46 APRIL 2020
Maybe someone who didn’t know him, an outsider to Gunnison,
a small Colorado town on the western slope of the Rockies, might
assume he was flaky or unreliable. At 29, Jake still lived with his
mom and spent most nights at the local dive bar, the Alamo.
But Jake’s friends knew he was deliberate, a creature of routine.
If you had plans to go to the movies on Saturday, he’d text you
on Wednesday: What time should I pick you up? And then again
on Thursday and Friday just to confirm. On a motorcycle trip
to California, Jake was the one who brought tarps and first-aid
kits. He definitely wasn’t the fall-off-the-face-of-the-Earth type.
Jake had spent most of his life on the 7-11 Ranch, his family’s
property just outside Gunnison. He’d drive into town most eve-
nings, work out at the gym, then stop by the Alamo. He always
sat at the same table and always ordered the same drink: a Coke,
because anything stronger made him nervous. His friends, a close-
knit group of half a dozen guys, would show up after their shifts at
the mechanic shop or the lumberyard. They’d shoot pool for a cou-
ple of hours, then Jake would head home to the ranch. “Everything
was like clockwork with him,” his friend Antranik Ajarian told me.
On Wednesday, May 20, 2015—five days since anyone had
heard from Jake—his friends Nate Lopez and Randy Martinez
drove out to the 7-11 Ranch. They turned into the driveway,
then drove past the barn decorated with the antlers of deer, elk,
and moose, testaments to the property’s glory days as a hunting
camp. They didn’t see Jake, although they did spy his truck, his
motorcycles, and his dog, Elmo.
In the horse corral, they spotted Jake’s mother, Deb, a wiry
woman whose frail frame belied her stubborn strength. Deb told
Lopez and Martinez that Jake had gone to Reno, Nevada, to train
at a mixed-martial-arts gym; he wasn’t responding to their texts
because he’d dropped his phone in an irrigation ditch and left it
behind to dry out in a bag of rice. Her explanation was logical
enough. But the more they thought about it, the more it didn’t
sit right with them.
Another few days passed, and still no word from Jake. His
friends called and stopped by the ranch. They weren’t sure what
else to do. I’ll let you know when he’s back, Deb would say. Were
they paranoid, or did she seem annoyed to see them? The situa-
tion felt weird, they kept saying to one another. It just felt weird.
After about a week, a Gunnison County patrol sergeant named
Mark Mykol, alerted to Jake’s sudden disappearance, called the
ranch. Deb said her son had taken off with a friend whose name
she didn’t know. She thought they were headed to Reno to go
camping. He did this sometimes, just up and vanished, and she
seemed less worried than irritated. Mykol marked the case status as
“unfounded”—nothing to see here. But Jake’s friends kept insisting
that something was wrong. A week later, Mykol called the ranch
again. This time, Deb admitted that she and her son had been argu-
ing; he was almost 30 and still living at home, after all. He’d grabbed
some camping equipment, a gun, and a wad of cash, then gotten
into a car with someone she didn’t recognize. She figured he was in
Nevada looking for work, or in California with friends, or in New
Mexico with his father; she’d stopped trying to keep tabs on him.
But Deb’s story only left Jake’s friends more confused. It was
as if she were talking about an entirely different person from the
Jake they knew.In the ski mecca of Crested Butte, the median price for
a house is $750,000; Gunnison is its more rugged, affordable
neighbor 30 miles south, a windswept town of hunting outfitters
and craft breweries, and the home of Western Colorado Univer-
sity (motto: “Learning, elevated”). Gunnison’s 6,500 inhabitants
are an eclectic mix of hippies, hunters, college kids, ranchers,
and professional mountain bikers. At the Trader’s Rendezvous,
you can pick up an antique rifle or a taxidermied wildebeest; a
few blocks down the street is Shamans Corner, a combination
massage parlor, tattooist, and metaphysical gift shop.
When I visited Gunnison in November 2018, the big news
was a local ranch’s cattle relocation: “Cows will be walking down
HWY 135 ... between 9-noonish,” the Gunnison Regional 911
Center’s Facebook page warned. “With the snow please be safe
and budget a few extra minutes as the girls make fast retreat down
valley. Thanks for the patience.”
Jake’s parents split up when he was 6 and his sister, Stephaine,
was 7. His father, Ray, whom Ajarian described as “an old crazy
gun guy” (he meant this as a compliment), eventually moved
to rural New Mexico. Deb got remarried, to Rudy Rudibaugh,
a widowed rancher two decades her senior. When I stopped by
Trader’s Rendezvous, everyone had a story about Rudy. He was a
“tough little turd,” as one man put it, who had served as a frogman
in World War II, lurking in rice paddies and breathing through
a straw as he stalked the enemy. After the war, Rudy bought the
7-11 Ranch and based a successful hunting business there.
Rudy was known for doing things his own way. In the pre-
cellphone era, he used carrier pigeons to send messages between
hunting camps. When Jake and Steph were little, Rudy and Deb
bought an African lion cub; they kept it chained in the horse corral
and fed it a diet of roadkill. Neighbors complained that it fright-
ened the livestock; eventually somebody shot and killed it from the
highway— the Gunnison County equivalent of a drive-by shooting.IT WAS WEIRD THAT NO ONE HAD HEARD
FROM JAKE MILLISON IN A FEW DAYS.