What This Missing Hiker's Phone Finally Revealed

Name: What This Missing Hiker's Phone Finally Revealed
Uploaded: 2026-10-11T04:01:47+00:00
Duration: 26 min 41 s
Channel: eXtreme

00:00June 17th, 2023, Northwest Tasmania.

00:03Celine Kramer was trapped in a freezing rainforest, fighting for her life, less than 2,000 feet from her parked

00:10car.

00:10She wasn't on some brutal multi-day wilderness expedition.

00:14All she had done today was walk to a waterfall on a tourist trek so easy, people do it in

00:19jeans and sneakers.

00:20No, the light was dying fast, and she had her phone and nothing else.

00:25On her screen, a little blue dot said the trail was right in front of her.

00:28What she was actually looking at was a wall of rotting timber.

00:32Should she push forward into it, or turn around and retrace ground she couldn't recognize anymore?

00:37Her next decision would make her the subject of one of the most intense rescue missions in Tasmanian history,

00:43one that would take three years to solve.

00:46Welcome to the extreme edge, where the stakes are high, but nobody's, just a headline.

00:51What baffled me was that if you told Celine that morning she was going to go hiking,

00:55she would probably have laughed in your face.

00:58At 1.15pm, this 31-year-old Belgian tourist was at the Waratah Roadhouse,

01:03a small fuel stop in one of Tasmania's most remote towns for a coffee and nothing else.

01:10In four days, she was heading back home to the Australian mainland, but right now she had a few hours

01:15to kill.

01:15So, while chatting with the roadhouse owner, she asked for something fun to do.

01:20The owner casually suggested checking out a waterfall just ten minutes down the dirt road called Philosopher Falls.

01:27For Celine, this was just what you do on the last few days of a trip.

01:31Kill an hour before the ferry, see one more thing before you go home.

01:35Nothing about the suggestion asked her to be brave.

01:38It was the kind of yes any tourist gives a hundred times without thinking.

01:42So, sometime around 2pm, Celine parked her white Honda in a small gravel lot at the edge of the forest.

01:49She stepped out and walked up to the wooden trailhead, and past that sign, it was just a wide, flat

01:55gravel path, cutting easily through the ferns.

01:58The mid-June air was bitter, hovering just a few degrees above freezing.

02:03And that is exactly the trap of the Tasmanian wilderness.

02:06It claims lives every single year.

02:09Sometimes it's a fall.

02:11Sometimes the weather just turns in minutes, trapping casual tourists and experienced hikers alike.

02:17But one thing that is certain is nobody who passes away out there thought they had any reason to be

02:22scared that day.

02:24Celine certainly didn't feel any particular fear that day.

02:27If this were a proper wilderness hike, she would have packed extra layers, waterproofs, a physical map, maybe a beacon.

02:34But nothing here seemed to call for that.

02:36There was a marked path under her feet that led to the waterfall the roadhouse owner mentioned in less than

02:41an hour.

02:41So, Celine locked the Honda and followed the gravel track into the trees, wearing only a cream jacket over a

02:48fleece, black tights, and trainers.

02:50She had no idea how deeply she would later come to regret that decision.

02:56But for now, Celine started down the path in front of her.

02:59This obvious, gently winding path that cut through the rainforest, past moss-covered trunks and thick, green ferns, before carrying

03:08her across what locals called the Arthur River and toward a staircase.

03:12Yes, a staircase, made of 200 purpose-built steps dropping down into a gorge and ending at a viewing platform

03:20right in front of the cascading water.

03:22It was green and lush, and I mean, just look at it.

03:26It was just absolutely beautiful.

03:29Celine certainly thought so herself, too, because at 2.42pm, Celine was standing on that platform, taking photos and videos

03:36of the whole experience.

03:38The forest, the river, the ferns crowding the path, Philosopher Falls itself, spilling through the rocks below her.

03:46Everything was going just right.

03:48She had seen the waterfall with plenty of daylight left, her car was less than an hour behind her, sunset

03:54was still more than two hours away.

03:56All she had to do now was turn around, climb those stairs, and follow the gravel path straight back to

04:02her car.

04:02But five minutes later, she took a photograph that told us she did something else.

