Missing Joe Wood — Alta magazine
Published on March 13, 2025
Over two decades ago, one of the most promising writers of his generation went for a walk on Mount Rainier and was never seen again.
The last time anyone saw New York writer Joe Wood Jr. was on July 8, 1999.
Wood was one of 6,000 writers and editors who had come to Seattle for Unity ’99, a journalism conference for writers of color. He had checked into his hotel and met up with some friends on the first night. The next day, he picked up a rental car and drove about two and half hours to Mount Rainier, the fifth-tallest mountain in the Lower 48.
Wood left his rental at the Longmire lot in Mount Rainier National Park. A Black man in his early 30s, he wore round glasses and had short hair. It was a beautiful Seattle summer day—sunny and mild with a high in the low 70s. The wind had picked up, which might be why Wood had purchased a windbreaker.
A man named Bruce Gaumond saw Wood at Comet Falls, 3.3 miles uphill. The hike from Longmire to Comet Falls can take up to three hours. Unlike the grassy-meadow terrain at the start of the trail, at 4,800 feet the ground was snow covered. An avid birdwatcher, Wood carried a field guide and binoculars. Gaumond saw the snowy ridges and turned back; Wood continued his walk into the wilderness.
He was never seen again.
The year 2000 would be an election year, and candidates were courting voters and working the press at Unity in 1999. Vice President Al Gore gave a speech; John McCain and George W. Bush, the Republican candidates that year, made brief appearances.
The morning before he set off for Rainier, Wood attended an intimate breakfast with seven other journalists; Cornel West, the former Harvard professor, author, and future presidential candidate; and Bill Bradley, another 2000 Democratic hopeful.
Bradley was challenging Gore, the frontrunner, and Wood was the one who asked the question on everyone’s mind: “ ‘How are you going to distinguish yourself from Gore vis-à-vis the black community, and what makes you think you can win?’ ” West recounted to the New York Observer in 1999. “It was a basic question, but he was the elephant sitting in the room. No one wanted to ask.” It was classic Wood. No wallflower, he was unafraid of confrontation, even among those far more established than himself.
At that time, Wood had recently been in a relationship with Somini Sengupta, a reporter at the New York Times who was also in Seattle for the conference. Also present was Andy Hsiao, his friend and editor from the Village Voice, the venerable alt-weekly where Wood had worked for years before becoming editor of the New Press, a nonprofit book imprint with a social justice mission.
At first Wood’s absence from Unity didn’t draw notice, but as the hours passed, Sengupta became alarmed when he wasn’t answering his cell phone, a still-novel device that hadn’t yet become an extra appendage. She started calling around. No one had seen Wood. By July 12, he hadn’t checked out from the hotel or arrived back in New York. He’d been missing for four days.
Mount Rainier, or Tahoma, as some Indigenous tribes from the region call it, is perhaps the most dangerous mountain in America. In fact, it’s not actually a mountain; it’s an active volcano, or what’s called a stratovolcano. Estimates put its formation at around 32 million years ago, but the picturesque, snowcapped mountain Washington State residents and visitors know today really came into being about 500,000 years ago, according to naturalist Jeff Antonelis-Lapp, author of Tahoma and Its People.
Over the first 100,000 years, eruptions, mud and lava flows, and long glaciation periods coalesced into a majestic stratovolcano. Researchers say that when it bursts again, it won’t look anything like the Mount St. Helens explosion in May 1980, which spewed volcanic ash, killing 57 people and destroying animals, plants, and forests within 230 square miles.
When Tahoma erupts, it will wreak havoc in a way that most people—even most of those living in the Seattle region—have never heard of. The heat and hot air combined with water will weaken the rock and turn it soft and claylike, triggering a lahar—an Indonesian word that translates to “a thousand stampeding water buffalo,” Antonelis-Lapp explains. Lahars are 60-mile-per-hour slides of debris and rock, a natural slurry of earthmade concrete so powerful it will sound like an oncoming train.
About 5,600 years ago, a lahar created the mountain’s current appearance—two snowcapped craters, both more than 1,000 feet in diameter, that loom above the Seattle skyline.
