May 27—Ingrid Lane always loved to hike.

Despite her chronic health problems, she treasured spending time in nature, said her mother, Rebecca Lane.

Family and friends believe that’s what 37-year-old Ingrid Lane was doing in October when she disappeared after heading out alone for a hike in the Jemez Mountains. She was last seen in Jemez Springs, where she had visited the Bodhi Manda Zen Center.

“Sadly, in my heart of hearts, I think she got lost hiking,” Rebecca Lane said. “She’d had COVID, she had impaired lungs, her car was left at 9,100 feet elevation. I think she just got lost somewhere and she’s somewhere in the wilderness and has passed away.”

Law enforcement and volunteers’ efforts to find Ingrid Lane came up empty in the days and weeks after she went missing last fall. Searchers focused mainly around the remote site where her car was found off Forest Road 144 near San Antonio Mountain, just west of the Valles Caldera National Preserve.

More than 80 search and rescue volunteers renewed the hunt recently, Rebecca Lane said, also without success.

She had driven to New Mexico from Oregon with her sister to be present during the search.

“They used it as a training session,” she said. “But boy, did they put effort in.”

Ingrid Lane, an Albuquerque resident and St. John’s College graduate, had struggled for years with mental health issues, her family members and friends said, though it remains unclear whether that played a role in her disappearance. As months continue to drag by, her loved ones say they’re still hopeful she will be found, bringing closure, but most have lost hope she will be found alive.

“She was a very intelligent person, a very kind person, [who] really did care about a lot of things,” said Emma Mincks, a childhood friend who reconnected with Lane in recent years when they both moved to New Mexico. “… Just because someone has mental health issues or mental struggles doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t keep looking for them.”

Lane had a recent breakdown, Mincks said. “I was thinking she probably went camping with the intention of not coming back, honestly. … [But] I’m very concerned that she could be still alive and waiting for people to help her.”

‘The scenic route’

Lane was dogged by health issues since birth. A twin who was born nearly three months premature, she was hospitalized for six months as an infant and had a condition called bronchopulmonary dysplasia. At one point, she was told she would need a lung transplant by age 30, said Rebecca Lane, 71, who lives in Albany, Ore.

Cognitively, Ingrid Lane was ahead of the curve. She initially attended Johns Hopkins University in Maryland before taking some time off and transferring to St. John’s College in Santa Fe. She later attended by turns the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, the University of South Dakota and, most recently, the University of New Mexico, where she studied biomedical engineering.

“She kind of likes to take the scenic route on things,” Rebecca Lane said.

Ingrid Lane was also a musician with a deeply spiritual side, who during her time at St. John’s spent a significant amount of time at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center in Jemez Springs, and even considered monastic life for a time, Mincks said.

Mincks said Lane was open about her mental health issues when the two started hiking together regularly in 2020 during the pandemic.

“She was definitely, like, thinking that she would die from COVID possibly if she got it because of her lungs, but she also was pretty positive about it, too,” Mincks said. “It was a little confusing for me.”

Mincks said Lane seemed to become more grounded after she met Louis Scuderi, a fellow musician who shared Lane’s love of science and math, and of cats. The pair started dating and eventually got married.

Scuderi did not respond to requests for an interview.

Mincks said Lane seemed happy and excited about the relationship. But she said she also could see mental health issues were taking a toll on her friend. Lane told Mincks she was having trouble at her job at Sandia National Laboratories, and, among other frustrations, said she didn’t feel the initiatives she wanted to work on there were well received.

Lane eventually left that position and started pursuing another role at an organization associated with Los Alamos National Laboratory, Rebecca Lane said.

Ingrid Lane experienced what her mother and Mincks called “a breakdown” last year, a few weeks before her disappearance.

Scuderi later told police his wife had expressed suicidal thoughts, and had been picking up hitchhikers and driving them around town, according to a Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office report.

Lane also contracted COVID-19 twice last summer. Mincks said thoughts of death seemed to be frequently on her friend’s mind.

“She had been talking to me about how she was worried she would be a burden on Louis,” Mincks said. “She was like … ‘I’m not pulling my weight.’ “

But in October, Mincks said, she got together with Lane while Lane’s mother was in town and noticed her friend seemed to be in a better place.

