Mountain Mystery

WAITSBURG - In the arid summer back country of the Blue Mountains, Gary Lommasson had come across bones before - animal bones parching in the sun.

As an elk hunter, Lommasson often hikes deep into the steep and rugged terrain of the Umatilla National Forest in search of a prized bull, which he hunts with a special tag using bow and arrow.

But he knew what he saw during an elk scouting trip in the Deduct Pond area off Tiger Canyon on the morning of July 22 was different, very different.

At the base of a spruce on the edge of a clearing, Lommasson almost stumbled onto the yellow-brown crown of a small human skull.

" 'What the heck is that,' I thought, 'that's not a rock,'" said Lommasson, who lives in Camas, Wash., but is staying with his parents in Waitsburg doing work as a flooring contractor.

"I'd never seen anything like that before," he said. "It caught us off guard."

He called over his friend and fellow elk hunter, who witnessed the discovery but prefers to remain anonymous.

The men were going down a steep slope and were separated by some 50 yards when Lommasson made his discovery. His friend didn't want to come at first until he heard what the Camas man thought he'd just found. Then, he joined Lommasson in a hurry.

In the still heat of the late morning, Lommasson carefully used his hand to turn over the skull, which had been half buried and had only been visible from the top.

"It was filled with dirt, fine dirt from ants that had once lived inside," he said. "One eye socket had been completely chewed off. There was no jaw, no teeth. But you could see where the ears had been, where there was a hole in the skull."

The skull must have been in its place for quite some time, Lommasson said. The exposed top had a darker color than the bottom part buried in the dirt. He deduced from the size of the skull, which was four inches wide and five inches long, that it belonged to a child no more than 12 years old.

They walked around to look for other remains, but decided not to dig for any.

"We watch CSI," Lommasson said, explaining that the men were afraid they might disturb critical evidence in case of a follow-up forensics investigation. Still, they felt it was important to bring the skull back home with them so they would have proof of their discovery. And they weren't sure if they could retrace their steps to the site, which was more than a mile from where they had parked their car on Tiger Canyon Road.

Lommasson wrapped the small skull in a towel and put it in his backpack.

When he got back to Waitsburg, he called the Oregon State Patrol because the site was on the Oregon side of the state line. A Walla Walla County Sheriff's deputy came to collect the skull from Lommasson later that weekend and the authorities asked him to return to the national forest discovery site with an anthropologist, a U.S. Forest Service ranger and the state patrol, whose representatives recovered the skull from the Walla Walla County Coroner.

U.S. Forest Service offi cials, who are reportedly now in possession of the skull, said they could not release additional details.

"The incident is still under investigation," agency spokeswoman Joanie Bosworth said.

She said she wasn't aware of any open-ended search and rescue missions in that part of the Umatilla National Forest.

A 13-year-old Walla Walla boy went missing in the Tollgate area more than two years ago, but his body was later recovered. The boy had become separated from his father during a cross-country skiing trip.

The Umatilla County Sheriff's Office, however, still has three different unsolved missing persons cases on its books that are loosely within the larger area where the skull was found.

Meanwhile, there's a possibility the skulls belongs to someone of Native American descent.

A spokeswoman for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation said her organization was notified of Lommasson's discovery and is awaiting the outcome of a federal missing persons investigation, the first step in determining its identity.

"If it's not (a missing persons case), that's when our staff would take over," tribal publics affairs manager Deborah Crosswell said.

She said human remains are discovered several times a year in the region that would be of interest to the tribes, including public and private lands.

"It's not uncommon," Crosswell said. "We deal with it on a case by case basis."

Lommasson said he has not had any followup communication with authorities, whom he said began to act fairly mysteriously when he took them to his discovery site.

"It was all very secretlike," he said. "I was a little upset. I haven't gotten any information about the skull since then."