Coroner identifies remains found near Bocco Mountain as Pablo Araya Rojas, missing from Avon for a year
Remains found near Bocco Mountain on Oct. 23 belong to Pablo Araya Rojas, the Eagle County Coroner's Office says. Rojas was last seen near Colorado Highway 131 and Ute Creek in October 2025. How he died has not been determined, and the Sheriff's Office is investigating.
Pablo Araya Rojas is the man whose remains were found near Bocco Mountain on Oct. 23, 2026, the Eagle County Coroner's Office announced in a release published this week on the Town of Avon's official site. Next of kin has been notified. KZYR, reporting the identification in its Nov. 4 Zephyr Press News summary, placed the discovery north of Wolcott, the unincorporated community on the Eagle River where U.S. Highway 6 and Colorado Highway 131 meet. The coroner's office says the cause and manner of death are still being determined.
Rojas had been missing from the Avon area for just over a year. He was last seen on the afternoon of Oct. 21, 2025, near Colorado Highway 131 and Ute Creek, at the turnoff for the landfill, according to the release. Bocco Mountain stands north of Wolcott, along the Highway 131 corridor, in the same part of the county where he was last seen. The identification, released 11 days after the remains were found, closes the missing person side of the case just over a year after that last sighting, while opening the question the coroner's work now has to answer: how he died. The release gives no age for Rojas and no hometown beyond the Avon area he went missing from, and it does not say whether investigators believe he stayed in the Wolcott area after Oct. 21, 2025 or arrived there later.
The Sheriff's Office leads the investigation
The investigation belongs to the Eagle County Sheriff's Office, which the release says is working with the Avon Police Department and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. Searchers from Vail Mountain Search and Rescue took part as well, working cadaver dogs over the ground near where the remains were found. The release says investigators see no threat to the public, are still following every lead, and may say more as the case develops.
The release does not describe how the remains came to be found, who found them, or what condition they were in, and officials have released no further details about the recovery itself. What has been established is narrow and official: a man missing since October 2025 has been identified, his family has been told, and the two questions that remain, the cause and the manner of his death, sit with the coroner's office while the Sheriff's Office works the investigation. Media inquiries are being directed to the Eagle County Sheriff's Office, the release says.