“She seemed very calm and not upset about the Sandia stuff anymore,” Mincks said.

‘No signs of foul play’

In mid-October, Ingrid Lane headed up to Jemez Springs to spend the night at the Bodhi Manda Zen Center. Hosen Christiane Ranger, the center’s abbess and director, said she knew Lane fairly well, thanks to Lane’s history with the center.

“She was a beautiful being,” Ranger said, adding it wasn’t unusual for Lane to visit every so often.

Lane departed from the center the morning of Oct. 15, telling Ranger she had to go to both Albuquerque and Los Alamos that day, and also mentioning she wanted to go for a hike.

Lt. John Castañeda, a spokesman for the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office, said the agency was notified of Lane’s disappearance Oct. 19, although Scuderi initially reported her missing a day earlier. Scuderi told local media outlets last year he got concerned about his wife after a couple of days of not hearing from her. He said he contacted the zen center Oct. 18, a Wednesday, and learned she had been gone since the previous Sunday.

Following the coordinates of an Apple Air Tag Lane had with her, sheriff’s deputies found her 2019 black Subaru Impreza on Forest Road 144 about 11 miles off N.M. 126, initial reports said.

“They found it broken down, abandoned, with a broken rear window,” Castañeda said.

A “big boulder rock” was sitting in the back-right passenger seat and shattered glass was all over the inside of the car, a report said — but Lane was nowhere to be seen.

It’s a remote area deep in the Jemez Mountains, Castañeda said, with not much around.

“It’s just trees,” he said.

Rebecca Lane said her daughter’s AllTrails account showed she’d last downloaded directions for a trail on San Antonio Mountain.

A deputy wrote in one report he used his public address system to see if Lane was nearby.

“I searched the area when I did not hear any sounds coming from the immediate area of where Ingrid’s car was located,” the deputy wrote.

More law enforcement arrived at the scene, and one deputy used his dog to try to track Lane, without success. Later, the La Cueva Volunteer Fire Department showed up to try to help, a report said.

“It was difficult to try to find her due to the sun going down,” the report said.

The next day, while search and rescue teams continued the efforts, detectives processed Lane’s car, which they noted had “no signs of foul play.” Three laptops were in the car, along with cash and a journal.

Castañeda said later some hunters reported seeing Lane walking up the road on the same day she went missing.

‘This huge, unfillable hole’

The search for Ingrid Lane paused over the winter months, as snow blanketed the area, Rebecca Lane said.

The recent search efforts were made as part of a training exercise for search and rescue teams from Taos, Los Alamos, Santa Fe and Cibola counties, said Bob Rodgers, the New Mexico Search and Rescue resource officer for the state Department of Public Safety.

“We covered a very large area,” Rodgers said of the search, spread over roughly six square miles of forest around the area where Ingrid Lane went missing.

Search dogs, drones, “ground-pounders” and even a fixed-wing Civil Air Patrol plane combed the area.

“The reason we did this as an exercise is because based on the time period, we could pretty much assume that the subject we’re looking for is deceased,” Rodgers said.

Rebecca Lane said she hopes hikers who frequent that area will keep their eyes out for any sign of her daughter, particularly in the area around Forest Road 376, which she said has not been searched as much and which runs parallel to Forest Road 144.

She’s grateful for the work of the volunteers, she said, but she’s been frustrated by local law enforcement’s response, handled mostly by the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office.

She doesn’t think a crime against her daughter was likely, Rebecca Lane said, but there have been a couple of odd occurrences during the search that have kept her wondering — an item belonging to her daughter showing up on a roadway a couple of days into the search, for example, when nobody remembered seeing it there before.

She said she wishes the sheriff’s office had been more involved.

“They have not really done anything to gather initial information,” she said. “Like, they didn’t even do forensics on the car. … They just really put no effort, even the token amount.”

The sheriff’s office didn’t respond to a question about Rebecca Lane’s concerns.

She said she and other family members are devastated by her daughter’s disappearance and are trying to move forward. But it’s hard without closure.

“I’m functioning,” she said. “But there’s this huge, unfillable hole in my life.”