Kayaker Disappeared on Arkansas River, 2 Years Later His GoPro Was Found Underground
In August 2024, 3 hikers following a deer trail near Arkansas’s Buffalo River found something wedged between limestone rocks that would reopen a case authorities had closed 2 years earlier. It was a GoPro camera, its waterproof housing cracked but intact, its memory card somehow still functional after 24 months in the elements. When investigators finally accessed the footage, they discovered 14 hours of recording that documented not just a man’s final day alive, but something far more disturbing than anyone had imagined.
The camera belonged to Marcus Holloway, a 34-year-old outdoor photographer from Little Rock who had vanished without a trace on September 15th, 2022. His disappearance had sparked 1 of the most extensive search operations in Buffalo River history. Hundreds of volunteers had combed the riverbanks. Dive teams had searched every deep pool for miles. Search dogs had followed trails that led nowhere. After 6 weeks, the official conclusion was drowning, a tragic accident on a river that claimed lives every season. The case was filed away. The family was left with condolences and an empty grave.
But the camera told a different story entirely.
Marcus Holloway was not the type of person who made careless mistakes on the water. He had been kayaking Arkansas rivers since he was 12, when his father first put a paddle in his hands on the Spring River near Hardy. By his 30s, he could read water like other people read books, understanding the language of currents, the warnings hidden in surface ripples, the way rocks beneath the surface revealed themselves to those who knew how to look. His equipment reflected his experience: a custom-fitted kayak he had owned for 8 years, a carbon-fiber paddle that had never let him down, and safety gear he checked obsessively. His dry bag contained emergency supplies for 3 days, though he had never needed them.
“His friends called him overcautious. His sister Laya called him paranoid. Marcus called it staying alive. He’d rather carry 10 lb of gear he didn’t need than need 1 oz he didn’t carry,” Laya told investigators after he disappeared.
She was sitting in the sheriff’s office in Marshall, Arkansas, her voice steady but her hands shaking as she held a cup of coffee that had gone cold hours earlier. “That’s just who Marcus was. He planned for everything.”
But no amount of planning could have prepared him for what was waiting in the caves beneath Hemmed-in Hollow.
The Buffalo River cuts through the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks like a green-blue vein, carrying snowmelt and spring rain through forests that have not changed much since the Cherokee walked those ridges. It is the kind of river that appears on postcards: clear enough to see gravel at 10 ft, cold enough to shock even in summer, wild enough to remind you that not everything in Arkansas has been tamed.
Marcus had photographed that stretch dozens of times, but never from the water. He was working on a coffee-table book about Arkansas waterways, something he had been discussing with a publisher in Nashville. The Buffalo River chapter needed kayak-level shots, perspectives that could only be captured from the river itself, looking up at bluffs that rose 300 ft above the water.
September 15th was perfect for photography. Overcast skies eliminated harsh shadows. Water levels were ideal for navigation. Temperatures were cool enough for comfort, but warm enough that a swim would not kill you. Marcus had driven down from Little Rock the night before, camping at Steel Creek with a group of other paddlers he had met through online forums.
“He’d seemed relaxed that morning,” according to fellow camper Janet Reeves, a retired teacher from Conway who had been coming to the Buffalo for 30 years. “He was excited about the photo opportunities, kept talking about some formations he’d seen in satellite images that he wanted to capture from river level.”
He had his whole route planned out: put in at Steel Creek, take out at Rush. He said he would be back by 6:00, 7:00 at the latest.
The other campers watched him launch at 8:37 that morning. His red kayak disappeared around the 1st bend, and that was the last anyone saw of Marcus Holloway alive.
By 7:00 p.m., when he had not returned, Janet Reeves was concerned enough to call the Newton County Sheriff’s Office. By midnight, when his truck was still parked at Steel Creek and his tent was still empty, concern had become certainty that something was wrong.
Deputy Harlon Tessmer coordinated the initial search. He had been working search and rescue on the Buffalo for 16 years and had seen every kind of accident the river could produce: capsized canoes in spring floods, heart attacks in August heat, broken bones from failed attempts to climb bluffs. Most of the time, they found people within 24 hours, wet and embarrassed, but alive.
“Marcus didn’t fit the typical pattern,” Tessmer said later. “He wasn’t a weekend warrior who’d rented gear at an outfitter. His equipment was top shelf, properly maintained. His float plan was detailed and realistic. Everything about his preparations suggested someone who knew what he was doing.”
The 1st break came on the 2nd day of searching, when a helicopter crew spotted something red against the limestone shore near Hemmed-in Hollow, about 12 river miles downstream from Steel Creek. It was Marcus’s kayak, overturned and wedged between 2 boulders in the shallows. The kayak showed no signs of damage, no cracks in the hull, no bent or broken fittings. The spray skirt was still attached but not deployed, suggesting Marcus had exited the boat deliberately, not been thrown from it by rapids or collision. His paddle was found 50 yd downstream, along with his dry bag, still sealed and floating.
