Seven months ago Esther vanished on a solo trek in the Pyrenees. Matthew Campbell joins the search.
Almost two miles up, I am standing on a knife-edge, the last hurdle before the summit, uncertain if I should go on. The flanks of this snow-draped mountain spine plunge almost vertically into Spain on one side and to France on the other. A fall could be fatal: I wonder if this is where it ended for Esther.
Esther Dingley, 37, a British backpacker and blogger, climbed up here alone in November and has not been seen since. Her 38-year-old partner of two decades, Dan Colegate, is trying to find her. I tread warily after him as he scampers along the ridge, sure-footed as a mountain goat, to the summit, where the love of his life posted her last selfie on social media before disappearing.
A solitary vulture circles above. We sit on a rock, catching our breath, taking in the view. Colegate, a thoughtful, softly spoken travel writer with a ginger beard, has been devastated by Dingley's disappearance. "Just for a moment I visualised her standing there," he says. "It knots my stomach." He gets up and walks further along the ridge, disappearing behind another rock. The previous day, he had told me, "I can't imagine any pleasure in a future that doesn't involve Esther." For a troubling moment I wonder if he, too, is about to vanish into thin air. After a minute he returns: "I had a little cry."
What happened to Dingley? It is as much of a mystery today as when Colegate reported her missing more than seven months ago. Was she abducted? Or did she disappear of her own volition? If she had jumped to her death, suffered an accident or been attacked by a wild animal — or hit by a hunter's stray bullet — the chances are that her body would have been found. But searches last year by French and Spanish rescue teams, involving foot patrols, dogs and helicopters, found no trace of her before being halted by snow in December. Now that it is melting and the helicopters can scan the slopes once more, Ria Bryant, Dingley's mother, has rented a home in Benasque, the small Spanish town in the Pyrenees where Dingley was based before she disappeared.
Speaking publicly for the first time about the ordeal, Bryant, 74, seems resigned to the worst. "I find it quite painful being here. I do not seem to be able to sleep but I want to go to the place where they find her," she says. She does not feel strong enough to join Colegate and me on the hike up the 9,000ft Pico de Salvaguardia, from where her daughter posted her last photos, smiling brightly with distant mountain peaks reflected in her dark glasses. One of the pictures was accompanied by the words: "I am in heaven."
Standing on what feels like the roof of the world, I can understand her elation. Colegate, in a white baseball cap, takes out a telescope to scan a neighbouring peak where several chamois, a goat-antelope native to the Pyrenees, can be seen grazing amid giant blocks of snow.
"It's very difficult to process something when you don't know what's happened," he says. "My feeling is I'm very much in limbo."
He and Dingley had been together since meeting at Oxford University, where they were studying chemistry 20 years ago. He'd summoned the courage to kiss her for the first time one evening on her doorstep in 2001 and remembers asking: "What does this mean? Anything or nothing? She replied, 'Something.' " He adds coyly: "It went from there."
In 2014 a near-death experience when he was stricken with necrotising fasciitis — a rare bacterial infection — prompted them to opt out of the rat race: they rented out their flat in Durham and spent almost seven years travelling around Europe in a motorhome, blogging and writing books about their cycling and hiking adventures. Occasionally they would spend time apart: in the summer of 2019 Dingley had walked 362km in a month in the Pyrenees, accompanied by two dogs.
"Esther was very, very comfortable and competent in the mountains. These trails wouldn't have troubled her," he says. "It doesn't mean she couldn't have slipped — but if she slipped, where is she? That's what I can't get my head around."
Dingley was well equipped for the climb. Colegate thinks something sinister may have befallen her — and police have not ruled anything out.
Inevitably, as her partner, he was the first focus of a missing persons inquiry that was opened shortly after the search for her ended last year. "It was tiring," he says, recalling being questioned for a whole day by police who turned up at the couple's French house-sit, a gîte in a village 160km north of the Pyrenees, where he was waiting for Dingley to come home. "They searched the house, looked in all the wardrobes, pulled the cover off the swimming pool," he says. "They went through everything."
They quickly established from analysis of his mobile phone data and credit card transactions that he had not budged from the village. "I was glad they got it out of the way," he says. "But I never felt like a suspect. I couldn't possibly have had anything to do with Esther's disappearance. I was 100 miles away, with only a push bike for transport."