The communities in the Puyallup Valley, which lies northwest of Rainier, even have yearly drills to prepare for a lahar. It will take the schoolchildren of neighboring Orting, Washington, 42 minutes to walk from school through town to get to higher ground; the citizens of Tacoma, 76 miles away, will have about an hour and 15 minutes to reach a safer elevation. The Puyallup River may be overwhelmed, and low-lying homes could be swept away by the lahar.
Wood was born in the Bronx to working-class parents; his father was a corrections officer. He went to Riverdale Country School, a private prep school, before going to Yale. It was at Yale that Wood met many of his future Voice colleagues.
At the Voice, Wood was part of a group of Black writers known colloquially as the “intellectual mafia,” a cohort that included the late cultural writer Greg Tate, New Yorker writer Hilton Als, music critic Nelson George, and fellow Yalies Lisa Jones and Lisa Kennedy (an Alta Journal contributor).
Writer Gary Dauphin also met Wood at Yale, while Wood was shooting a documentary about Black students at the Ivy League school. The project went unfinished after some of his equipment was stolen. “He basically got mugged,” recalls Dauphin, who was a production assistant on the project. “They actually took the media, stole the videos, and they took the cameras. It was a big disaster for him financially, too.”
Wood was five years older than Dauphin and served as his entry to the Voice’s Black intelligentsia, taking him to parties where he met the Lisas as well as other writers, like Donald Suggs and Ben Mapp. At Wood’s urging, Dauphin applied for the Voice’s Minority Writing Fellowship and eventually joined the paper (where I also worked for eight years after Wood left).
“Joe was a real mentor,” says Dauphin, who now lives in Los Angeles. “And Joe was somebody with whom I had an uncomplicated relationship, where I had a lot of complicated relationships with editors and people at the Voice, and was somebody who called me on my bullshit.”
Where others saw straightforward narratives, Wood looked at stories like diamonds—each cut refracting a different truth. Hsiao remembers Wood understanding the Central Park Five case, which involved a group of teenagers wrongly accused of a brutal rape, from an intersectional standpoint long before that word or practice was commonplace, examining both feminist and racial perspectives.
Though Hsiao and Wood were about the same age, Hsiao remembers his colleague as confident and brash, fearless about approaching more established writers like Stanley Crouch, the iconoclastic, volatile columnist who started at the paper writing about jazz and evolved into a rare conservative Black voice at the alt-weekly. (Crouch died in 2020.)
“[Wood] was a super-heady guy, much more advanced than I was in a New York, intellectual, literary way,” Hsiao says. “Everybody who met him was like, Holy shit. He had that sheen to him.”
When Wood walked in to meet Martha Southgate at her office at Essence magazine, she was shocked. Southgate had been reading his Voice pieces, including an article about James Baldwin, and had reached out to him to write for Essence, expecting a veteran man of letters.
Instead, Wood entered, sporting a head of dreadlocks, no older than 24 or 25. “I was truly surprised to have a young person walk in the office.”
The two became close friends, and Wood became her son’s godfather and was at the hospital for the birth of her daughter. Wood convinced the DJ to play N.W.A. at Southgate’s wedding, a small provocation but in keeping with his goal to upend preconceived notions. That was Wood: a Public Enemy fan who was also an avid birder, an Eagle Scout who also stood up to institutions.
“The way he was trying to think about being Black in America was really complicated and sophisticated and nuanced,” Southgate says.
“He was on a public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Stanley Crouch type of path,” says Colson Whitehead, who worked for VLS, the Voice’s literary supplement, before he went on to become a Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist. “It was always much more serious than the stuff I felt I was doing and admirable in that way.”
In just a few years, Wood had developed into a formidable critical thinker. He edited a collection of essays, Malcolm X: In Our Own Image, with selections from Amiri Baraka, West, and Als. In his opening essay, he wrote, “When I was a child I wasn’t Black enough, but Malcolm X helped me turn things around.… Quietly, without fully realizing how much, I began to embrace this thinking, despite its strange incongruity—no one in my Black, working-class neighborhood seemed to be spending much time thinking about America or Blackness.”
