Pictured: Missing British hiker Esther Dingley’s Fiat camper van

This is missing hiker Esther Dingley’s camper van parked at a Spanish police station as officers forensically exam it for clues over her disappearance, MailOnline can reveal.

The Oxford graduate parked the vehicle in a car park in the Spanish town of Benasque on November 15 before setting off on her solo trek around the Pyrenees.

Now the vehicle has been moved and impounded by the Guardia Civil paramilitary police who are combing it for evidence after suspicions were raised that she may not have simply had an accident in the mountains.

A source close to the Guardia Civil told MailOnline: ‘The camper van is in the headquarters of the Guardia Civil.

‘It is being forensically examined for any clues as to why this woman went missing.

‘Specialist officers are looking for any traces of evidence, such as finger prints and blood. The van was parked out in the street.

‘But when it became a possibility that she had not had an accident it was taken to the headquarters to be examined.’

Esther’s partner Daniel Colegate is understood to have handed over keys to vehicle they own when he traveled to Spain after reporting her missing.

The 38-year-old, who has been Esther’s boyfriend for 18 years after the couple met at university, was also interviewed by the Guardia Civil officers.

Gendarme Captain Bordinaro told MailOnline: ‘Daniel Colegate went to Spain shortly after reporting Esther missing.

‘He took keys to the camping car with him and gave them to the Guardia Civil.

‘Mr Colegate was interviewed by the Guardia Civil and spent the night at a hotel.’

The Fiat Chasson camper van had been home to Esther and partner Daniel Colegate for the past six years as they traveled around Europe together after quitting their life in County Durham.

Last night a source close to the search for Ms Esther Dingley in the Pyrenees told the Mail of his fears she could have fallen into a lake or other freezing water.

The 37-year-old had been planning to camp next to one of a number of high altitude lakes in the area days before her disappearance.

Such an accident could also explain why no trace had been found, particularly as the lake would since have iced over, possibly for months to come.

The source said: ‘These kind of accidents are sadly very common, all year round.

‘Over the decades, people have fallen in the still and very deep water, and drowned, or severely injured themselves.

‘In the past it was common for bodies to disappear in the winter, because of the snow and increased water depth, and then to appear in the Spring.

‘The possibility of someone slipping into water is high, and with nobody else to rescue them or raise the alarm, the consequences can be fatal.’

Miss Dingley was reportedly last seen by a Spanish Olympic skier who said she carried on towards the summit of the mountain after asking for fruit. 

Marti Vigo del Arco told Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia he and his girlfriend were hiking down a trail when they met an English woman on November 22, believed to be Esther. 

About one hour after meeting the Spanish skiers, Esther reached the summit of the mountain and sent her partner Dan Colegate a selfie, and the following day she went missing.   

Her aunt, Elizabeth Wolsey, has told of growing fears her niece has been kidnapped, because Spanish police have still to track down a mystery ‘fellow hiker’ who gave Esther a lift three days before she vanished.   

Ms Wolsey, 68, said that if Esther had had an accident ‘they would probably have found her’ and the longer searches go on for, the more it is making her wonder if she has ‘been kidnapped’.  

Investigators are exploring ‘non-accident theories’ and the manager of a mountain refuge where she had stayed said her disappearance was ‘very strange’, reports the Mirror.    

Chema Grau, 60, said Esther stayed at his 7,000ft Angel Orus Refuge on November 17, and seemed ‘in very good spirits’, adding: ‘There was nothing untoward about her behaviour.’ 

Bad weather reached the area late on Thursday, leading to the week-long search involving helicopters, dogs and around 15 experts from several Civil Guard elite mountain rescue units being halted that night.

They did not go out on Friday and have no plans to resume their work this weekend because of the snow and freezing temperatures affecting the village of Benasque, 3280 feet above sea level, and the peak where Esther made her last contact with her boyfriend on November 22 which is another 6000 feet further up.

Sergeant Jorge Lopez Ramos, head of the Civil Guard GREIM mountain rescue team in Benasque, admitted the operation may not resume with the same intensity until next spring.

Teams from both France and Spain have spent a week scouring hiking trails in the mountainous border region for 37-year-old Esther – from Durham – but have found no trace of her.  

Ms Wolsey said: ‘It’s a very distressing time for everyone. We have no idea what has happened to her.

‘Her father is distraught. We feel utterly helpless. It goes round and round in your head — where is she? — and yet there’s nothing you can do but wait for news.’  

Speaking after the suspension of the search, which has also taken part on the northern French side of the Pyrenees and on Thursday was extended to Catalonia Sergeant Ramos said: ‘We appreciate the chances of finding Esther alive are minimal and it leaves us with a very bitter taste in our mouths.  