He recalls a final video call he had with Dingley as she stood on the summit on the afternoon of November 22. She had sounded excited at the prospect of returning to him in three days. When she failed to show up on November 25, he called the Spanish Guardia Civil to report her missing. Police in Benasque knocked on the door of the vehicle that she had left in the municipal car park before setting off on her trek. She was not there.
Her exact route up the mountain is well known — she passed several other hikers, all of whom have been quizzed by police. The mystery is where she went after reaching the summit.
She and Colegate were in the habit of sending numerous messages, pictures and songs to each other when apart. In some of their last exchanges on November 22, Dingley said she was planning to cross into France that evening and worried that she might not have any mobile phone signal.
The idea was to spend the night at an isolated, unmanned French mountain shelter, Refuge de Venasque, before continuing back into Spain to the motorhome the next day. Police have determined that while on the Pico de Salvaguardia she made a Google search to find out more about the refuge. "Hoping refuge Venasque has a winter room," she wrote in a WhatsApp message to Colegate, adding: "Keep you posted when can. Love you xxx". Just after 9pm that evening, he wrote to her from the gîte: "Love you very much my angel x". He assumed she would be curled up in her sleeping bag at the refuge: "Imagining you safe and warm somewhere beautiful".
He does not know if she saw these messages — they got one tick on his phone instead of the usual two to show they had been received. Nor is it known if she ever got to the refuge.
Ringed by snow-clad summits, Benasque is a magnet for hikers and mountaineers. When I visit in June the town is preparing for the Benasque Mountains Grand Marathon. Participants are told to bring a survival blanket and emergency whistle, a reminder of how treacherous the conditions can be. Few in Benasque have more experience than its mayor, Ignacio Abadias, a keen mountaineer who boasts of knowing all of the town's 2,300 inhabitants by their first name.
Each summer the mountains exact a heavy toll, he tells me — a handful of deaths as well as multiple accidents. These often involve climbers who have suffered broken limbs after venturing onto glaciers without the right gear, prompting several helicopter rescues a week. "It's a luxury service we provide here," Abadias chuckles.
Disappearing without trace is unusual, however. He grimly recalls how, in the 1970s, rescuers found the frozen, perfectly preserved body of an Austrian climber who had vanished on a glacier near Benasque 150 years earlier. Over the years other visitors have disappeared, probably after slipping into crevasses. But there are no crevasses on Pico de Salvaguardia and if Dingley had suffered an accident there, Abadias believes rescuers would have found her by now. He pauses before adding: "It's a bit macabre but a tell-tale sign of an animal dying on the mountain are big numbers of vultures circling in one place. We haven't seen anything like that this time."
He thinks Dingley may have chosen to disappear.
Everyone I meet in the town knows about the inglesa desaparecida and few believe she suffered an accident. "We always tell guests to be careful, the mountains can be dangerous," says Piedad Garcia, a hotel owner. "We tell people to let us know where they are going. But it's really odd they haven't found this girl. It's hard to disappear in the place she was walking in. Some people choose to disappear."
Dingley and Colegate each had a credit card attached to a joint bank account that police have been monitoring. A transaction on Dingley's card a few days after she vanished set alarm bells ringing. But it turned out to be an automatic payment to Amazon after a month's trial period expired.
Dingley's mother, an elegant, blonde-haired woman in spectacles, scoffs at the idea of her daughter going off to start a new life without telling her or Colegate. "That wouldn't be Esther at all," she says. "She wasn't only my daughter, she was my best friend. We've always had a very open relationship, we share even the most private things." Besides, she adds, "I found it incredible how well she and Dan got on — Esther was the busy bee, meeting people, planning where they were going, what they were doing. He was the practical one. They connected."
Colegate, similarly, cannot imagine his soul mate deciding to start a new life without telling him and her mother. "Esther is such a socially responsible person — she can't pass a piece of litter without picking it up," he says. "The idea that she would precipitate a massive search and rescue operation and an international police investigation because she felt like going off-grid for a bit would be total anathema to her." He adds: "If Esther wanted time on her own, she just had to say the words, 'I feel like a bit of time to myself' — that's it. She knew that, because that's what she was doing."
