Today the house is quieter, less active and more empty than Heidi and Kevin Bardsley would like. Cameron, 14, is still at home. Courtney, at 20 the oldest, moved away and got married. Jared, 18, left Monday to start college at BYU-Hawaii.

The house is filled with pictures from favorite vacations, a portrait of a beaming bride, a family picture in front of an LDS temple and scrapbooks documenting the family’s growth, while playground equipment and toys take up the back yard. Dogs and cats lounge lazily around, both inside the house and out, and horses graze leisurely in a field.

But there’s a hole in the family that used to be occuped by Garrett, the baby of the family, who walked into the wilderness a year ago while camping and never came out.

“We have two lives,” Kevin Bardsley said. “We have a life before Garrett, when Garrett was here, and we have a life after Garrett.”

On Aug. 19, 2004, several teenage boys and their fathers loaded camping gear into vehicles for a trip to the High Uintas in Summit County. Scoutmaster Wally Trotter brought his son to the meeting site that Thursday morning to help pack the trucks; he wasn’t going because he didn’t have enough vacation time. It wasn’t an official Boy Scout activity; they didn’t want the boys to feel pressured to earn any merit badges that weekend.

“We just wanted a last, end-of-the-year camping trip to go have fun before school started, to give the boys a chance to relax and to enjoy each others’ company,” he said.

On Friday morning Kevin and Garrett went fishing at one of the many nameless lakes that dot the mountain landscape. Garrett got his shoes wet, and because mornings are cold, Kevin sent him back to camp to change shoes. The camp was 150 yards from the lake, a walk of just a few minutes.

Kevin returned to camp about 15 minutes later and learned Garrett had not made it back. The 12-year-old had only been missing for a few minutes, and no one thought he could have gotten far. Kevin, although starting to panic, focused on his task.

“I remember thinking that I’ve got to find him,” he said. “I just ached inside because I wanted to hold him so bad.”

For Alex Trotter, finding out his friend was lost wasn’t much of a concern — at first.

“We thought he’d yell, or hear us and come toward the sound,” he said.

Not until seeing a trusted leader’s fear did Alex begin to understand the seriousness.

“I just remember looking at Brother Hansen’s face, and he was wild-eyed and pale, and he’s a tough guy,” Alex said.

Tanner Dunn remembered being a little scared. He teamed up with one of the adults and they spread out to search the immediate area, confident that Garrett had just wandered a little ways in the wrong direction.

The seriousness sunk in later for the two boys, who were playing with the others while the leaders searched.

“Gary said, ‘Guys, you need to help us look, because if not, Garrett’ll be dead by morning,'” Alex said.

Back home

For Wally, Friday morning was anything but peaceful. He was sitting in his office interviewing people when he suddenly got concerned about Alex. The feeling bothered him two or three times, until just as suddenly, he got a feeling that Alex was fine. Wally put the concerns behind him.

Later that morning, he got a prompting to call Gary Hansen, the young men’s president on the trip. He dismissed the thought, since no one could get cell phone reception in the mountains, although he found out later that by that time Gary was down from the mountain and calling for help to search.

Then Wally’s phone rang.

“I said, ‘OK, I’ll be there,’ hung up the phone, ran upstairs and told my boss, ‘See ya, I’m gone,’ ” he said.

Wally made the drive to the mountains, reasonably confident that as soon as he got there he would hear Garrett had been found.

It was when he arrived and didn’t hear that news that he really started to worry.

The bears

Garrett had just turned 12 a few weeks before the campout, and while he’d been camping before, he wasn’t very experienced. Kevin called him innocent, “without any hardness of the world.”

Wally said any number of factors could have caused Garrett to get lost. He wondered if Garrett worried about the wildlife.

“Garrett ran face to face into a bear, and it scared him to death,” Wally said, remembering an earlier Scout camp with about 400 boys. Garrett came running into camp saying he’d seen a bear; Wally, not quite believing him, started asking questions. A few observations later Wally was a believer.

“Yep, you saw a bear,” he told Garrett. “Let’s go see if we can find him.”

He gathered up the Scouts and they started heading toward the woods, all eager to demonstrate their bravery — until Wally stopped and threw his arms out.

“I yelled out, ‘Look out, there it is! And boys just started to go everywhere,” he said with a laugh.

Garrett’s fear was real, though, and Wally wonders if maybe, when Garrett found himself turned around, he panicked at the thought of meeting another one and just started running.

