20-year-old student from North Carolina, Brook Cheuvront, who went missing while hiking on South Africa’s Table Mountain has been found dead, authorities confirmed.
The American woman had been in Cape Town for an internship with a local NGO.
She was reported missing on Saturday after the tracking app she was using during her solo hike stopped updating, and she became unreachable.
On Sunday, her body was discovered in the Devil’s Peak area, a mountainous region near Table Mountain, according to police reports.
South African National Parks (SANParks), which oversees Table Mountain, stated that Cheuvront had left her accommodation around noon to begin the hike. Concerned friends alerted police when there were no further updates from her tracking app, and she could not be reached by phone.
Search teams, including rangers and wilderness crews, initiated a rapid search on Saturday but had to halt operations later that evening. Efforts resumed on Sunday, with a helicopter joining the search and eventually spotting her body on the mountain’s slopes.
“The circumstances around the hiker’s death are still being investigated,” SANParks said in a statement.
Police said an autopsy would be conducted to determine the possible cause of death.
SANParks said an investigation into Cheuvront’s death was ongoing.
In a Facebook post, Cheuvront’s father said the family was “devastated.”
“God help me and us,” Steve Cheuvront wrote.
She was a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, interning with a non-governmental organization (NGO).
While South African officials have refuted claims of a crime issue in Table Mountain National Park, they advised hikers in a separate statement to refrain from trekking alone.