For two days, more than 100 people deployed to look for the 16-year-old girl from Ohio, there in the park with an environmental group conducting a service project.

Authorities used dogs and ATVs, helicopters and infrared imaging to detect heat sources on the ground. They looked for clues and distributed missing person posters that described what Jackson was last seen wearing: white hat, tan pants, a long-sleeve green shirt that said “Find Your Park” and “Groundwork USA,” maybe a purple backpack.

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But when they finally found Jackson, she didn’t look the same.

Her hair, once long and sandy brown, was now a different cut and color, according to a statement from the National Park Service. The teenager had changed her clothes.

And as her rescuers approached, she ran not toward them, but away.

They caught up with Jackson on Saturday, near the Snake River Outlook, a popular sightseeing spot in the park, about three to four miles away from where she disappeared. Although she appeared uninjured, Jackson was taken to St. John’s Medical Center for a welfare check, officials said, then placed in the care of the Teton County Sheriff’s Office.

Authorities have not explained her odd behavior. Nor has she. Did she leave the park and go somewhere else, have her hair dyed and get a change of clothes, and then return once more so she could be “found?” Or did she not want to be found at all?

It seemed unlikely.

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Activity on her debit card ceased the day Jackson disappeared, her stepfather, James Bennett, told WLWT. The same for her cellphone.

And it seemed unlike her.

A sophomore at Clark Montessori High School in Cincinnati, the teen is known in her community as kind, reliable and a budding young leader, reported the Cincinnati Enquirer.

It was those skills that had brought Jackson to Wyoming in the first place. After spending eight weeks in a youth employment program through the Cincinnati chapter of Groundwork USA, a national civic organization that focuses on green issues, Jackson was selected as one of three teens to make the trip to the Grand Tetons, the newspaper reported.

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“She’s very strong minded, very smart, able to handle all the tasks we had over the course of the summer — trail-building, invasive removal, restoration work,” Alan Edwards, with Groundwork’s Cincinnati chapter, told ABC affiliate WCPO. “Honestly, one of the best employees we had and that’s why she got to go.”

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The Wyoming trip lasted nine days and included attending an NPS-sponsored event with outdoor activities, leadership and team-building and fieldwork, Robin Corathers, executive director of the chapter, told the Enquirer. Outdoorsy and an avid gardener, Jackson “worked hard, got along well with the fourteen other youth in our summer program, and showed leadership potential,” Corathers told NBC News.

Jackson had been documenting her trip on social media, posting Instagram photos of herself at Old Faithful and atop mountain peaks. But few, if any, clues foreshadowing her mysterious behavior were to be found there. On Wednesday, the day before she disappeared, she posted a selfie with two other teens. In the caption, she wrote: “Last day in Wyoming is tomorrow!! I can’t wait to be home and see everyone. Today I’m going to be blazing a trail, pretty siked. I love you all a bunch and can’t wait to see all of you soon!”

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Friends and strangers flooded the photo with nearly 150 comments in the days after she disappeared.

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“Come back safe Fauna!”

“I hope when you get home you see these comments and smile!”

“i’ve been looking for you ever since you went missing, i leave tomorrow and i hope that you’ll be found by then,” one girl wrote. “my heart aches for you and your family.”

After news of the circumstances of her discovery, the unexplained change in her appearance and her flight from those striving so hard to find her, the tone in the comments shifted.

Some scolded the girl and alleged that she led authorities on an expensive and dangerous wild goose chase. Others couldn’t believe she would do something like that on purpose.

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“I know her and I know this is not something that she would do of her own accord,” Chad Vahue, Jackson’s math teacher at her high school, where she was a straight-A student and president of the Vegan Club, told NBC affiliate WLWT before Jackson was found.

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Her family was just relieved to see her again. “Her condition appears to be good,” Bennett, Jackson’s stepfather, told Fox 19. “We’re just so happy to have our beloved daughter back.”

In a statement on the organization’s website, Groundwork USA Director of National Youth Programs Curt Collier said:

“Groundwork USA doesn’t just build trails. We’re in the business of changing places and changing lives. As a community-based organization that fosters youth leadership and develops the next generation of conservationists, we care deeply about the safety and wellbeing of all the youth we work with. Needless to say, an event like this shakes us deeply. It is our profoundest hope that there is a happy resolution to this incident.”

The details, and Jackson’s physical transformation, are still under investigation, officials said.