On the mountain

More than anything, Kevin Bardsley wanted to find his son. What he wanted second most was for his wife to be there, but that scared him too.

“The last thing I wanted to do was tell Heidi that I’d lost Garrett,” he said. “I could almost imagine him walking through those fields crying, crying for Mom, crying for Dad.”

Heidi had to find out eventually. She was out of town when her husband called with the news, and she got a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach and said she knew then Garrett would not be found.

Kevin was not convinced. He spent the next few days running around frantically, always on the move but never running out of energy. He searched until midnight or later the first couple of nights, long after the other searchers had gone to bed. When he finally had to stop, he would hike to his car, drive to Kamas and call people — his wife, his daughter, other family members — just to hear their voices.

Then he’d drive back up the mountain and, almost against his will, fall asleep in his car for an hour or so before waking up cold, yet another reminder of the challenge facing him.

“I realized if I was cold, what was Garrettfi”

Guilt also hit Heidi Bardsley and Wally Trotter; Heidi said she had difficulty sleeping or eating knowing her youngest son didn’t have those basic needs being met.

Wally felt the guilt most Saturday night. It had rained that day, and he was cold, wet and tired. He returned to his tent, changed clothes and crawled into a sleeping bag for what turned out to be a restless night.

“All I could think about was I’ve got a boy out there who doesn’t have those, and I felt guilty for being warm,” he said.

The efforts

The search was in high gear the first weekend; hundreds of searchers combed the mountains yelling Garrett’s name, while a helicopter and search plane searched from above, shining a spotlight and calling Garrett over a loudspeaker.

“I’ve never seen a spotlight that could light up the trees and the mountainside like that one could,” Wally said. “You kinda think ‘he’s gotta hear it, he’s gotta see it, we’re gonna find him.’ “

He and several other men spent a sleepless Friday night at one of the nearby lakes, lighting bonfire after bonfire around the shores, hoping Garrett would see the flames and come toward the fires to get warm.

Saturday brought the sun, which warmed up the shivering volunteers, and with it renewed hope and vigor for the search. But it also saw the Scouts, including Garrett’s brothers, sent home.

“I think one of the hardest things for me to watch was, I watched Cameron and Jared pack up Garrett’s things in his backpack,” Wally said.

That day it rained. The Scoutmaster in Wally knew what that meant. If Garrett was still alive, he was now wet. If he was wet when the sun went down and the temperature dropped to below freezing, he probably would not survive the night.

Later in the weekend

By this time Heidi Bardsley had arrived on the mountain, with hope but not expecting much. She knew, though, her husband needed her, and she knew they had to do everything they could to find Garrett.

With Heidi there, Kevin calmed down some. But he still searched and worried and searched more to get rid of the worrying.

“I remember one of the first particular times I knelt down by myself and tried to bargain with the Lord, that I’d do anything to have him back,” he said. “I got an overwhelming impression that I didn’t have to worry about Garrett, that his test was done.”

Praying was hard after that, Kevin said, because he was afraid he’d get the same answer again. He did, several times.

By Sunday, two days after Garrett had last been seen, the mood was more urgent. Searchers still held a desperate hope the missing boy was alive, but the day progressed with no sign of him. To add to the bleak picture, it snowed on Sunday, and many searchers, including Wally, had to return to their homes, jobs and lives.

On Tuesday, the rescue mission became a recovery mission. Just a couple hundred people were on the mountain later that week when Wally returned. The number of volunteers swelled to about 1,000 that second weekend, but by Sunday, Summit County called the official search off.

“That was a tough day,” Wally said. “I was going home without one of my boys. It wasn’t right to leave one there.”

Acceptance

The reality took some time for the Bardsleys to digest.

“It’s hard to remember those two weeks because you’re just kind of in a blur and you’re body’s kind of numb,” Courtney Christen, Garrett’s sister, said. “I thought we were going to find him.”

Heidi accepted it more quickly than Kevin.

“I remember days I would wake up saying, ‘Today’s the day we’re going to find him,’ ” Kevin said.

“And I never thought that,” Heidi said.

They noticed immediate changes in their family; Courtney, Jared and Cameron grew closer and more sensitive to each other. For Cameron, who was closest in age and relationship to Garrett — the two could pass for twins in pictures from just a couple of years ago — the loss was especially hard. The two had always shared a room until just a few months before, when Cameron decided he wanted his own room.