04:07At 2.47pm, Celine took a photograph of a fallen log lying across that old water race.

04:14It looked completely ordinary.

04:17At the time, it was just another photo.

04:19Later, it would become the moment investigators kept coming back to, because it showed that instead of climbing back up

04:26the stairs toward her car,

04:28Celine had continued past the falls and onto something called a water race.

04:33See, right next to the stairs, there was a flat, dirt trench cut into the side of the mountain.

04:38Back in the 1890s, miners dug this channel to move water.

04:42The local council simply put gravel over the first section for the tourists and stopped at the falls.

04:48But the old dirt trench just kept going, deeper and deeper into the uncharted wild.

04:53And if you were standing there without knowing any of that history, you could easily mistake it for another walking

04:58track.

04:59It was flat, narrow, and ran cleanly through the bush.

05:02For a while, it even felt easier to follow than the staircase she had just come down.

05:07So, Celine kept walking, and the further she went, the less it looked like the tourist trail she had started

05:13on.

05:14The gravel thinned out, ferns pushed into the trench, fallen trees began cutting across it.

05:20But the shape of the water race was still there, running forward through the forest like a line she could

05:25follow, and that was enough to keep her moving.

05:28At 3.31pm, Celine was nearly 3,300 feet beyond the viewing platform.

05:35Somehow, what began as a short walk to a waterfall had carried her deep into a forest she never meant

05:41to enter, and the light under the thick canopy was starting to fail.

05:45The temperature was dropping, and night was coming.

05:48She was no experienced hiker, but even she knew that hiking unprepared at night was begging for something bad to

05:55happen.

05:56She had to get to her car somehow.

05:58So, Celine turned around and began retracing her steps along the dirt trench, heading back south toward the staircase.

06:06She was probably thinking if she just stayed on this old water race, she would eventually reach the wooden steps,

06:12climb them, and maybe somehow find her way out.

06:15But while she walked, the afternoon had been quietly slipping away.

06:20What was green and lush two hours ago at the falls had gone to the flat gray of a room

06:25with the power dropping out, one bulb at a time.

06:29The cold, which had been sitting politely in the low single digits all afternoon, started sliding towards something with teeth

06:35in it.

06:36Sometime that afternoon, Celine stopped walking the way she came.

06:40Maybe she spotted a gap in the trees that looked like it cut the distance in half.

06:44Maybe dabbling all the way back to the falls, then up 200 steps, just to reach a car park she

06:50could practically feel behind her already, seemed like the long way around.

06:54Either way, at 3.49 that afternoon, Celine Kramer was no longer on any kind of path a tourist should

07:00be on.

07:01But she was not moving blindly.

07:03She still had her phone.

07:04On the screen, the situation looked manageable.

07:07Philosopher Falls was behind her.

07:09The car park was somewhere beyond it.

07:12Her own position was marked by a little blue dot, and the trail looked close enough that she should be

07:17able to cut straight back toward it.

07:19Then she looked up at the new path she was on, and what she saw was a wall of fallen

07:23trees belonging to some kind of local plant called Horizontal Scrub.

07:28These trees grow low and thick, piled on top of each other, all bent and twisted together.

07:34She pushed through anyway.

07:36A branch snapped back across her face.

07:38She climbed over one trunk, then another, and five minutes later, she'd only moved about 20 feet.

07:44The dot on her phone barely moved either.

07:47Then it started to rain.

07:48Not hard, just cold and steady.

07:51The kind that didn't feel like much at first, right up until your clothes were soaked through, and holding the

07:58cold against your skin instead of blocking it.

08:00Celine kept going up anyway, because up was the way her phone said would loop her back toward the falls.

08:05Up was the only way out of this nightmare.

08:08She was burning energy rapidly.

08:10Her cream-colored jacket and fleece offered almost no protection against the bitter, wet cold.

08:16In the boot of her car was a thick jacket that would have kept her warm, but it might as

08:20well have been on Mars for all the good it would do her right now.

08:23She kept checking her phone, watching the blue dot, trying to force the digital map to align with the physical

08:29nightmare around her.

08:30But she was using Google Maps, an app that was built for city streets, not wild rainforests.

08:36Because it doesn't map elevation or deep wilderness terrain, it was completely blind to the wall of rotting timber trapping

08:43her.