In his writing, Wood played with format and tone: for a piece on Sly Stone, he used numbered segments instead of paragraphs throughout. Though the Bay Area music legend proved to be impossible to reach, Wood’s was better than a perfunctory profile. “It’s a story about failure,” Hsiao says.
In “The Yellow Negro,” a piece for Transition, a journal about the African diaspora published by what was then known as Harvard’s W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for Afro-American Research, Wood wrote about traveling to Japan to witness the phenomenon of Japanese youth’s obsession with Black culture and hip-hop, which was sometimes expressed with blackface. “He doesn’t dismiss it as simple racism,” Hsiao says. “It’s some kind of strangely racist love.”
In Japan, Wood watched Brooklyn’s club scene carried out in near-perfect homage thousands of miles away, amazed. He wrote, “Blackfacers are even proud of their assumed skin color. That, of course, is the strangest thing about them: they wear blackface in order to embrace black people.”
“We all understood Joe was like this very hard-charging, radical guy,” says Hsiao. “But then on paper, he was willing to be ambivalent, vulnerable, uncertain, paradoxical, you know? And it was like, Wow.”
For the 1993 debut issue of Vibe, Quincy Jones’s newly launched urban music magazine, Wood went to Seattle to write a piece about the city’s burgeoning underground hip-hop scene. A writer friend connected him to Stranger columnist Charles Mudede, who would show him around. Wood turned up decked out in mid-’90s street style: Timberland boots, a puffy jacket, and baggy jeans.
“It was like somebody just walked off of a video on Yo! MTV Raps,” Mudede says. “He wasn’t in full gear, but the Timberlands stuck out.”
Mudede took Wood to Yesler Terrace, Seattle’s most famous housing project, and Wood was confused. “The yards had flowers in them. Some guy’s making a sculpture,” Mudede laughs. “He couldn’t believe it. He turned this into a criticism of Seattle.”
Indeed, Wood’s piece took note of the city’s anemic scene—though it had talented rappers, it didn’t have the grit or racial diversity of New York.
Despite what Mudede saw as the article’s shortcomings, he and Wood formed a long-distance friendship.
When Wood next visited Seattle, Mudede took him on a tour of a new online bookseller called Amazon, whose campus was then nestled on top of Beacon Hill in an old hospital building. “It was then emerging as one of the first big e-commerce companies. And that was just before the dot-com crash,” Mudede says. “He was really impressed. It was the only moment he gave Seattle some credit.”
In 1999, when the Unity conference came to town, the two writers were supposed to get together, but when Wood didn’t show up or return his emails, Mudede was perplexed.
“And then I got a call from a friend at night: ‘Have you watched the news? There’s a guy who went missing on Mount Rainier. And it sounds like your friend.’ ”
Rainier’s ability to swallow people up whole is well-known by locals. Type “Mount Rainier” and “hiker” into Google and you will find countless stories about someone going missing or found dead there.
“I call it a huge tombstone,” Mudede says. “People die up there all the time. And it’s easy to fall into one of those crevices and be frozen.”
One of the deadliest days on Rainier was June 21, 1981. Six professional mountaineers guided 23 novice climbers up the mountain. With only a single day of training, they attempted to ascend the area known as Disappointment Cleaver, 12,300 feet high. Some of the hikers, too tired to summit, made their way down the mountain, and when the guides determined after two feet of fresh snow had fallen that the hike was too dangerous, the rest of the group began a descent to the flats, a few thousand feet below. Suddenly, a 300-foot-wide piece of the Ingraham Glacier split and triggered an avalanche, covering the entire group. Eleven climbers died, buried under ice in a crevasse. A sudden storm with white-out conditions hampered rescue efforts.
Mount Rainier is the most glaciated mountain in the continental United States, with 25 named glaciers covering about 35 square miles of its surface. The natural state of Rainier is one of constant turmoil made worse by climate change, which spurs the massive bodies of ice to melt and recede faster, even as the region gets more rain, triggering mudslides and avalanches. Antonelis-Lapp calls the glaciers “the glue” of the mountain: their ice formations hold together the rock and gravel that make up the landmass. As glaciers melt, more debris shakes loose. Gravity does the rest. The scientific term for this process is aggradation.