What, I ask, if she had met another man?
"Even if she met the most charming person in the world and ran off to Hawaii, she would have told her mum," Colegate replies.
Nor does he believe that Dingley, who had suffered from depression before they set off on their travels in 2014, took her own life. "Esther would not leave her family or myself in the dark like this," he says. "The idea that she would harm herself at a time in her life when she was happy and had so much opportunity ahead of her, and do so in a way that she would be completely vanished, doesn't fit."
Phil Ash, a fellow chemist from their Oxford days and one of Dingley's closest friends, corroborates his account. Now a chemistry lecturer at Leicester University, Ash had a video call with Dingley about a week before she disappeared. "She was telling me how wonderful it was in the mountains," he says, "and how much she was loving her adventure and how much she was looking forward to meeting Dan back in France."
Witnesses questioned by police include hikers who had crossed paths with Dingley. One was Marti Vigo del Arco, a Spanish former Olympic skier who remembers the English woman asking him and his girlfriend if they had any fruit — they did not. It was around 3pm and he remembers thinking it was a little late in the day to be heading up to the summit.
Having reached the peak at around 4pm, however, Dingley still had well over an hour of light to make it to the cabin in the next valley. "In any case, she had head torches," Colegate says. "She would have seen where she was going." Abadias, the mayor of Benasque, agrees: "The path is easy."
From Pico de Salvaguardia the cabin refuge is clearly visible, nestling on a lake shore. We carefully make our way along the path to a giant V-shaped gap in the mountain ramparts that marks the border with France. There are no guards or customs posts up here. In the 19th century, goods including pianos and kitchen units were smuggled by mule over the pass from the French town of Bagnères-de-Luchon to Benasque. This was also a popular route into France for Republicans fleeing General Franco's firing squads in the Spanish Civil War, and for Jews, downed British pilots and other fugitives from Nazism travelling out of occupied France in the Second World War.
Trying to keep up with the hyper-fit Colegate as we descend into France, I am soon out of breath. Having spotted an unusual object on a neighbouring hillside, I ask to borrow the telescope — a pretext also for a rest. The object turns out to be nothing more mysterious than a rock. "This whole area was searched back in November before the snow arrived," he says. "The search helicopters get so close they see butterflies floating around the rocks."
He has scrutinised every inch of the map, trying to imagine where Dingley might have gone. The day after he reported her missing he rented a car and drove to the Pyrenees to explain her planned itinerary to French and Spanish police. In co-ordination with them he conducted his own searches, returning to France when the weather closed in.
He and his father, Mick, a bus driver who had flown out from Nottingham to be with him, were returning from the supermarket to the gîte when they spotted a couple of strangers outside.
"At first we thought they were journalists and my dad was about to tell them to shove off when they showed us their badges," Colegate says. It was the French police. "They wanted to know where I had been. Why I didn't go with Esther on the trip. Why was she travelling alone. How much in contact were we. They took my passwords, my laptop, a copy of my phone, basically. They were there all day."
He expresses irritation over a French police spokesman's comments, reported in the British press, that he and Dingley had been going through a rough patch in their relationship. "He said something like, 'Their life wasn't as idyllic as it seemed on social media,' " he recalls, adding: "Whose is?"
Among witnesses interviewed by police was Laura Adomaityte, 27, who had hiked with Dingley a few days before her disappearance. She was reported to have claimed the English woman was wrestling with difficult choices. Colegate says that was typical: "Esther wears her heart on her sleeve, she's an open book. She is very reflective, very introspective. She may have given the impression that things are uncertain."
Life in the motorhome, he admits, was sometimes difficult. "We had to grapple with the realities of living 24 hours a day in a box. We had to work on our communications." According to Bryant, suggestions of conflict had been "blown out of all proportion". She says: "It's hurtful the things they've written. Dan and Esther were a great team."
Temperamentally, they were worlds apart. Colegate is, by his own admission, an introvert: "Given a choice between spending the evening with a group of strangers or sitting around reading a book, I'd take the book." Dingley, who was born in Naarden, Holland, was more outgoing. "She had this way with people. They just take to her," he says. "In terms of approaching people, she was quite uninhibited. It seemed to make people feel good, it was quite a gift. One I don't have."