‘We have not found anything at all in any of the areas we’ve searched that might help us discover where Esther is.

‘The weather has changed and the search finished on Thursday. In principle if the adverse weather conditions continue as we expect, then we’ll have to stop the search until we have a better idea of where we should be looking.

‘The snow will cover the mountain and it’s possible that it won’t disappear until the spring. That means it’s possible the search can’t resume with the same intensity we’ve seen so far until the spring.’

Other Civil Guard units including specialists in telecommunications are believed to have been asked to probe Esther’s disappearance. But the force has remained tight-lipped about the work they are doing.

They have privately dismissed the idea the hiker could have been attacked by a bear and have made no comment on reports they are hunting a man travel blogger Esther said in her online travel diary had given her a lift down from the mountains in the days before she vanished. 

Police have spoken to hikers who saw Esther, who rowed for Great Britain as a schoolgirl, heading towards Pico Salvaguardia on November 19. 

Her 38-year-old boyfriend Dan Colegate, a former business development manager, had stayed in France with their five dogs and was house-sitting in the tiny village of Arreau in the Haute-Pyrenees. 

He is understood to have been quizzed by both Spanish and French police to see if he can shed any more light on her whereabouts.

Well-placed sources confirmed she had been on Pic de Sauvegarde on the Spanish side of the border on November 21 and posted a selfie on Instagram before returning the following day. 

Civil Guard spokesmen in the provincial capital Huesca and the national force HQ in Madrid, asked about what other work is being done to unravel the mystery of what has happened to Esther, will only say: ‘All options are being considered. None have been ruled out.’ 

On the last day of the search officers from five different Civil Guard mountain rescue teams took part in the operation.  

The situation is a torturous one, particularly for Esther’s partner, Dan, who has spoken of being ‘broken’ and ‘shattered’ that ‘my beloved Esther — the person who taught me how to feel — is missing.’

The last he or anyone heard from Esther was just before 4pm on Sunday, November 22, when she sent him a selfie taken at the top of the Pic de Sauvegarde on the Spanish side of the border. The image shows her beaming at the camera from a snow-capped peak with a sweeping mountain vista behind her.

Conditions were clear and there was still at least an hour-and-a-half of daylight left — plenty of time for the highly experienced hiker and trail runner to reach the mountain-side cabin where she was planning to spend the night. There is no evidence, however, that she ever got there.

According to Dan, Esther was well-prepared for what was meant to be the last walk after several weeks of solo hiking. Their last conversation had been about ‘how excited we were to see each other, as this was her last trip before driving back’.

Esther also spoke to her father, Henry, before setting off up the mountain, phoning to tell him of the preparations she had made.

‘She told him she was preparing for her last hike before heading home to Dan,’ says her aunt. ‘She’d got all the right clothes and equipment and she knew where she was going. She was looking forward to it.’

Esther set off on her solo adventure in early November, leaving Dan and the couple’s five dogs behind in the tiny French village of Arreau in the Haute-Pyrenees where they were house-sitting.

It was the second time in two years she’d headed up into the mountains alone. ‘When I do something like this it helps me not to feel scared about other things. I also feel less stressed about the urgency of things in my mind,’ she wrote.

Was this ‘the feeling’ to which she and Dan referred when they rented out their Durham flat and set off on their adventures in 2014?

On the morning of November 22, several hours before Esther sent her final message to Dan, the couple featured in a BBC regional news article from Tyne & Wear. Esther said that beneath the surface of their former conventional lives in the UK, both had felt hollow inside, like ‘zombies sleepwalking through life’.

She added: ‘We were always just chasing the next objective, always chasing something bigger so we could do something in the future.’

It was a theme Dan mentioned in the 2019 book he wrote about their hiking adventures, Turn Left At Mont Blanc: ‘Esther and I had always done our best to be high-fliers, scrambling up the ladder of success’.

They met at Wadham College, Oxford, in 2001. Dan was a second-year chemistry student when Esther arrived to study Economics and Management.

The granddaughter of World War II hero Warwick Dingley, who was awarded the Military Cross for his service in Italy, she had been born in Amsterdam to a Dutch mother and British businessman father.

Following her parents’ divorce, Esther and her mother moved to the Buckinghamshire village of Stone. She was a boarder at £36,000-a-year Headington School in Oxfordshire, where her skills as a rower saw her representing Great Britain in the Junior European Cup.

Both she and Dan left Oxford with first-class degrees, and went on to study at Durham University, where Dan gained a PhD and Esther a Masters, before taking up research jobs at Cambridge. Then they left academia to start their own venture capital-backed business. They also dabbled in the property market, borrowing heavily from the bank.