A day-tripper like Wood probably wouldn’t have considered melting snow or even that there’d be snow at all in July. During summer in Seattle, temperatures can reach the 70s or 80s, but on Rainier, the temperature can be cooler or hotter, depending on elevation. Although he was an Eagle Scout, Wood had very little nature experience outside of birding, according to several friends. A Seattle Times article noted that he’d been to Mount St. Helens earlier in the ’90s. Wood had also recently learned he had a heart problem and was considering getting a pacemaker.
A city dweller, Wood might have been unaware of the “10 essentials” for safe hiking: insulation for warmth, a flashlight or illumination for darkness, sun protection (like sunglasses, a hat, and sunscreen), a navigation tool (some sort of GPS or, before the widespread adoption of that, a map), a first aid kit, fire starters, a small repair kit that includes duct tape and a multitool, food, hydration, and shelter. It wouldn’t have occurred to Wood to tell people exactly where he was going and when to expect his return. He’d told only one casual acquaintance he was going to Rainier that morning.
Most of the people who die on Mount Rainier or other West Coast mountains like Los Angeles’s Mount Baldy are not trying to summit the peak. Many perish in accidents like slipping and falling, then drowning or getting stuck in a crevasse.
The British actor Julian Sands disappeared on Mount Baldy on January 13, 2023, but owing to the extreme “atmospheric rivers” California experienced during the winter and spring, the search and rescue operation was halted until the summer. After eight different searches came up empty, day hikers discovered his remains.
Like Rainier, Baldy is a short drive from a major metropolis and attracts hikers who are not as prepared as they should be. Though Sands was reportedly a more experienced hiker than Wood, the people who found his remains were aghast to discover he was wearing all black instead of something more visible, like orange; lacked a satellite messaging device to call for help; and had only microspikes on his shoes, not the crampons required for thick ice in steep conditions.
More than 425 fatalities have been recorded on Rainier since 1897, and only 90 or so of those were during summit attempts. Many deaths are random, including a surprising number due to car accidents and small-plane crashes.
Most deaths on the mountain are simple mistakes. Among the millions of annual visitors, many of whom are tourists and day hikers, there is a naïveté about Rainier’s true power. Snow, torrential rains, lightning, and high winds can occur without warning, surprising even seasoned mountaineers.
And then, there are the earthquakes. Mount Rainier has its own fault line, called the Western Rainier Seismic Zone. An earthquake could trigger an eruption, which could result in a lahar, avalanches, and general destruction.
Outsiders “don’t understand that we actually do live near nature. This is the thing that people don’t quite get about us, about our region,” Mudede says. “It’s not a park. This is the real thing. When you go up there, you’re meeting nature. And you’re going to meet its forces and its changes and all these problems. There’s actual wilderness here.”
For Wood’s friends, family, and former colleagues in New York, his lack of preparation seemed too simple an explanation. Maybe, some posited, Wood’s disappearance was the result of foul play.
In 1998, the year before the Unity ’99 convention took place, an initiative on the ballot in Washington State to ban affirmative action was approved, giving many attendees pause. Some wanted to boycott or change venues in response.
While the city of Seattle is racially and politically diverse, the surrounding areas are far whiter and more conservative. The Pacific Northwest, in general, is a notoriously white place. At its inception, Oregon wrote a Black exclusion law into its constitution, banning Black people from living within its borders. In 2000, Washington State was 81.8 percent white compared to 68 percent in New York. To this day, there are right-wing militias in the area surrounding Seattle.
“This big minority journalist convention kind of invaded town, and we were like, ‘Oh my God, this is like a white, white world,’ ” Hsiao says. “Especially people like us from New York City. So there’s already this feeling, especially among certain folks, that this is a hostile environment.”
So, was Joe Wood’s disappearance tied to racism? Had he met someone on the trail who didn’t like the way he looked? Wood’s disappearance holds enough intrigue that, decades later, it’s been the subject of murder-mystery blogs and podcasts trying to gin up dark theories besides the cruelty of Mother Nature. In a 2020 Orion magazine piece, poet Major Jackson wrote—without offering any evidence—that he believed Wood was murdered. (A friend of Wood’s, the novelist Lynne Tillman, left a comment on the story agreeing with the dangers of hiking while Black but strongly disagreeing with Jackson’s suspicion.)
