SILVERTON — Loud cracks rise from the Animas River as ice shatters under a blinding midwinter sun. That sound in this otherwise silent valley puts a big grin on Bruce Conrad’s face.

“A little thing like that is so ‘Dad’ to me,” says the 39-year-old San Juan County sheriff’s deputy.

“Dad” is Skip Conrad, a man who was as much a part of these mountains that he rambled for 30 years as the avalanche chutes and the twists of streams.

Skip took off from Silverton 3½ years ago on one of his twice-daily hikes into the mountains and never returned. His remains have never been located. But Bruce and the many Silverton residents who cherished Skip for his care of the mountains and kindness to the people there say they feel as if they’ve found Skip in other ways.

Most have come to grips with the possibility that Skip did not intend to return when he took off down Lackawanna Road the morning of Aug. 21, 2006. He was a lean and ropy 56-year-old. He could out-hike those half his age. But his carotid artery was shutting down, and doctors had told him it was too far gone to fix.

He had told more than one person he preferred to be “coyote food” than waste away in a hospital bed.

“He chose his own exit. And that’s pretty cool,” said San Juan County Commissioner Pete McKay, who always counted on Skip to speak out for environmental causes.

Good friend Anita Steck is one of the few who doesn’t think Skip chose a hike with no return: He was too averse to drawing attention to himself.

“I think if it was the day, he would have left a note saying, ‘Don’t bother looking for me,’ ” she said.

Another longtime friend, Silverton Town Board member and town coal man “Outback John” Shertz, said Skip wouldn’t have told anyone of his plans.

“If he told someone he wanted to go for a last hike and sit under a tree and read the Bible, they would have locked him up,” Shertz said.

Whether Skip planned a swan-song hike that Monday or suffered a dizzy spell and tumbled into a crevice or mineshaft will be the enduring mystery in his story.

His disappearance was noted when he didn’t show up at a tourist shop where he always took the trash out for a friend Wednesday mornings.

Bruce Conrad was a bartender at the time at one of the busiest establishments in Silverton. He also was one of the officers on the San Juan County Search and Rescue team. He quickly put down his bar rag and joined in when the call came that a search was being organized.

More than 50 searchers and a small army of volunteers combed the mountains around Skip’s favorite haunts. Helicopters and dogs joined those pounding the trails.

The organized effort was called off the next week with no sign of Skip. But Bruce couldn’t stop looking on his own. The tracking of a trained and experienced searcher turned into the solo hunting of a heartbroken offspring.

“He knew, I think, that we weren’t going to find him,” Bruce said with reddened eyes as he rifled through a box of letters and papers his father left.

In the box were stacks of thank-you notes from charities across the country — orphanages, shelters for battered women and homeless programs. It turned out this man who made his own shoes from castoff boot parts and served cold peas from a can to dinner guests, had given away more than $40,000 to charities.

Bruce Conrad said he already had been in awe of his father and the spare way he lived his life. But when he saw those letters, “I knew he was even more than I thought.”

Skip came here 30 years ago as a hard-drinking brawler. In Silverton, he worked for the mines, did mechanic and carpenter jobs, ran a ski-hill rope tow and made fudge for tourists.

Gradually, he also found something powerfully transforming in nature. In 1983, when the son he hardly knew was 13, Skip invited him to spend a summer in Silverton. They repeated this every other summer until Bruce decided in 1994 that he also was in love with his father’s mountains. He moved to Silverton.

Skip had become known for his many kindnesses. He tutored kids in math. He chopped wood, changed oil and shoveled snow for friends all over Silverton.

He fashioned some barbed wire he cleaned out of the mountains into figures of the crucified Christ that hang in front of the Silverton Catholic Church and outside his abandoned trailer.

He worked to get wilderness legislation passed to protect areas around Silverton and to secure wetlands protection along parts of the Animas. His hand-lettered signs warning motorized vehicles not to trespass still poke out of the snow along the river.

The official search is over, although Skip still comes up on the computer next to Bruce’s desk in the Sheriff’s Office as “missing.” But the “searching” for Skip — the wondering about his whereabouts and the quest for living life more like him — has no foreseeable end around here.

“I’ll let you know,” Bruce Conrad said, with the same half-smile that his father was well-known for, “when I’m done looking.”