“But when this happened, Cameron didn’t want to be alone, and Jared immediately took him into his room and said, ‘I want Cameron to be with me,’ ” Kevin said.

He was more sensitive to Heidi’s feelings as well, Kevin said; he didn’t want to add to the pain she was already feeling. That pain was especially acute because of how close Garrett and his mother were, closer than she was with the other three.

“We had to pack a lot in in 12 years,” Heidi said.

Kevin also looks at his children differently, after learning to see Garrett through God’s eyes.

“It also made me realize as a father, maybe I need to look at all my children that way,” he said.

They saw their children grow up quickly, shouldering a difficult burden and trying to take on as much of their parents’ burden as they could. Kevin said he realized just how much the last year has affected his children at the search earlier this month. The Bardsleys and Summit County had organized a final search effort to bring Garrett home, and about 1,500 people showed up throughout the course of three days. Their 18-year-old son took on the task of comforting his mother.

“Jared just said to her, ‘Mom, Garrett was never alone,’ ” Kevin said. “He just said, ‘I just want to find Garrett for Mom.’ “

Courtney said the family had grown stronger as well.

“This could either make you closer or tear you apart, but we’ve made sure it made us closer,” she said.

Their faith has held them together, as they searched for how they could react to this instead of wondering why it happened to them.

“We’ve always felt there was a purpose,” Heidi said.

But knowing there was a reason didn’t make the changes come any easier.

“There’s always one person who’s not there,” Courtney said.

“It’s weird taking family pictures because there’s someone missing,” Heidi agreed.

Garrett’s absence — and his presence — was noticeable on June 24 when Courtney and Kenyon Christen got married in the temple. Courtney said she felt her youngest brother’s spirit in the room during the ceremony, and Heidi felt a sense of family that included her youngest son. But Kevin, despite the happy occasion, still missed Garrett.

“I yearned for him to be there,” he said.

His friends

Accepting Garrett’s death was difficult for his friends, too. Alex Trotter and Tanner Dunn said when people tried to tell them Garrett was dead, they’d respond with “Shut up. No, he’s not.”

“I didn’t really believe them,” Alex said.

“Yeah, I just thought they were wrong,” Tanner echoed.

Reality sunk in the first day it snowed in Utah Valley. Both boys quietly accepted the truth. Wally said he hoped Garrett had died the first night on the mountain; he didn’t want Garrett to be up there alone, cold and scared. Knowing he went to sleep that night and never woke up was a less horrible way to picture him.

His friends changed too. Alex and Tanner said they felt a little bit of Garrett in them, a piece of their friend to keep alive.

Wally said his relationship with Alex changed; they now have this experience to talk about that both went through and both understand. Wally noticed the changes as soon as he got on the mountain the first day and his usually non-affectionate son surprised him.

“That was one of the first things he did was hug me, because he wanted to make sure that I was there, that I was OK,” he said.

The two also have cried together more than a few times since August.

“I was one that never wanted to have anyone see me cry, and now I don’t care who sees me,” Wally said. “If somebody sees me, that’s just fine. If somebody wants to pass the tissues, that’d be much appreciated.”

Alex learned the same lesson on the first day of school without Garrett. A sign on the middle school said, “Our prayers are with Garrett,” and Alex, not wanting his friends to see him cry, blinked away the tears. He said his father took him aside at Boy Scouts later and told him crying was OK whenever he needed to do it. Another Scout told his mother that he cried himself to sleep every night for the first two weeks after Garrett got lost.

Wally also has learned not to take tomorrow for granted.

“You need to tell whomever it is that you love them, because they might not be here tomorrow,” he said.

The Scouts have pulled together with the loss of one of their own, becoming a more cohesive unit and focusing on Scouting and learning. All the boys and their parents are still active and camping, although not entirely without qualms.

“I think everybody was a little bit nervous on our first campout after Garrett disappeared,” Wally said.

Acceptance doesn’t stop the wondering, though, what went wrong, where Garrett was, why they couldn’t find him. The boys were most vocal in June, in the middle of a 50-mile hike. Wally was on this hike under protest; he wanted to be in the Uintas searching for missing Boy Scout Brennan Hawkins. His bishop, however, told him his first responsibility was to his Scouts, and then he could search.

One of his rules on Boy Scout trips was no radio; he wanted the boys to talk to each other. That rule was supposed to be in effect that day.

“I don’t know what made me do it, but I violated my own rule and turned on the radio in my truck, and right about the time I turned it on was right about the time they found him,” Wally said.

