearance hit particularly hard. “It was like an end that hadn’t happened yet in some ways,” she says.
Quinn’s community organized a final search weekend at Sheep a few weeks before the snow came. Several K9 groups from Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah came out; the dog handler hiking with Cicarelli commented that the environment was hard for tracking because of the up- and down-drafts on the steep slopes. And although the official search operations have wrapped, Cicarelli still brings binoculars to Pilot Hill, in case he spots something while riding. He’s even gone looking again on rugged Sheep Mountain. “We had some deep conversations before he went missing,” he says, “and I think about those quite often.”
Wyoming’s long winter makes searches even more challenging, especially when the target is a white bike. But Cicarelli told the family that he’ll keep looking as long as they want him to. “And [if] you just want to let him rest,” he told them, “I’ll stop.”
Art, like bicycle riding, can be a solitary pursuit, or something that brings people together. Maybe each reminded Quinn of the other; his goal, articulated in one YouTube video, was to create “work that is remarkable for the object that it is and for the experience that it gives you.” A bike fits that description.
Both also involve the mastery of intricate and precise engineering—and Quinn seemed inexorably drawn to mechanisms that made sense, that could tame chaos, that could click together in a way that brought order to a messy world. Conquer those things, and maybe the unwieldier parts could be endured.
This feels like a central paradox of Quinn’s life. He mastered the workings of small, intricate objects, and the results were both art and mechanical magic. He crafted objects beyond imagining. But when it came to assembling the disparate components of a life that he felt content living, the parts didn’t seem to fit.
What happened on Quinn’s last ride? Those answers will eventually come—hopefully. In the meantime, everyone left behind will wonder what happened—or, as Quinn might put it, how the click went away.
David Howard has written for many national publications and is the author of two nonfiction books, most recently Chasing Phil: The Adventures of Two Undercover Agents with the World's Most Charming Con Man.
