192. The Vanishing of Justin Alexander Shetler

In 2016, a man who was equal parts survivalist and seeker, a man who traded a six-figure tech career for a life in the wilderness, a man who was phenomenal at surviving in nature, disappeared in it forever. This is the story of that man. But this is also the story of the Parvati Valley—a sliver of the Indian Himalayas so staggeringly beautiful and so consistently deadly that the list of people who have walked in and never walked out reads less like a police register and more like a haunting. And it is the story of a phenomenon called India syndrome, a kind of spiritual psychosis that has been quietly consuming Western travelers in India for decades, blurring the line between enlightenment and madness, between choosing to disappear and being disappeared. This is the story of Justin Alexander Shetler.