08:44All it gave her was a flat, blank screen and a blue dot.

08:47But incredibly, despite that limitation, this shortcut almost worked.

08:52By 4.13pm, she had fought her way near the top of a rise.

08:57Geographically, she was just about 2,000 feet from a track that could lead her back to safety.

09:02That's what made what happened next so painful to understand.

09:06Because at 4.18pm, Celine and her phone became separated.

09:12Maybe it slipped from a pocket while she was climbing.

09:14Maybe she put it down for a moment and couldn't find it again in the scrub.

09:18Nobody knew.

09:19What we did know was that the one thing she had been using to navigate this forest was out of

09:24reach.

09:25And just like that, Celine was standing completely unprepared in the freezing rain, on a trail no tourist had ever

09:32walked on.

09:33She had no map, she had no flashlight, and she had no way to call for help.

09:38And for the next 72 hours, not a single person on Earth knew Celine Kramer was in trouble.

09:44Three days later, more than 52 million feet away in Belgium, this woman named Justine Ropay tried to call her

09:51best friend.

09:52No answer.

09:53That alone did not scare her.

09:55Justine didn't know it yet, but she was the only person on Earth about to start looking.

10:01See, Justine was Celine's closest friend.

10:04She knew her buddy had been traveling all around Tasmania, where reception disappeared all the time out there.

10:10And Justine wasn't even calling for anything too serious.

10:13It was good news in a way, in fact.

10:15She had just booked her flight to Darwin, where the two of them were supposed to meet later in the

10:20trip.

10:20So when she sent a message and she received nothing at first, well, that was just life.

10:26But then a couple of days passed with no response, and Justine started asking questions.

10:31And she wasn't the only one concerned.

10:33Justine's mother, Ariane, had been trying to reach her too.

10:37Then other friends, who initially assumed Celine was somewhere without reception, started asking when they had heard from Celine last.

10:45And that was when they realized something terrifying.

10:48Nobody had actually heard from Celine since June 17th.

10:52So finally, on June 26th, nine days after she walked into Philosopher Falls, Justine and another friend finally called Tasmania

11:01police to report her missing.

11:03The next morning, a council worker drove into the small gravel car park at Philosopher Falls and saw a white

11:09Honda CRV sitting among the trees.

11:12And he immediately recognized it because he had seen that same car here days earlier.

11:17He probably assumed it belonged to a local attempting a multi-day trek, or maybe a tourist whose engine wouldn't

11:24start.

11:25Now he knew there was trouble, so he immediately raised an alarm.

11:29Police got a warrant, opened the car, and inside were Celine's camping gear and belongings.

11:34Everything she would need to continue the road trip was still inside.

11:38The only thing missing, of course, was Celine.

11:41By midday on June 27th, police officers were walking this same path Celine had walked nine days earlier toward Philosopher

11:49Falls.

11:49Only now did the place look completely different.

11:53Rain had been hammering this part of Tasmania,

11:55and light snow falling through the trees meant the Arthur River below the falls was no longer the quiet strip

12:01of water Celine had crossed on her way in.

12:04It was swollen, fast, and brown with runoff.

12:07It could take anybody off balance if someone tried to cross it without knowing how deep it was.

12:13So the police began putting two and two together.

12:16Maybe she fell in that river somewhere and needed help.

12:18A helicopter was called in, but low clouds hung over the forest and made flying useless.

12:24So a search team made up of the police and local volunteers went in on foot looking for her.

12:29They followed the maintained track and the old water race, shouting her name.

12:33Celine! Celine!

12:35Trying to listen for any sound coming back through the trees, but the forest was completely silent.

12:41They brought in tracking dogs, but it had been raining for nine days straight.

12:45Whatever physical scent Celine left on the gravel or the wooden stairs or the dirt trench had been washed deep

12:52into the mud.

12:53The dogs had nothing to follow.

12:55They just walked in circles.

12:57The weather finally cleared enough by the next day for helicopters to fly, but it didn't help.

13:02The police brought in choppers equipped with thermal imaging cameras,

13:05but the canopy above the horizontal scrub was a thick, wet ceiling, and the thermal cameras couldn't see through it.

