A Texas man hiked up Georgia's Blood Mountain and disappeared without a trace

BLAIRSVILLE — Charles Hosch came to Blood Mountain to take a small amount of dirt.

The 67-year-old and his older brother, Heyward, last year began gathering soil from places they considered sacred — Gettysburg among them — and sealing each sample in labeled spice jars.

For Charles, the collection was incomplete without soil from Blood Mountain, the highest peak on Georgia’s stretch of the Appalachian Trail and near the source of the Chattahoochee River. He and Heyward had visited as boys with their father to fly fish and pan for gold, returning many times over the years.

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On the afternoon of Nov. 11, after tending to his late father’s estate, Charles Hosch left Gainesville, where he grew up, and drove north into Union County. He planned to begin the return drive later that day to Texas, where he had moved decades earlier. The calendar he carried was tightly arranged: classes to teach at Southern Methodist University, duties at the Dallas law firm he co-founded, daily reminders to call Beth, his wife of 42 years, and to check in with his daughters, Julia and Cat.

He parked near the Byron Herbert Reece Trail in temperatures in the high 30s, with a steady wind. He hiked three-quarters of a mile to the Appalachian Trail, then another mile and a half to the Blood Mountain summit. Near the top, he spoke briefly with a man adjusting a ham radio and one resting in a hammock. According to those men, Hosch was heading back down the mountain.

After that, Hosch vanished.

More than a month later, despite extensive searches by law enforcement, emergency crews, volunteers, family members and friends, no verified trace of Hosch has been found. No clothing. No food. Not the small spade and plastic bag he carried for collecting soil.

“It is a major mystery to us,” said David Dyer, director of the Union County Emergency Management Agency. “We have not found a clue.”

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

An unprecedented search

At 7:07 a.m. on Saturday, a rooster crowed as darkness lifted at the Byron Herbert Reece Trailhead parking lot. Charles Hosch’s car was discovered there Nov. 12 after he was reported missing. For weeks the Hosch family had returned almost daily, and they had come to know the resident chicken nicknamed Frank.

Soon trucks, SUVs and shuttle buses rolled in. More than 70 professional search-and-rescue members from Georgia, Alabama, North Carolina and Tennessee unloaded gear and headed up the trail, hunting for any sign of Hosch. K9 teams deployed. Some crews carried drones. Others brought heavy packs with ropes to rappel down cliffs and rocky outcroppings.

An additional 50 volunteers joined — experienced hikers, medical professionals, even a veterinarian who attended high school with Hosch.

Credit: Laura Alderman

Michelle Michaud drove in from Nashville. A three-time Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, she estimates she has climbed Blood Mountain’s paths at least a hundred times.

“People don’t understand how difficult it is,” she said. “You’re talking steep rocks, it gets wet, there’s ice when it gets colder. It doesn’t take much, if you step 50 feet away for a good view you can turn around and everything all looks the same.”

This past weekend marked the largest coordinated effort since official searches were suspended a few days before Thanksgiving.

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

The early searches, led by Dyer in coordination with local, state and federal agencies, lasted two weeks. Some days stretched 18 hours. More than 250 personnel scoured the ground while helicopters and drones circled overhead.

“Our guys were down crawling on their hands and knees and bellies to get under some of the thickets,” said Union County Sheriff Shawn Dyer, a distant relative of David’s.

Blood Mountain has a grim history. In 2008, 24-year-old Meredith Emerson was abducted on its trails by drifter Gary Michael Hilton, who held her captive for days before killing her.

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Yet Union County authorities more often deal with routine hiking injuries: sprained ankles, broken legs, medical emergencies. In recent years at least three missing people were found alive within days: a motorcyclist who wrecked, a fisherman trapped in rocks, a hiker who simply lost his way.

David Dyer, who doubles as fire chief, said he has never seen a case like Hosch’s.