He gathered the boys around for the announcement; all were genuinely happy. But underneath the gladness they hurt.

“It was almost like every boy looked at me and said, ‘But Brother Trotter, why didn’t we find Garrettfi’ ” he said. “I didn’t have an answer.”

Finding joy from the pain

Because of Garrett, though, the Hawkins family was not left wondering the same thing. Heidi, Kevin and Wally all say their missing boy played a big role in making sure another didn’t end up like him.

“We didn’t want them to have to recreate the wheel,” Kevin said. “In our eyes, Garrett saved Brennan’s life because of the things that we’ve learned.”

A day or two after Brennan disappeared, Summit County Sheriff Dave Edmunds called Kevin Bardsley, said he had a similar search under way and wanted to know if Kevin wanted to be involved. Kevin’s decision had been made a long time ago.

“That’s the week my daughter got married,” Heidi said. “It was a busy week, but we couldn’t have kept him away.”

Courtney actually shooed him out the door, saying she and Heidi could take care of wedding details. Kevin packed his trailer with food and water, loaded up his radios and global positioning systems and headed for the mountains.

Edmunds said Kevin helped because he brought a lot of experience and volunteers with him, but also because he understood what the Hawkins were experiencing. He explained the process, calmed a lot of their fears and told them he truly understood what they were going through.

Because of those searches, there is now a core of experienced searchers and technical expertise ready to mobilize in the case of another lost child, Wally said. Brennan was the first on the receiving end of it.

“I would like to think Garrett was on the mountain the day Brennan was missing,” he said.

The Garrett Bardsley Foundation

Finding missing people is one of the missions of the Garrett Bardsley Foundation, set up with funds donated after Garrett disappeared. The second is to build schools in poor countries, a family tradition started in Christmas 2003.

Heidi said that Christmas, disillusioned with the commercialization of the holiday, the family went to Mexico and built a well and a medical clinic and bonded with the people.

Last Christmas, the Bardsleys and several friends went to Ecuador to build the first school. The money had come from numerous sources, including Garrett’s school friends; students at Spanish Fork Middle School raised $20,000 for the effort and collected more than 1,000 backpacks to send to schoolchildren.

The first few months of this year they continued their efforts with the foundation, raising money for a second school. Both Kevin and Heidi were wondering if they should focus on just one of the foundation’s purposes, and they were leaning toward the schools, which helped so many people in these poor areas.

“We really kind of put a lot of emphasis on the schools — and that’s when Brennan went missing,” Kevin said.

Healing

The trips to Ecuador brought their own sadness; Heidi said Garrett had enjoyed them most. He was surprisingly compassionate for a 12-year-old boy and truly understood the service they were doing, so doing it without him was hard.

But his family found peace as well, sometimes in unexpected places.

On New Year’s Day, the family climbed Wyna Picchu in Peru, the mountain next to Macchu Picchu. Kevin, Heidi, Courtney and a family friend reached the top first.

Once there, instead of appreciating the view, Kevin noticed the three women’s hair was standing straight up, indicating a lightning storm, and thought they’d better get off the mountain quickly.

“All of a sudden we noticed this rainbow forming,” he said. “It was the most brilliant rainbow you’d ever seen.”

Standing at the peak with his family, looking down on a rainbow for the first time in his life, Kevin said he understood what Garrett was telling him, and he sat on the mountain and cried. Since then, they have looked for the rainbows, both seeing them in the sky after a particularly hard day and finding them in life.

“It’s been kind of a motto of ours that we need to look for the rainbows,” he said. “As Heidi always says, how we handle this is up to us.”

Looking for the rainbows

The Bardsleys say the rainbows are easier to find because Garrett could always find them. He appreciated finer details of the world that others didn’t notice. The day before Garrett got lost he was petting a friend’s horse, and Kevin again learned the complexity of his youngest son.

“He said, ‘Dad, feel Chris’ horses’ noses. Feel how soft they are.’ “

The incident left his mind until a couple of weeks later when he was walking Cameron to the bus stop, past those same horses, and he stopped to pet them.

“It just flooded back to me that he saw God’s creations differently than we did,” Kevin said. “He saw the little things.”

Garrett had difficulty reading and had to go to an early-morning class for help. This difficulty didn’t stop him, though. During family scripture study Garrett would beg his parents to let him read more, while his brothers and sister were begging them not to let him, for fear they’d never finish. He always wanted to read in school too, his parents remembered.

