Overlooking the small outpost of Palo Verde, Calif., an oasis in the distance on the western reach of the Sonoran Desert, Evan Tanner passed away alone and frightened on Sept. 5, 2008.
Temperatures approaching 120 degrees along the California-Arizona border torched the unmerciful terrain where Tanner’s body would be found by search-and-rescue workers three days later.
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Tanner’s death made news. Stories were written and documentaries released. Speculation pinned the former UFC middleweight champion’s death on suicide. Theories were put forward that he had been drinking in the desert because, according to the Imperial County coroner’s report, alcohol was in his system.
These notions never sat well with Bobby Razak, a filmmaker who got to know Tanner as the fighter worked his way up the UFC ranks in the late 1990s.
Reporting around Tanner’s death “was very open-ended and confusing,” Razak said. “There was no intel. Based on that, I felt I was getting no information. So let me go to the scene of the crime. Let me go to where he died.”
That expedition is the subject of a short film Razak shared exclusively with The Athletic.
(Full Disclosure: I consulted on the creation of this video. Bobby and I previously worked together, and we have a partnership to produce historical MMA documentaries.)
One of the volunteers who canvassed the area for Tanner’s body in 2008, tracker Jeff Green, helped Razak retrace the fighter’s steps using the pinpoint location data gathered from the deceased fighter’s GPS.
Before departing for the desert from Oceanside, Calif., where he moved in July, Tanner began blogging about his mindset and preparation for the journey.
“I’ve been gathering my gear for this adventure for over a month, not a long time by most standards, but far too long for my impatient nature,” he wrote on Aug. 16, 2008. “Being a minimalist by nature, wanting to carry only the essentials, and being extremely particular, it has been a little difficult to find just the right equipment. I plan on going so deep into the desert, that any failure of my equipment, could cost me my life. I’ve been doing a great deal of research and study. I want to know all I can about where I’m going, and I want to make sure I have the best equipment.”
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Riding the dirt bike he purchased in August, Tanner left the breezy Pacific for the oven of a summer desert with provisions and water; the latest GPS technology to guide the way; water purification equipment; protection from the sun; a cot to sleep on; new metal detectors; books on gold mining; and a sense of exploration.
Heading down Milpitas Wash Road for a couple of miles, Tanner eventually turned down a side road and got his first sense of the intensity of the terrain. Above the dry riverbed on a rocky plateau, Tanner set up camp. This is where he awoke on Sept. 4, ready for a nine-mile trek to and from Clapp Spring, the first day of what he imagined might be a couple of weeks of solitude.
On the move by 7:45 a.m., Tanner soon encountered a series of twists and turns in the washes, elevation changes, and mounds of unstable rock and dirt. Not to mention that by 9 a.m., the temperature in the Palo Verde Mountains Wilderness area had already hit the low 100s.
Razak’s second nonfiction short film examining Tanner’s last days was shot in February. Temperatures were in the mid-70s — the terrain is hospitable maybe six months out of the year, from October through March — and Razak hiked 50 miles a week to prepare for the five-mile journey he and Green planned to take across the challenging landscape.
“Jeff wanted to make it clear that you do not go to this place,” Razak said. “It’s not safe. If you go, there’s a good chance you’ll get in trouble.”
A half-hour into his hike, Razak said everything looked the same to him. The ground was so difficult to negotiate at times that it could take an hour to move 400 feet. One mile felt equivalent to four. Every step is perilous because rock might appear sturdy but crumble and loosen in the earth with the slightest shift in weight.
“You’ll grab a piece of rock, and it’ll collapse,” Razak said. “I learned very quickly you cannot trust anything that you grab.”
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Razak called his journey the hardest thing he’s done in his life. Every step required being aware and engaging stabilization muscles, which saps energy faster than usual.
“The terrain is savagely brutal,” explained the director, who planned to return with a sparse crew in April to film scenes for a feature film he wrote based on Tanner’s life that was put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. “It’s not meant to hike. It’s super dangerous, and if it’s hot, it’s a potential death trap.
“For this movie, I wanted to feel the angst of what he was experiencing, and that is why I wanted to do it. I wouldn’t have done the hike if it wasn’t for the film.”
The layout of the washes doesn’t necessarily mesh with the GPS. Reading directions and the best routes comes with experience, and Tanner had none.
Early on his way to Clapp Spring, Tanner took a wrong turn.
“What Jeff realized from our map is there’s a major fork,” Razak said. “You’re supposed to take the right fork to take you to a washbasin that can lead you to a cleaner route to Clapp Spring. Instead of going right, he went left. As soon as you take that left wash, everything fell out whack for him on that route.
“We feel that mistake there, which is very easily doable on that kind of GPS that he had, is what spiraled him out of control. There is no straight clean route.”
Around noon on Sept. 4, Tanner was already running low on water.
During the search-and-rescue mission, Green, the president of the De Anza Rescue Unit, spotted a red one-liter bag for water on the side of a hill that matched ones left behind at Tanner’s camp.
If he was under the impression that he could fill canisters in Clapp Spring, Green and other authorities, including the Imperial County Sheriff’s Office, told Razak that it sounded unlikely as the location almost always ran dry.
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By the time the mixed martial artist, who famously taught himself to fight by studying VHS instructional videos, left the site four hours later, he texted a friend and said he was almost out of water to drink.
Over the next eight hours, Tanner headed back toward where he began the day, getting to within a mile of the campsite before shutting down after midnight due to the darkness and the physical toll claimed by the environment.
Text messages indicate Tanner’s awareness that a dire situation was becoming increasingly dangerous.
One text he wrote that was not sent: “I need help.”
The GPS tracklog shows that at the crack of dawn on Sept. 5, Tanner was moving again. The next few hours were erratic. Within a half-mile radius, he climbed up and down hills, presumably looking for a line of sight to his camp or some other lifeline.
Tanner was “in the total grasp of dehydration,” Green told Razak.
“Your mind doesn’t have a thinking capacity anymore,” he continued. “It gives you false ideas.”
Green believed Tanner was panicked well before he came to his final resting spot with a view of the wilderness area down into the valley and the farmlands near Palo Verde.
To get there, Tanner managed one final burst up a steep and slippery incline.
“Even in the last hour of his life, he had that drive that a lot of people don’t have,” Green said in the video.
Razak surmised that Tanner’s last moment represented the spirit finding another plane in the search for survival, and that his experience as an elite fighter gave him an ability to overcome adversity and pain that may seem superhuman.
Said Razak: “I’m not sure I’ll be able to answer that question because it goes into the realm of the metaphysical.”
Accounts from the authorities haven’t helped in that department, but when it comes to filling in the gaps to the questions that Razak wanted answered regarding Tanner’s demise in the desert, Imperial County’s top pathologist, Dr. Darryl Garber, ruled the cause of death to be an accidental heatstroke.
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“I was like, OK, everything that has been told about Evan in prior narratives was incorrect,” said Razak, a 46-year-old London native. “He didn’t want to commit suicide, and I know that from the timestamps on the text that he was sending that he was requesting help. If he wanted to kill himself, he wouldn’t have had these SOS timestamps. There was also the potential that he drank himself to death and went in there, but the autopsy report showed that there was actually zero alcohol in his system. There was 0.08 (percent blood-alcohol content) in his system, which is part of the decomposition. The level of alcohol in his body would be equivalent to a beer, but that was decomposition.
“If anything he was clean and sober during this hike. He was actually looking to cleanse himself and do a hike and connect with nature and spirit. It had nothing to do with suicide.”
(Top photo: Josh Hedges / Zuffa)