Wood’s disappearance was disturbing enough that Faith Childs, his literary agent, hired a private investigator. The discovery of his car nearly a week after he had gone missing kicked off a frantic search effort.
The search team thought they caught a major break when hiker Gaumond, after seeing a small story in one of the local newspapers and recognizing Wood’s photograph, told park rangers that he had crossed paths with the missing person. He remembered Wood as looking like a birdwatcher. Hsiao got in touch with Gaumond and learned that he’d seen Wood at a higher elevation, 4,800 feet, and literally off the beaten path, not on a marked trail.
After Wood’s disappearance, Hsiao wrote in the Voice that he understood why friends were perplexed about Wood climbing so high up the mountain, hiking three-plus hours, venturing past the dogwood and lush landscape and Douglas fir to the clearing where he encountered Gaumond. There, “four- to six-foot-high compacted snow blankets the steep landscape, obscuring the trails.”
Hsiao, Sengupta, and other loved ones converged on Seattle for a week of search and rescue efforts. At the peak of the search, there were as many as 38 people looking for Wood, including volunteers, rangers, and friends and family, plus five dogs and a helicopter.
The team was hampered by an onslaught of rain and cold weather. That winter had seen record amounts of rainfall, creating a large, melting snowpack that would have erased his steps. The search didn’t begin until a week after his disappearance, and with each day, the likelihood of finding him alive diminished.
For a week, the rescue team climbed the trail to retrace the steps Wood may have taken. The New Yorkers saw how dangerous Rainier was with their own eyes. “Stupid city slicker that I am, I had no idea that you could die a thousand different ways up there, right?” Hsiao says. “Then learning, too—Why isn’t this trail better marked? Why is it so wild up here? And the rangers saying, ‘We have an ethic here at Mount Rainier to keep it wild.’ It’s a different relationship to nature. And all of that was news to me.”
Eventually, Wood’s father gathered the friends and family and gave a speech—“one of the saddest things I’ve ever heard,” Hsiao recalls—telling everyone, “We have to face reality and we just have to stop.”
During one of their search hikes on Mount Rainier, Hsiao and Sengupta climbed the trail and left a token for their friend underneath a dwarf dogwood tree. It’s a tree that flowers even in the depths of winter. Sengupta dug a hole and buried an earring for Wood.
At the time of his disappearance, Wood had been writing a nonfiction book about the Black family, using his own as the centerpiece. This would’ve been a deeply personal work that exposed his family’s secrets, his friends say. Wood had conducted hours of interviews with his relatives, but he hadn’t had a chance to process the material. His parents, both of whom have since passed, held on to his computer and the material for years. His mother held out hope that her son would be found for so long that there was no memorial until about a year after his disappearance, when one was held at the Schomburg Center in Harlem. “The book he was working on, I think, would have been really remarkable,” says Southgate.
Mudede thinks Wood hadn’t yet reached the heights of what he could really be as a writer. “I wonder where his career would have gone. We were still trying to figure out what we were going to do. He was just a really smart guy and a great observer of American culture. I always thought he hadn’t done his best work.”
“He was, and could have been, one of the most brilliant American writers of all time,” Hsiao says. “I had a feeling like, Oh my gosh, this is kind of like what it’s like to meet [James] Baldwin when he’s 30 years old.”
Yet Baldwin lived into his 60s, and his writing became a touchstone for generations of writers and activists. Wood, much of whose work was done in the predigital era and is not available online, has been deprived of similar posthumous renown.
Instead we’re left with a series of what-ifs: What if he had completed his book about the Black family? What if he had witnessed the Obama presidency and Black Lives Matter? What if he’d seen the centering of more Black voices in journalism and publishing? What if he hadn’t gone hiking on Mount Rainier?
If he hadn’t, then Joe Wood would be 58 years old, an eminence like the ones he sparred with in his Voice days, and we’d know some of the answers to those questions. Instead, we can only gaze at Mount Rainier’s snowcapped summit—that “huge tombstone”—and wonder.•
This piece originally appeared on Alta Magazine.