13:12So they flew back and forth, directly over the patch of forest where Celine went missing, but couldn't find anything.

13:19And down on the ground, the search teams hit a physical wall too.

13:23When they tried to push off the flat dirt tracks and into the unbroken bush,

13:27the rotting timber was so tangled that even experienced hikers who came prepared had trouble keeping their footing.

13:34And they were looking for a woman who just came out here for a quick trip.

13:38They knew her chances were slim.

13:39A few years earlier, a climber named Gigi Wu fell into a ravine on a solo climb.

13:45She was conscious.

13:46She had a satellite phone.

13:47She gave rescuers her exact coordinates.

13:50Bad weather kept the helicopters away anyway, and by the time anyone reached her on foot, she had already passed

13:57away.

13:58Celine had none of Gigi's advantages.

14:00Nobody knew where she was.

14:02Her surviving would be an absolute miracle.

14:05But they searched for weeks anyway.

14:07Some of the rescue team roped up and lowered themselves straight down into the gorge,

14:12checking underneath the waterfall itself in case she'd slipped near the platform.

14:16Others waded into the Arthur River, fighting a current strong enough to knock a grown man off his feet,

14:22because if she went in the water anywhere near here, this was where she'd be.

14:27They found nothing.

14:28A doctor brought in to advise the search told them the plain hard truth.

14:32Dressed the way Celine was, in conditions like these, most people didn't survive much past three or four nights out

14:40there.

14:41So, on July 10th, 17 days after Celine disappeared, Tasmania police grounded the helicopters.

14:48The search crews packed up their gear.

14:50A tow truck backed into the small gravel lot, hooked up the white Honda CR-V, and dragged it away.

14:56The local council took down the police tape, and the gravel path to Philosopher Falls was quietly reopened to the

15:03public.

15:03The search was formally over.

15:05For all intents and purposes, Celine Kramer just ceased to exist.

15:10Did she survive that first night?

15:13Did she try to crawl out the next morning?

15:15Did she fall?

15:16The police had no answers.

15:18Her family had no body.

15:19For most missing person cases, this was where time started doing its work.

15:24Search teams moved on, and people just stopped asking.

15:28For most people, Celine Kramer simply became another mystery.

15:32But Justine, who had known Celine since kindergarten, was not one of those people.

15:37And she could not accept that her best friend had simply vanished just like that.

15:43So, she came to Tasmania herself, not for a weekend or a search, but for months.

15:49She drove the roads Celine had driven and spoke to people Celine had spoken to.

15:53At first, Justine genuinely feared somebody had taken Celine, or maybe she had fallen victim to an animal attack.

16:00And I get it.

16:02If somebody told you your friend walked onto a safe tourist track,

16:05hundreds of people searched for her, and not one piece of her was ever found,

16:10your mind naturally jumps to the worst possible scenarios.

16:13So, in 2024, Justine contacted a popular private investigator named Ken Gamble.

16:18Ken had worked on another case involving a missing Belgian backpacker in Australia.

16:23He knew what abductions, or worse, looked like.

16:26But when he looked at the last records of Celine's cell phone data,

16:29he reached a very different conclusion.

16:31See, even though no one had any idea where her phone was in the forest,

16:36the device had spent that entire afternoon desperately searching for a signal.

16:41Every time it tried to connect to a tower, it left a digital footprint her family had access to.

16:46And when they gave it to Ken, he mapped out those broad location pings.

16:50The erratic movement did not look like a woman being chased by a person,

16:55or hunted by something with claws.

16:57It looked like a woman physically fighting the terrain, trying to find her way out.

17:01That small distinction changed everything, because it meant she was still in the trees.

17:06It meant there was still something left to find.

17:10That realization was exactly what caught the attention of a Tasmanian prospector and YouTuber named Rob Parsons.

17:16Parsons knew the physical reality of this specific bush.

17:20Building on the investigator's theory, he went out to the old water race himself.

17:25He wanted to understand the exact route a freezing, lost hiker would logically take.

17:30He filmed the dense scrub and put the videos online.

17:34People watched them.

17:35And as they watched Parsons struggle through the rotting timber,

17:38they saw exactly why the police had failed.

17:41They saw how easily the forest hid things.

