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SALT LAKE CITY -- Having mailed a farewell letter to his family back in Minnesota, Jerry O. Wolff stepped off a shuttle bus on a sunny Sunday morning and disappeared into Utah's rugged Canyonlands National Park.

"I am gone in a remote wilderness where I can return my body and soul to nature. There is no reason for anyone to look for me, just leave me where I am," he wrote.

No trace of Wolff has been found since he was last seen May 11. Park officials assume the 65-year-old biology professor committed suicide.

This year, at least 18 people have committed suicide in America's national parks, from the swamplands of the Everglades and the beaches of Cape Cod to the rain-soaked forests of Olympic National Park and the bleak Mojave Desert.

For some, the parks are apparently just a convenient place to end it all. Others, though, seem to seek out their beauty and solace.

"Parks hold a special place in people's hearts," said Al Nash, a spokesman at Yellowstone, where five suicides have been recorded since 1997. "There are some individuals who feel it's important to have that kind of connection in those final moments."

Joan Anzelmo, superintendent of the Colorado National Monument, said of her park: "It's become known in this area as a place that suicides are happening, but you can be sure the staff here are doing everything we can to prevent them."

Rangers are trained in suicide prevention, and park officials are contemplating closing certain areas at night and adding more guardrails.

Ten people have killed themselves at the Grand Canyon since 2004; that's more than at any other park in recent years, according to the park service. The 1991 movie Thelma & Louise, which ends with the pair driving off a cliff, has been blamed by some for a string of copycat suicides at the Grand Canyon, even though the scene was filmed at a state park in Utah.

Michael Ghiglieri has co-written books about deaths at the Grand Canyon and Yosemite. Among the stories he has recounted: A young man once asked a couple to take his picture at Grand Canyon, then jumped to his death in front of them. Another man, who had squandered an inheritance, climbed to the top of Yosemite Falls, wrote his will -- leaving money to have a redwood planted on his grave -- and then leapt off the falls, the highest in North America.

Lanny Berman, executive director of the American Association of Suicidology, said of suicides in national parks that, in general, "the driving force for most is availability and accessibility and, secondarily, whether that site offers something that other sites don't."