“In my 35 years with the fire department I’ve not known any search and rescue that we’ve been involved in that we did not find somebody,” he said. “We’ve always found them.”

Credit: Union County Sheriff's Office

Often, locals say, if there’s a dead body of a person or a large animal in the mountains, buzzards circling in the sky will lead you to it. In the days and weeks after Hosch’s disappearance, there were no such buzzard sightings, according to two residents who live within a few miles of Blood Mountain.

The Appalachian Trail is billed as the longest hiking-only footpath in the world. It stretches just under 2,200 miles through forested peaks and valleys from North Georgia’s Springer Mountain, about 30 miles south of Blood Mountain, to Katahdin in Maine.

Charles Hosch’s planned hike along part of it on Nov. 11 was a bit less than 5 miles, a much-smaller area to search. With winter closing in and no answers from the official effort, the Hosch family refused to stop.

On Saturday, they stood at the center of the renewed frenzy. Daughter Julia delivered briefings to incoming teams, her 1-year-old daughter strapped to her chest and often wrapped in her arms. Charles’ wife, Beth, also grieving the recent death of her mother, claimed a spot beneath a pop-up tent, often hugging her daughters and feeding her granddaughter sliced strawberries.

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Heyward Hosch, Charles’ older brother, in his early 70s, has trekked the mountain’s slopes nearly every day since Charles disappeared. He hauled sack lunches deep into the woods to a designated drop point.

Cat, Charles’ other daughter, held court with a growing circle of volunteers curious about her father. Questions began with Nov. 11 — what he was wearing, who saw him on the trail. But as one of Charles’ Gainesville High classmates joined the group, the conversation drifted further back, to stories from decades past. Standing in the woods where her father went missing, Cat drew laughs by delivering punch lines from stories previously told by him.

“Dad has always been an optimist,” Cat said. “A friend once said my dad could look at a pile of manure and say, ‘You know, there’s a pony in there somewhere.’”

‘Charles loved learning new areas’

Charles Hosch was president of his senior class and crowned Mr. Gainesville High School in 1976. He was already helping plan the 50-year reunion set for next fall.

“When we go to the reunions, he’s the one that everybody wants to see,” said Kirk Vardeman, a classmate who now lives in Young Harris. “But he doesn’t want to talk about himself. He wants to find out about what you’re doing.”

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Hosch left Gainesville for Harvard, earning his undergraduate and law degrees there. His gentle North Georgia drawl stood out in Boston, where he met Beth, then a student at nearby Wellesley. They married, and four decades ago the couple moved to Texas, a relocation the family still teases about.

The running joke was that Beth, in retribution for all those blistering Dallas summers, would one day force Charles to retire to snowy New Hampshire. He always pushed back, but Cat said her father would have followed wherever Beth led.

“One of Dad’s favorite quotes,” Cat said, “was ‘Women and cats do as they please; men and dogs better get used to it.’”

Hosch began his career as an antitrust lawyer, but as the legal landscape shifted, so did he, most recently specializing in technology transactions, data deals, terms of service and privacy policies.

“The thing I really admired about him is that he loved learning,” said Kate Morris, who worked alongside Hosch for years before they co-founded their own firm. “A lot of lawyers get stuck. Charles loved learning new areas.”

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Yet for all the billable hours, Morris said Hosch poured even more time into his role as adjunct professor at Dallas’ SMU. Before each semester he compiled detailed student bios — complete with photos — scouring Google and social media for personal tidbits. He held office hours, but insisted every student meet him individually for coffee or lunch. His opening question was always the same: “Would you please tell me about your life?”

That same impulse — to collect not just soil from sacred places, but the stories of the people he met — defined him. Classmates, colleagues, students, strangers on a trail: Hosch wanted to know who they were, where they’d been and what mattered to them. And he remembered.

“We’d often run into his former students in Dallas,” Morris said, “and he could tell me everything about them. Almost perfect recall. He truly listened.”

