Olympic National Park is basically the Pacific Northwest's version of a haunted house that also has really good hiking.
So when a 37-year-old backpacker from Tacoma didn't come home from a solo trip through the Hoh Rainforest last weekend, nobody expected the plot to get this strange.
Let's start with the part that makes search-and-rescue folks sigh into their coffee.
The hiker — let's call him Dave, because his real name is also Dave — was reported missing after he failed to show up for his shift at a Bremerton auto shop on Monday.
Found in his tent, fully charged, with 14 unread messages from his mother and one very ominous note in his Notes app that simply read "the moss knows." Rescue teams fanned out across the Hoh on Tuesday morning.
What they eventually located, according to a park spokesperson who sounded like she needed a nap, was Dave.
Wearing a rain poncho he'd fashioned into what can only be described as a "moss cape." He was fine.
He was also, and I quote the official statement here, "unwilling to leave until he finished his conversation with the trees." Now, before you fire off a comment — yes, people do get genuinely lost and genuinely hurt in national parks, and that's not funny.
The park later clarified that Dave had plenty of food, water, and gear, and had simply decided that cell service and his job and, presumably, the concept of linear time were optional.
One viral tweet called him "the first man to voluntarily go full Ent." A Reddit thread titled "AITA for wishing I was Dave" hit the front page in four hours.
Someone made a GoFundMe for his moss cape.
It raised $8,000 before the park asked people to please stop.
Here's where the story gets a little less funny and a little more real.
Olympic National Park actually sees a handful of missing-person cases every year, and most of them do not end with a guy in a poncho having a spiritual epiphany.
Search-and-rescue volunteers are unpaid, exhausted, and routinely put their own safety on the line for folks who packed a single granola bar and a dream.
So while it's easy to meme Dave into a folk hero, the people who spent two days combing through old-growth forest for him probably weren't laughing on Tuesday night.
They were cold, wet, and wondering why they do this. (Spoiler: they do it because every once in a while, the person they're looking for is alive and just being extremely weird.) Dave was cited for not having a permit for the backcountry zone he was found in.
He reportedly told a ranger, "That's fair," and then asked if he could keep the cape. **The takeaway:** We all want to be Dave until we remember that someone has to come find us, and those someones are volunteers with day jobs.
Final Thoughts
But tell your mom first, and maybe leave the trees out of your voicemail.