Bryant describes an intensely energetic only child who "lived her life three times over in a single day". She was a "chatty person who loves meeting new people, hearing people's stories. She connected with people, with empathy and compassion."
Could this "gift", as Colegate calls it, have backfired and got her into trouble?
Though in some ways opposites, Colegate and Dingley had much in common. They were both athletes, Colegate a talented ice hockey player and Dingley a champion rower who represented Great Britain in the Junior European Cup. She got into rowing at Headington School in Oxfordshire, which had been recommended to the family after Bryant discovered that her daughter was severely dyslexic. "After two years at the local school, she still couldn't spell 'bed'." The new school paid off: "At long last, Esther felt she was understood. She had an extremely bright mind."
So did Colegate. At Chilwell comprehensive school near Nottingham, he kept his academic goals to himself "so as not to stand out". "I didn't even tell my parents when I went down for interview at Oxford. I just bought a train ticket and went," he says.
They were a typical student couple at Oxford. "We went interrailing that first summer in 2002," he says. "It was very much Esther's idea. She had a passion for travel." He soon discovered that he did too. They both graduated from Oxford with firsts — a feat all the more remarkable for Dingley, who had switched from chemistry to economics. They launched into postgraduate studies at Durham, where they bought their first house together, and later secured academic posts at Cambridge University.
They began dabbling in business, setting up an online employment network for academics. Dingley also worked as a personal trainer and university researcher. For all their hard work, though, these high-achievers felt unfulfilled. "There was a lot of stress, houses, mortgages, work, feeling at loggerheads with each other, but underneath it all still knowing we were totally in love and we were trying to rediscover those two young people who just wanted to travel together," Colegate says.
The couple did not want to have children: "The argument 'it's what you do' is not good enough to create a person," he says, adding that Dingley's reluctance might have stemmed from her childhood health issues. "She had eczema covering her entire body and had to be hospitalised as a toddler."
Colegate had also suffered severe health issues: a birth defect had left him plagued with bowel incontinence. He had undergone various corrective surgeries. None worked. In 2014 the couple had planned to marry. But a month before, just as they were discussing table decorations, Colegate suffered a scare that almost cost him his life: a part of his stomach where he had been operated on had "split open", he recalls, becoming severely infected. He was rushed to hospital. After an emergency operation the surgeon told Dingley things were "touch and go", urging her to say a "proper goodbye" in case he did not survive. It changed their lives. "It really shook us up," Dingley said in an interview about their travels and writing projects with BBC Radio Tees a few weeks before she disappeared. "We decided to go and do some of the things we'd been dreaming of."
They packed up their belongings, stored them in a friend's attic and rented out their Durham flat. They bought a motorhome, which they christened Homer, and set off across the Channel to France.
"It was a real honeymoon period," Colegate says. "It was new, living in a van together all the time. We had no work stress, enough money in the bank not to worry about it, enough coming in from rental — everything was set up, stable, everything just flowed that first year, it was effortless."
Life became more complicated when they adopted Leela, a stray dog they found in Spain. She promptly had six puppies. They ended up starring in Puppy Pack, a series of canine adventures for children that were written by Colegate and edited by Dingley. Like Colegate's travel books, they were self-published on Amazon. The books brought in £50-£100 ($100 - $200) a month, topping up the rent they earned from their flat.
One problem concerned the dogs. "Four years on the road with the dogs was getting a bit much," Bryant says. "Esther's main stress [was] trying to find good homes for them." Visiting the UK last year, the couple left Leela and one of her puppies with Phil Ash. They left one dog with another friend and one more with Bryant. Back in the van, they embarked on a 1,600km journey across the Alps before returning to France, where they moved into a friend's gîte, agreeing to help with the upkeep. They intended to return to the UK to collect some of the dogs before the end of the year.
By October, Dingley was planning her next solo adventure, a return to the Pyrenees. "She couldn't wait to get back there," says her mother. "Her eczema symptoms would disappear after a couple of days in the mountains. That's partly what drew her there."
