Kevin Bardsley still occasionally visits that unnamed lake in the High Uinta Mountains where he last saw his son Garrett almost three years ago.
"I spend time up there; not really searching, but I feel closer to Garrett when I'm there," Bardsley said, emotion tinging the edge of his voice. "It's like what someone would feel visiting a grave."
Garrett Bardsley, 12 years old, left his father at that lake in August 2004 to return to a campsite just a few hundred yards away. He was never seen again, and two major searches have yielded no trace of what happened.
The Bardsley family was devastated but determined to preserve Garrett's memory. Within months of Garrett's disappearance, the Garrett Bardsley Foundation was up and running. Six months later, a school bearing Garrett's name was built in Ecuador. Within a year, Kevin Bardsley had formed a well-trained search team with the intention of saving other families from the grief his has endured.
Reader's Digest did a story on Kevin Bardsley and his work with the foundation last year for its monthly Hometown Heroes feature. In a readers' poll conducted earlier this year, readers voted Bardsley as the Hero of the Year.
"I was very surprised," Bardsley said. "I was honored, but surprised. My first reaction to the whole thing is that I'm not a hero. I'm just an average guy that wants to help people any way that I can. ... It's a great honor, but there's a lot of people who receive this with me; all those who have helped build the foundation."
The foundation has since built a second school in Ecuador; a third is planned to go up in December.
But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the foundation's work is in forming a well-trained and well-equipped group of searchers to help in other search efforts. Less than a year after Garrett disappeared, Bardsley was back in that same mountain range as a key figure in the search for another lost boy, Brennan Hawkins.
That search had a happy ending: Hawkins was found on the fourth day. Bardsley has also helped in the search for Destiny Norton, who was kidnapped last summer in Salt Lake City, and had offered the foundation's services to searchers looking for a lost young boy in North Carolina this week. He was found Tuesday before Bardsley heard back.
"The main reason we do it is to keep a remembrance of Garrett alive and to make something out of a real bad situation," Bardsley said.
Helping search for others helps his family heal, Bardsley said, but he said the family's faith has been the biggest source of healing.
"Faith has been the main key," he said. "I don't think I could have lived or gone through this experience the same way without it."
With that in mind, the foundation's efforts are more about passing on the kindness his family received, Bardsley said.
"We had a lot of people help us in our time of need," he said. "There's no way we could ever repay the kindness we were given. The only thing we can do to is give to others."
E-mail: jtwitchell@desnews.com