Hosch became an Eagle Scout as a teenager in Gainesville and stayed active with the organization’s local Board of Review in Texas, often advising Scouts on projects like building park benches. According to his daughter Cat, he would review their materials and timelines, then deliver the same suggestion: “You need at least one girl in the group. Why? Because it will get done in the time you want it to.”

‘To revisit a beloved place’

Local legend claims a bloody 18th-century battle between Cherokee and Muscogee Creek warriors raged across Blood Mountain and nearby Slaughter Gap. Folklore describes a clash so vicious that blood turned the creeks and streams red. Historians find no record of such an event, yet a 1958 Georgia Historical Commission marker still stands, acknowledging a fight without date or name.

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Gold fever swept the area in the early 1800s, bringing white settlers and, soon after, the forced removal of the Cherokee on what became known as the Trail of Tears. Around 60,000 Native American people were marched west to Oklahoma, thousands dying along the way.

That violent past lingers in local lore.

“Growing up around here, people talked about being chased through the woods by Cherokee ghosts,” said David Dyer, the emergency management director and fire chief.

Some say the roughly 4,450-foot-high mountain also might have gotten its name, or kept it, for the rhododendrons that blossom in an explosion of red along its hiking trails in the late spring and early summer.

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Blood Mountain never felt haunted to the Hosch brothers.

As their parents aged, Heyward’s trips from Birmingham to Gainesville grew more frequent. On many Sundays after church he would drive to Blairsville, hike to the summit, and return in time to help with evening needs. He said he figures he made that pilgrimage at least 50 times in the past decade — always choosing Blood Mountain over any other trail in North Georgia.

“It was nostalgic and back home,” Heyward said. “This was not an exploration. It was to revisit a beloved place.”

Charles carried the same homesickness. He returned to Gainesville as often as he could — multiple times a year. After their mother died in 2020 and their father in 2024, there was no immediate family left in Georgia, but the pull remained. When he came home to Gainesville, Blood Mountain became part of his routine.

“He would call me huffing and puffing on hikes to check in,” his law partner, Morris, said. “I’d tell him he didn’t need to be up there alone.”

Morris has come to know the mountain intimately this past month. She has spent nearly every day in Georgia — save one quick trip to Dallas to meet Hosch’s students — trekking its paths and supporting searchers. A rock climber and experienced hiker, she calls this terrain a different beast entirely. She has seen a bear and a wild boar up close.

“He loved this mountain so much,” she said, “and I’ve grown to hate it.”

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

The family works to hold onto a gentler view of the place Charles considered sacred. Julia admits she has “had some angry words with the trees” on occasion. Cat, speaking to volunteers Saturday, called the woods magical more than once.

Signs of Charles Hosch’s whereabouts and fate remained elusive, though, as searchers combed the mountain. They discovered an abandoned hiking pole Saturday, triggering a glimmer of hope.

“A lot of things we’ve found are water bottles and tents, which could be anybody’s. We can’t dependably say this hiking pole belonged to him, but we’re definitely going to check this out,” David Dyer said.

On Sunday, a cold snap settling over Georgia and Christmas approaching, volunteers continued searching as the windchill-adjusted temperature at the summit hovered near 10 degrees. The mountain surrendered no new clues.

Some volunteers struggled to understand how that could be. Hosch was no longer on the mountain, a few said Saturday. Others wondered whether someone had taken him or if he had chosen to vanish himself.

“The idea of anything like that is ridiculous,” Morris said of speculation that Hosch intentionally disappeared.

Shawn Dyer, the sheriff, said investigators have examined Hosch’s bank records and explored potential criminal motives.

“We’ve come up with nothing,” he said.

Heyward said he will keep coming back to Blood Mountain — to search for his brother and for all the reasons that drew him here before.

“We may find Charles and we may not,” he said, “but if the hills have claimed one of their own I’ll be at peace with it. He loved them so.”

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

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