17:44Eventually, the audience stopped asking why nobody had found Selene,

17:48and started asking a different question.

17:50Why don't we go look?

17:52More than 200 people actually volunteered to search for her.

17:55But you could not send 200 strangers into that type of vegetation

17:59without risking another search and rescue operation.

18:02So the group was cut down to 28 people,

18:04made up of former military members and hardened, off-track hikers.

18:08And on December 13th, 2025, almost exactly two and a half years after Selene disappeared,

18:15they walked back into the rainforest with maps and sections of the dense bush already divided into grids,

18:21looking for the woman who had no idea a simple hike would lead to this.

18:26One of those 28 volunteers was a man named Tony Haig,

18:30one of the men involved in the initial search for Selene.

18:32And on the first day of the new grid search,

18:35Tony was walking near the back of one of the lines his group was searching when he looked down.

18:40Something small, dark, and incredibly easy to miss sat on the vegetation.

18:46Tony bent closer, and just like that, saw what it was.

18:50It was a mauve Samsung phone wrapped in a blue case.

18:53And when police compared it to their records, it was a perfect match.

18:58Tony had just found Selene Kramer's phone,

19:01and the crazy part was he was standing inside the same forest the police had searched.

19:06The vegetation here was so thick that Tony himself had previously walked

19:11within just a few feet of this exact spot and never seen it.

19:15For more than two years, one of the most important pieces of evidence in the entire case

19:20had been lying almost exactly where everyone thought it should be.

19:23They just could not see it.

19:25But if the phone was here, where was Selene?

19:27For two and a half years, everyone had thought that Selene and the phone were in the same place.

19:32Now, it turned out that while the phone stopped here, Selene didn't.

19:36Police took the mauve Samsung to a lab.

19:38It was badly damaged, obviously.

19:41But technicians managed to extract the memory.

19:43That's where they found the photos of the ferns and scrubs I mentioned earlier.

19:47They found 45 distinct GPS pings,

19:50which told them just how hard she was relying on her digital map to save her.

19:54And technicians also saw something that honestly broke my heart when I read it.

19:59At 3.46pm, Selene had searched for Philosopher Falls.

20:03At 4.07pm, she had opened the phone keypad.

20:07Eight minutes later, at 4.15pm, she had switched the phone off and turned it back on again.

20:12Then, at 4.18pm, she had searched for Philosopher Falls one final time and taken a screenshot of the map.

20:19Just think about what those four actions meant.

20:22Selene, cold, wet, and stuck inside that horrible scrub, was not panicking.

20:28She might have been scared, but she was still actively trying to solve the problem herself.

20:33She never stopped trying to get out.

20:35But after 4.18pm, there was nothing.

20:38No new search, photograph, or touch on the screen ever again.

20:42Which meant Selene had not simply stopped moving at 4.18pm, she had lost the thing that was recording her.

20:48But she was still out there somewhere.

20:51So the searchers went back into the forest, pushing past the spot where Tony had stood looking for her.

20:56A couple of days later, they thought they found something huge.

20:59Because tucked near a tree, they found plastic bags and a bottle,

21:03arranged in a way that looked like a makeshift shelter.

21:07If those belonged to Selene, it meant she survived the first night.

21:10Maybe she somehow made it.

21:13But DNA testing revealed the material on the objects belonged to a man instead.

21:17And despite searching the surroundings, they found no evidence of anything belonging to Selene.

21:22She was still lost in a forest that refused to surrender a single physical trace.

21:28And that, ironically, was exactly what told one volunteer they were looking in the wrong place all over again.

21:35His name was Jared Boyce, and his theory was simple.

21:38If Selene lost the phone and lost the trail, sooner or later, she'd have looked for the one thing in

21:44this forest she genuinely couldn't lose.

21:46Water.

21:47The Arthur River cut straight through this whole landscape, and lost people followed rivers.

21:52It was a good instinct, actually, because rivers led to roads, towns, bridges, somewhere.

21:58What if that was what happened here?

22:00So, on January 28th, 2026, six weeks after Selene's phone was found, Jared walked back into the bush and began

22:08moving downstream,

22:09checking the edges of the river, the log jams, the places where somebody could have slipped or become trapped.

22:15The ground here was just absolutely brutal.

