U.S. Route 50

This report told the story of 23-year-old Christine Scubish and her 3-year-old son Nick.

They were driving along Highway 50 in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California when they vanished without a trace on June 6, 1994.

Christine was a single mother and had recently completed paralegal training.

She had plans of going to work for a prestigious law firm and she hoped to make enough money so that she and her child's father could be married.

After failing to make contact with her family after three days, her step-father, Dave Stotzenbark, reported her and her son missing on June 8.

The police took the missing persons report, but there were no initial leads in the case.

Five days after Christine and Nick disappeared, however, A woman named Deborah Hoyt and her husband were driving along Highway 50 around 3 a.m.

The pair were on a long overnight drive and had been joking and singing in order to keep each other awake.

what happened on Highway

50 yesterday? I didn't really get too involved in the news with the first incident that happened on Highway 50 near Hazel, but I do know that the freeways shut down for a very long time.

Traffic was backed up.

Then in the afternoon at like 3.30, traffic was shut on Highway 50 at Howe after a shooting at Panera Bread.

And then this morning, it was taking people two hours to get from like downtown to Watt Avenue.

Insanity.

And so the freeway was shut down anyways.

And then I woke up this morning.

One of our biggest challenges at the moment are, uh, the approval process of power lines and associated Solar energy fields.

There is a power line project paralleling Highway 50, kind of replacing an old power line that was, uh, that's 50 years old or something now.

And it's not the power line itself that is the issue.

Uh, it is the solar energy projects proposed in every valley across Nevada that wants to tie into new power lines.

Ah.

Okay? And those solar energy projects, if you've flown to Las Vegas and you look south of Henderson and south of Boulder City, you'll see those valleys, thousands of acres completely taken up by solar panels.

Okay? There are an estimated 72 solar energy projects that are proposed along that Highway 50 route.

72.

It's entirely possible, though, that the identity of the monster who walked out into the hotel hallway and turned the key in the lock will never be known.

Now, on a pitch-black stretch of US Route 50 cutting through the dense, towering pine forests of California's Sierra Nevada mountains, a modern miracle and an inexplicable, terrifying anomaly occurred simultaneously.

The case of Christine Skubish and her three-year-old son, Nick, is well documented in the annals of California Highway History.

But it remains one of the most chilling examples of a phenomenon that straddles the razor-thin border between life and death.

And I was like, let's just...

I was like, we got like six and a half hours to go on Highway 50.

Got a mountain pass, like... you've been up the, my buddies, he went to work early that day, even at four o'clock, I've been up since six o'clock.

I was like, let's just park it on the side of the road here and try to catch a few hours before we get back on the road.

Literally,

yeah.

This is Highway 50 right outside of Salida.

And...

And then it also said Bridal Veil Falls, a picnic day use area.

And I was like, Bridal Veil Falls is a tiny ass little waterfall that's right on Highway 50.

Literally, there's a pull out to the highway-

Yeah

[laughs]

Yeah.

Yeah, the Highway 50 Bridal Veil Falls out of Placerville Pollock Pines area-

Yeah