But with all their earnings eaten up by debt, the venture folded. Esther set up a personal training business and Dan found work as a business development manager. But, as Dan puts it, they were experiencing ‘disillusion verging on depression.’

By the beginning of 2014, Dan was receiving counselling for depression while Esther had been diagnosed with chronic fatigue, sparked by her own mental health struggles.

After Dan suffered a near-death experience they re-evaluated their lives again. Having suffered bowel problems since childhood, he underwent what should have been routine surgery to fix a hernia but while in hospital developed necrotising fasciitis which became so serious that Esther was advised to say goodbye.

As she put it: ‘It was time for us to think again about our lives.’

Over the past six years, the couple’s adventures have taken them hiking or cycling across the Alps in France, Italy, Switzerland and Austria.

At the end of October, Esther embarked on a month-long solo adventure. She told the BBC she and Dan had decided to spend a few weeks apart, with Dan staying with the dogs in Gascony while she went off in the camper van.

‘We realised that during the coronavirus we had not been apart for a year so decided to each just do our own thing for a bit. This whole thing has been really good for us; we are genuinely happy now,’ she said.

Over the past month, she completed several solo hikes, some of them day trips. At other times she camped overnight either in her tent or in mountainside cabins, posting photographs of the breathtaking scenery she saw each day.

The arduous hikes she undertook were well within her capability. A keen athlete, in April this year she raised more than £4,700 for NHS Charities Together by cycling a 36-hour marathon.

She carried all the equipment necessary for winter mountain walking: ‘I love being a snail,’ she wrote on Instagram on November 17. She added: ‘I love carrying everything I need with me on my back. It gives me confidence and freedom . . . because I know I have everything I need to survive with me.’

On that occasion, she turned back from her planned route because the snow was too deep. A couple of days later, on November 19, bad weather forced her to abort an overnight trip. She returned down the mountain with a fellow hiker who gave her a lift back to Benasque, where her camper van was parked. Two days later, she headed back to the 2,800ft summit of Pic de Sauvegarde. ‘I’m in heaven,’ she wrote on Instagram on November 21.

The selfie she sent to Dan the following afternoon was the last time she made contact. She was due to return to Gascony last Wednesday, and when she failed to make contact Dan raised the alarm. Head of the Civil Guard mountain rescue Sergeant Ramos says their failure to find her is baffling given that visibility has been good and that the terrain is largely open. The route she was following is well-used by families in summer. According to experts, there are not many places where it’s possible to fall more than a few metres.

Sergeant Ramos said his team has also searched areas off the main routes and small crevices and cavities in the rock face.

Attempts have also been made to pinpoint Esther’s location via her mobile phone — not an easy task given that there is no signal in parts of the mountain and the masts to which her phone would have connected as she walked are thousands of metres apart.

‘You’re left with a bitter taste in your mouth when so much work has gone into a search that’s had no result,’ says Sergeant Ramos.

Pierre Gaillard, deputy commander of the French high-mountain gendarmerie platoon, says the last time Esther’s phone was active was when she called Dan just before 4pm on November 22. ‘There is no data use or GPS trace since then,’ he adds.

While the possibility that Esther is still on the mountain remains the most likely scenario, a police investigation has been launched. Officers will reveal nothing except that all options are being considered. Theories abound.

Five days before she vanished, Esther posted pictures on Facebook of a large animal print in the snow. Brown bears are known to inhabit the Pyrenees and, although they are said to be frightened of humans, it’s another possible line of inquiry. Police are also seeking to speak to the man Esther met at the peak of the mountain three days before she disappeared.

She mentioned him in a Facebook post on November 19, saying they’d hiked down together and he’d given her a lift back to her van. Police believe he may hold vital clues about what plans she might have had.

Back in 2014, when Dan was seriously ill, Esther spoke of how the fear of losing him had changed her outlook on life: ‘All of a sudden, someone says the person I love and was planning to do it all with could be gone by the morning.’

Last May, Dan reflected on what she must have gone through. ‘I never really appreciated how hard it was for her to go home alone, to an apartment full of our shared life with no guarantee that life would resume,’ he said. ‘It takes strength to be the one left behind.’

How tragically prescient those words seem now.

‘I need her back. I can’t face the alternative,’ he wrote on Facebook page on November 28, when Esther had been missing for four days.

Their nomadic life is one that many dream of, but few dare to attempt. But Esther’s disappearance has turned their hard-won happiness on its head.Until she is found, there is no end in sight for her partner and family as they face an agonising wait for news of the woman they love.