22:18Steep banks, wet, rotting trees, ferns thick enough to hide holes in the earth,

22:24fallen trees jammed together where flood water had thrown them.

22:28Even in daylight, navigating this section took careful experience.

22:32To do this alone, at night, on a trip he hadn't prepared for, must have been terrifying.

22:38Jared had been walking for about two and a half hours, when something near the riverbank caught his eye.

22:43There was something down in the ferns beside him, half hidden among the leaves and wet debris.

22:47From where he was standing, he couldn't quite tell what it was.

22:51So Jared stepped closer, bent down, and the second he realized what he was looking at, he froze in shock.

22:58Then, Jared pulled out his phone, took a photograph, marked the exact location,

23:04then turned around and started moving back through the forest as fast as he safely could.

23:08He needed to call someone now.

23:10When he finally got enough signal, Jared called Tasmania police and told them to come quickly.

23:16He had found something in the Arthur River.

23:19Something human.

23:20Officers quickly arrived at the coordinates he'd given them.

23:23They pushed down through the same steep riverbank, moved through the ferns,

23:27and lying right there, less than ten feet away from the exact spot Jared photographed,

23:32was a human jawbone with teeth still attached.

23:35Two days later, specialist search and rescue teams descended into the gorge area.

23:40They knew what to look for this time.

23:42And in no time, the forest that had refused to give investigators a single clue for almost three years finally

23:48broke wide open.

23:50Tangled high up in the debris of a massive log jam, they found a human skull.

23:54Scattered further down the bank, half buried in the mud and ferns, they found a human vertebrae, part of a

24:01pelvis,

24:02and caught in the branches nearby were pieces of clothing, a bra, and a weathered fleece jacket.

24:07The remains were not in one neat place, but when they were taken to a lab, they belonged unmistakably to

24:13one person.

24:14A person who had been in the river long enough for floodwater to pull the body apart, move bones downstream,

24:21wedge clothing into branches, and scatter pieces across hundreds of feet of riverbed.

24:26And then, during another search of the same stretch in early February,

24:30officers found something that put it all to rest in their minds.

24:34It was a car key, still attached to a super cheap auto tag.

24:38And when Tasmania police, still with Celine's Honda, took the key back to the vehicle and put it in the

24:44lock,

24:44it actually opened her car.

24:46Now, there was no room left for doubt.

24:49The phone was hers, the car key was hers, the clothing matched what she had been wearing.

24:54So, on February 27th, 2026, Tasmania police finally made the announcement.

25:00After nearly three years, the search was over.

25:03The remains of Celine Kramer had been found.

25:06When coroner Madeline Wilson officially wrote her report on what happened here,

25:10she called it a confluence of errors.

25:13And honestly, that was a bit too clinical for what actually happened.

25:16Anyone who'd ever been on a trail, even experienced hikers,

25:20had made the exact same calculation Celine did.

25:22You saw a beautiful waterfall, you saw what looked like a flat dirt path continuing past it,

25:27you decided to walk just a few more minutes to see what was around the next bend.

25:31It was the most natural human impulse in the world.

25:34And if you got a little lost, well, you had your phone, didn't you?

25:37It was a tourist trail.

25:39She would make it out somehow.

25:40That's exactly what Celine would have told you.

25:43It's what any of us would say.

25:44I'll be honest with you.

25:46I've been on hikes where I trusted a screen exactly like that, underprepared.

25:50Sure, I had it handled.

25:51And if two or three small things had gone differently that day,

25:55I could be telling you a story about myself right now, instead of her.

25:58Most people who've ever walked into the woods could.

26:01But Celine wasn't the only adventurer who calculated that,

26:05trusting herself to somehow figure it out.

26:07This man, at 29,000 feet in the death zone of Mount Everest, did the same thing.

26:12Except he wasn't standing in a Tasmanian rainforest.

26:15Three hours earlier, his guide had turned back, ill.

26:19He pushed on.

26:20And now, at 29,000 feet on the tallest mountain in the world,

26:25he was blind, alone, and had to come back down if he wanted to live.

26:29Now, he had to get off the mountain without ever seeing his own hands.

26:33Whether that choice killed him too is what happens next.

What This Missing Hiker's Phone Finally Revealed

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