Missing 14-year-old girl found 24 hours after disappearance in the Uinta Mountains
Aug 8, 2025, 7:55 AM | Updated: 2:12 pm
Maya Suisse is pictured before her disappearance in the Uinta Mountains while on a backpacking trip with family. (Suisse Family)
(Suisse Family)
SALT LAKE CITY — Search and rescue teams were looking for a 14-year-old girl, Maya Suisse, who went missing on Thursday in the Uinta Mountains. On Friday afternoon, her family updated with the best-case-scenario news: she’d been found.
Cpt. John Crowley with the Duchesne County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that she was being reunited with family Friday afternoon.
Crowley said Maya went missing in the Painters Basin area near Kidney Lakes. The sheriff’s office got a call reporting her missing just after 11 a.m. on Thursday.
Crowley said Maya was with a group of about seven family members who had all been hiking for about a day and a half. Maya went away from the group to use the bathroom, and didn’t come back.
According to Maya’s sister, Brooklyn Suisse, the family has experience backpacking, but this is the first time Maya has joined on a big trip.
“Every year, my grandpa and my dada and others from that side of the family — they do this big backpacking trip up to the Uintas with backpacking goats and whatnot, and they usually spend about a week up there,” Brooklyn Suisse said. “So this is not a new trip, but it was Maya’s first time going on the trip. She was so excited for it.”
A helicopter joined the search effort on Thursday night and Crowley was hoping to have it back up again Friday morning, weather permitting.
Brooklyn Suisse said she hopes Maya would have had the thought to sit down and wait at some point when she realized she might have been lost.
“I’m positive that at first that she would have done everything that she could to find her way out to find camp and everything,” she said, “but I’m hoping that as time went on that she would have stopped.”
An immediate effort to try and locate her began when the rest of the family realized she’d been gone for too long, Suisse said, and the family searched overnight.
“From what I understand, the family that’s up there ran into a group of, I think, four hikers. And those hikers … such great people,” Brooklyn Suisse said, emotional. “And so there are so many efforts, and we’ve had literally hundreds of people from my parents’ ward and neighbors and friends and family and everyone possible has reached out offering their help and support.”
Search and rescue crews decided to ask the public to stay away from search efforts because the search area would take more than a day to reach for anyone on the ground and pose the risk of volunteers getting lost or falling on the rocky terrain. Dogs were similarly not being used in the search due to the area’s remoteness, and Crowley said it would require them to fly in specially-trained dogs.
Brooklyn Suisse thanked her community for the support they’ve offered.
“This is the scariest thing that any of us has ever been through,” she said.
The Duchesne County Sheriff’s Office urged “anyone who may have been in the Painters Basin or Kidney Lakes area recently, or who may have any information about Maya’s whereabouts, to contact Duchesne County Dispatch at 435-738-2424.”
This story is breaking and will be updated as more information becomes available.
Contributing: Don Brinkerhoff, KSL NewsRadio and Daniel Woodruff, KSL TV