Dingley's independent streak reminds Bryant of her own adventures as a younger woman. "In my early twenties I'd go off in my Triumph Herald, no map or telephone," she says. Later she would organise holidays to France in a camper van for herself, Esther and Esther's stepfather, Terry.
She was sad to see less of her daughter when she began travelling. "At a certain moment, though, you've got to let your children do their own thing," she says. "I've got no regrets, we've had a wonderful life. I ask myself all the time, would Esther want me to be sad, to be crying like this? She'd say, 'No, Mum. We need to look after ourselves.' "
We cross a patch of slushy snow and arrive at the refuge to find two French workmen with weathered faces having lunch at a table outside. "We're laying the foundations for an extension," says one in a yellow helmet. I open the cabin door to peer into the gloom. The only furniture is a bunk bed and a table covered in empty bottles. There does not appear to be any visitors' book, let alone a guardian. My phone, I notice, has no signal.
I wonder if Dingley spent the night here — and whether she was alone in the cabin. It is about an hour's walk from the nearest road and in an area frequented by hunters — chamois are highly prized in local gastronomy. "She may have been forced to go with someone at gunpoint," Colegate says. "A horrifying prospect, but it does mean there's a part of me in my gut that feels Esther could still be out there, alive. Part of me requires a seed of hope just to get up each day."
After last year's search he returned to the UK to join his mother, a retired administrative assistant, in lockdown in his native Nottingham. He came back to France in March to resume his quest. The couple's motorhome is still parked in a police compound in Benasque as evidence. He drove out from the UK in another van that he bought from his brother.
Outside the refuge I peer into the turquoise lake. French police are planning to search it. The water is clear but deep. I wonder if it holds any secrets.
Back in Benasque after our 12km walk, Colegate pulls out his laptop to show a dense web of red lines marking all the routes he has hiked. He points to a map of the valley beneath the cabin — Dingley's expected path the day after she went missing. It would have taken her close to the Hospice de France, another refuge that has been closed recently for renovation. It has a shop — and is on a road. "Esther would have seen this building in the distance, she may have been tempted to check it out, perhaps she wanted to buy a bit of fruit," he says. "It would not have been a very big detour from the westward route back into Spain."
What Dingley ate has become a focus of interest. She and Colegate followed a vegetarian diet, largely because of Dingley's eczema. According to Colegate, Dingley took "superfoods" and vitamins with her on hikes, but liked to supplement these with fresh food when possible. "She loves her rocket," he says. Adomaityte, who went on one walk with her, said she had been surprised to see how little food Dingley carried and shared provisions with her. But Colegate calls this a "red herring", adding: "Esther knew better than most how to fuel her body and how to look after herself, underlined by the many much more demanding solo trips she had safely completed."
Dingley is known to have hitchhiked the few kilometres from Benasque to the start of her climb to the Pico de Salvaguardia — the driver has given testimony to police. Did she hitchhike again on the French side of the border?
She had started her solo adventure in France and crossed into Spain only when France declared a second national lockdown on October 29. Technically, that meant hiking on the French side of the mountain was outlawed. It may have made locals who recognised Dingley from the photograph reluctant to come forward for fear of being accused of breaking the lockdown.
"It needs to be looked into," Colegate says. "If she went to the Hospice de France or the shop to get something to eat, she may have come into contact with people."
Police say the chances of finding Dingley will increase along with the influx of climbers this summer. "We'll get information that could help us," says Jorge Ramos of Spain's elite mountain rescue unit. "It's when most people are walking in the mountains."
Colegate will be among them. "I'll keep going until I can look at the map and say, 'She's not there,' " he says. "I'll keep going until there's nowhere to look."
Final texts from the summit
Esther Dingley sent a photograph and text message to Dan Colegate from the 9,000ft Pico de Salvaguardia at about 3.30pm on November 22. It read: "I'm on a col/peak so can't stop for too long. Can't wait to read all your messages. Love you very much XXX having a really good time".
About 35 minutes later she wrote that she was heading for the Port de la Glere mountain pass the next day. She added: "Might dip into France. Hoping Refuge Venasque has a winter room. Keep you posted when can. Love you xxx".
Written by: Matthew Campbell
© The Times of London