“He didn’t care. He wasn’t embarrassed,” Kevin said.

Garrett loved school and would go even if he was sick; he would have started middle school just a few days after he got lost. Kevin admitted he was worried about Garrett having a different teacher for each subject; he wasn’t sure the teachers would have time to get to know Garrett as closely as his elementary school teachers had.

“I didn’t want him to be discouraged by that,” he said.

Garrett’s friends and family say he was funny, always telling jokes and acting goofy. Alex said at Scout camp or during sporting events Garrett would be the first to say good job or encourage someone who was falling behind.

“That’s why, when we hurt, I think he hurts too, because I think he always wanted us to be happy,” Kevin said.

Heidi Bardsley did not think Garrett would be found in the search in early August, but she knew they had to do it. Their responsibility, she said, was to do as much as they possibly could. The rest they trusted to God.

She was right; Garrett did not come home. But so many other good things came from the search that she and Kevin say it’s not a loss. None of their efforts have been fruitless, they believe, because of the many lives changed.

“I don’t think we even know the extent of it yet,” Heidi said. “So many people’s lives have been touched by Garrett, more than if he’d lived to be 80 years old.”

Many of those people have contacted the Bardsleys and shared their stories. One man decided to donate money every month to a different charity. Another man, a music teacher back east, pledged to spend his free time finding and fixing up instruments for inner-city schools.

A local man who suffered from involuntary convulsions felt a strong desire to search for Garrett, despite his physical difficulty. His wife told him that was impossible.

“He said, ‘I went to bed that night and just felt this overwhelming impression that I needed to go,’ ” Kevin said.

The man drove up to the mountains, hauled out his backpack and started up the trail, suffering from convulsions the whole way.

“As he walked into the forest it stopped,” he said. “He has never had it ever since.”

Also, the search earlier this month turned out to be a blessing for a Scout on the mountain with heart problems. The boy was having serious medical problems but, because of the helicopter, sheriff’s deputies and all the people in the area, he made it to a hospital quickly.

“We know of at least two Scouts that Garrett has saved,” Heidi said.

And although Wally participated in the first search, the final search and every search effort in between, he said his wife made the biggest sacrifice of the family. She was pregnant and due any time the first week in August. Kevin told Wally to stay home and be with her. Instead, she was induced the night before the search.

“She said, ‘You know, I can’t go search, I don’t even feel like I can go up and help, but this is one way I can help the search,'” Wally said, laughing.

Remember Garrett

Sometimes Kevin Bardsley still has trouble accepting the resolution — or lack thereof.

“I just couldn’t believe we couldn’t find him,” he said. “And that was a hard thing.”

Wally struggles with it too, although his take is somewhat more pragmatic, as he tells the Scouts when they say they’ve looked in a million places.

“A million places seems like a big number, but there are a billion places to look, and we haven’t looked in the right place,” he said.

Wally still believes they’ll find the right place eventually, and he says he wants to go back up the mountains to see how far Garrett got. But in the meantime, life still has to be lived.

The bracelets the Bardsleys had made no longer say, “Find Garrett;” they say “Remember Garrett.” Kevin and Heidi say they want people to remember their baby, remember his life and his goals and remember the feelings that brought thousands of individuals together to help their family.

Scout and church leaders are doing their part, telling their boys the importance of serving a mission and fulfilling their responsibilities.

“One of those things he’d always tell you is, ‘I want to go on a mission. I want to be a missionary,'” Wally said. “He’s doing a different kind of mission now.”

Heidi said their return from Mexico ignited the mission talk in her son.

“We thought he had eight years, not eight months,” she said.

The Bardsley family and the Scouts returned to the Mirror Lake Trailhead in the High Uintas last weekend, the same place Garrett was lost. Cameron received his EagleScout award, and Garrett received the Spirit of the Eagle, an award forScouts who were working toward their Eagle but died before it was completed.

Kevin said while his children are a little wary about returning to a place that holds so many memories, most of them unpleasant, he believes returning is important for all of them.

The lake where Garrett was last seen has a sacred feeling about it that Heidi and Kevin appreciate when they return. And while it is still nameless on the rolls of the U.S. Forest Service, its visitors last weekend have named it for a young man whose body is somewhere near and whose spirit still visits.

“We don’t care what the rest of everybody else calls it,” Wally said. “In our mind that is Garrett’s Lake, and that will always be Garrett’s Lake.”

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page A1.