When Kinsley Rolph first met her boyfriend Hunter Lewis at Utah’s Zion National Park, it was love at first sight.
“It was an instant connection,” the 20-year-old Boston-native recalls about that October 2020 day. “We just clicked. He understood me and I understood him. A week later he asked me to be his girlfriend and the rest was history.”
While many people saw being stuck at home during the pandemic as a curse, Rolph and Hunter thought of it as a blessing, spending every minute they possibly could together, she said.
“Even during class we would be together cuddling,” said Rolph, a junior majoring in broadcast journalism at Chapman University in Orange County. “I knew he was the love of my life and he knew that as well.”
But ever since Hunter, a 21-year-old Cal State Long Beach student majoring in aerospace engineering, went missing on Dec. 30, 2021, while planning a treasure hunt in Northern California for friends and family, those closest to him have been trying to deal with the reality that they may never see him again.
“I try and breathe a lot and think into the present,” Rolph said. “But I miss him more and more every day.”
Born on Sept. 15, 2000, Hunter Nathaniel Lewis is remembered by friends and family as an enthusiastic student who wore his heart on his sleeve, often putting others’ needs before his. So much so that when the pandemic forced everyone inside, he began thinking of ways he could get everyone outside while still social distancing.
Early on in the pandemic, Hunter got the idea of creating a treasure hunt, an idea inspired by his father Corey, who had done one for him and his brother Bodie a couple of years ago.
Rolph was alongside him every day as he hatched his elaborate idea. He researched the history of Humboldt for places to hide clues, read up on cyphers and created riddles that participants would need to solve in order to get the treasure.
At the root of it all was a family lore he created called “The Lost Lewis Treasure,” a tale that his father believes prophesied Hunter’s disappearance.
On Christmas day 2021, about 20 participants, made up of friends and family, received letters saying that they were the inheritors of the lost Lewis treasure. The letter said a Lewis family member was lost at sea one day and with them, their treasure. Now it was up to the recipient of those letters to work together to solve the clues and win the treasure.
The first four days of the treasure hunt, Hunter watched as his friends and family relentlessly worked to solve riddles and find the next clue. The clues were scattered all across Humboldt County, from an abandoned train trestle to low caves that required rappelling.
“He was a very creative person,” his father Corey said. “We were all having a great time doing it.”
On Dec. 30, 2021, Hunter went on a mission to place the final treasure, about $200 to $250 made up of the participants’ $10 entry fees and $50 he placed into the pot himself. When Corey and Rolph did not hear back from Hunter by 4 p.m., the time he said he would call, they called the police.
Volunteers showed up as early as 7 a.m. for several days to look for what, at the time, they believed was a lost hiker. Eventually, the family noticed their canoe was missing and realized he had gone out to the ocean.
For two weeks, volunteers helped his family comb Humboldt County’s beaches, rock climbers searched caves and surfers paddled in the ocean for any signs of his body.
With Corey and Rolph having no luck finding Hunter and hope dwindling, they turned to the treasure hunt in hopes that it would answer their questions.
Through Hunter’s clues, they determined that he was headed to place the final treasure on Flatiron Rock, a small island about a quarter of a mile off the coast of Trinidad in Northern California. His father believes that Hunter’s canoe capsized when he came across a shallow rocky reef that can only be seen during low tide.
Scuba and sonar teams were sent out to the area but they didn’t find anything, Corey said.
“At this point because of the waves and the ocean currents, it’s likely that we will never recover a body,” he said.
On Monday, Feb. 7, Corey was at CSULB for a memorial honoring his son. Dozens of people who had been inspired by Hunter’s determination attended the event where Corey and Rolph shared their favorite memories of their loved one.
Fighting through waves of grief that come and go, Corey said he continues to take time each day to look fondly back at the memories he shared with his son.
“He was just a wild kid, so full of life,” said Corey, recalling the time we would take his sons to Humboldt State to do parkour. “Children often look up to their parents but I looked up to him. He made me want to be a better person.”
By the time he was 21, Hunter was well on his way to accomplish his dream of becoming the first person to terraform Mars, believing that if the red planet could become habitable then it would teach humans how to heal Earth.
He was the president of CSULB’s American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, where his peers agreed to keep him as chair until the end of his term this semester amidst his disappearance.
“Last time I talked to him on Zoom, I remember him saying, ‘Bye I’ll talk to you over break, I’ll see soon,’ and that didn’t happen,” AIAA vice chair and friend Michael Nightingale said. “It sticks with me, the smile he had when he said that.”
Hunter had also already obtained his pilot’s license, was certified in scuba diving and was ready to start astronaut training after being accepted into NASA’s PoSSUM Scientist Astronaut Program.
But the bigger picture was still ahead of him as Hunter planned to propose to Rolph after they graduated in 2023. They talked about moving to Colorado and eventually starting a family. They wanted a girl named Marceline and a boy named Maverick, after Tom Cruise in Top Gun.
“He was very much in love with Kinsley,” Corey said. And everyone saw just how much.
But through it all, the tragedy has only brought Corey’s and Rolph’s families closer together. They remember Hunter’s laughter and the bright smile on his face. She’s even built an “island” in her room made up of her favorite mementos from Hunter. It includes love letters that he wrote to her every week, his clothes and the heart-shaped key that led them to the final treasure.
“We joke that one of the treasures he would have wanted is the friends that we found along the way,” Rolph said with a small chuckle that quickly subsided.
But the hard days aren’t over, she said. A little over a month since Hunter’s disappearance, Rolph says she doesn’t feel like herself.
“What’s helping me get through this is reminding myself of what he would want and he would tell me to get sleep and that helped me sleep,” Rolph said. “I dream about him every night and sometimes I don’t want to wake up because there are such vivid dreams of him in front of me.”
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