But there was no sign of Marcus himself.
“That bothered me from the start,” said Sergeant Patricia Wulmack, who took over the investigation when it became clear this was more than a simple river accident. “Everything else was accounted for. Kayak, paddle, gear, even his baseball cap caught on a root downstream, but no body. In my experience, rivers don’t usually keep bodies. They give them up. Sometimes immediately, sometimes weeks later, but eventually they surface.”
The area around Hemmed-in Hollow presented unique challenges for searchers. The river curved sharply through a narrow gorge, with bluffs rising almost vertically on both sides. Side canyons and hollows branched off in multiple directions, many of them filled with thick stands of pine and oak that blocked visibility from helicopters. Limestone caves pocked the cliffs like Swiss cheese, some large enough for a person to enter, most too small to explore without specialized equipment.
Search teams focused their efforts on the water first, then expanded to include the immediate shoreline and lower reaches of the side canyons. Dive teams from the Arkansas State Police worked the deeper pools, their visibility limited by tannic water that turned dark brown where Big Creek fed into the main stem. Side-scan sonar detected several large objects on the river bottom that turned out to be fallen trees and discarded tires from decades past.
The weather held for the 1st week, allowing helicopters to provide aerial support and keeping the river at manageable levels for diving operations. But on September 23rd, a late-season thunderstorm swept through the Ozarks, dropping 4 in of rain in 6 hours and turning the Buffalo from a clear mountain stream into a chocolate-colored torrent that made further diving impossible.
“That was when we knew we were probably looking at a recovery, not a rescue,” Wulmack said. “Water like that moves everything. If Marcus had been in the river, that flood would have carried him miles downstream, probably all the way to the White River. We’d find him eventually, but it might take weeks or months.”
The official search was scaled back after 2 weeks, though volunteers continued combing the riverbanks for another month. Marcus’s family offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the recovery of his body. Flyers with his photograph appeared in gas stations and cafes throughout the Buffalo River region. The Arkansas Game and Fish Commission issued bulletins to guides and outfitters asking them to watch for anything unusual during float trips.
Nothing turned up.
The Buffalo River had apparently swallowed Marcus Holloway completely.
His sister Laya refused to accept the official conclusion of accidental drowning. She drove down from Fayetteville every weekend for 6 months, walking riverbanks and side trails, posting fresh flyers, asking questions that had already been asked dozens of times. She hired a private investigator, a retired state police detective named Ray Fulbright, who specialized in missing-persons cases. Fulbright spent 3 weeks in Newton County interviewing everyone who had seen Marcus that last day, reviewing the physical evidence, studying maps and satellite images of the search area. His conclusion matched the official findings.
Marcus Holloway had likely suffered some kind of medical emergency while kayaking, gone into the water, and drowned. The flood had moved his body beyond recovery.
“I told Laya what I tell all the families in cases like this,” Fulbright said later. “The river is big and it keeps its secrets. Sometimes people just disappear and we never find out exactly what happened. It’s not what anyone wants to hear, but it’s the truth.”
Laya stopped her weekend trips to the Buffalo in March 2023. She kept the reward posted for another year, renewing the flyers twice before finally accepting that her brother was gone. The case remained officially open but inactive, filed among dozens of similar disappearances across Arkansas waterways for nearly 2 years.
That was where the story ended. Marcus Holloway had become another cautionary tale about the dangers of solo river running, another entry in the grim statistics that outdoor recreation enthusiasts prefer not to think about.
Then came the August morning when Kim Porter, hiking with her teenage daughters near Hemmed-in Hollow, noticed something that did not belong wedged in the rocks of a small creek bed about 3 mi downstream from where Marcus’s kayak had been found.
“At first, I thought it was just trash,” Porter said later. “You know how it is. People throw all kinds of stuff in the woods. But when I got closer, I could see it was some kind of camera. One of those action cameras that kayakers and mountain bikers use. The case was cracked, but it looked like it might still work.”
Porter’s daughter, Madison, a college sophomore majoring in digital media, recognized the GoPro immediately and convinced her mother to take it to the authorities rather than simply disposing of it as litter.
“I told her there might be important stuff on the memory card,” Madison said. “I was like, what if someone lost their vacation videos or something?”
Deputy Tessmer, the same officer who had coordinated the initial search for Marcus, was on duty when Porter brought the camera to the Newton County Sheriff’s Office. The serial number on the housing matched Marcus Holloway’s equipment list exactly. The same camera he had been carrying when he disappeared 23 months earlier.
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