She set out on September 24 but there has been no sign of her since her car was found locked and with two flat tires in Kaibab National Forest just northeast of Ash Fork on October 5.
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Parents of photographer Chelsea Grimm who vanished on cross-country road trip says she told them when she reached Arizona that 'I just don't think I can do this by myself'
Missing photographer Chelsea Grimm had abandoned her plans to drive across the country from her San Diego home by the time she vanished in
Arizona, her parents have revealed.
The 32-year-old chose to drive the 2,860 miles to a wedding in
Connecticut because she could not bear to be parted from her pet lizard, Roxy.
But she disappeared just six days into the journey after telling her parents 'I just don't think I can do this by myself'.
She set out on September 24 but there has been no sign of her since her car was found locked and with two flat tires in Kaibab National Forest just northeast of Ash Fork on October 5.
'The day she was supposed to fly east she called and said I'm going to drive across the country,' her mother Janet Grimm told
NewsNation.
'She said I've packed my car I have my tent and my sleeping bag, I might spend a couple of nights in a hotel, I might camp, I'll sort of see how it goes.
'Three days later she was only as far as Arizona and she said I just don't think I can do this by myself.
'So she said I'm just going to skip the wedding and stay here for couple of days and do a little camping, and she made it sound like she was going to head back to San Diego.'
'The magnitude of this adventure of driving across the country was a lot even for Chelsea and we said we thought that was too much and if she wanted, we'd help her fly from Phoenix,' father Stephen Grimm said.
'But she seemed intent on this once she had chosen it.'
Chelsea had planned to document 'lost and forgotten people' for an art project on her cross-country journey, and met up with a friend in Phoenix on September 27.
'We last talked on the 27th in the afternoon and she said I'm probably going to camp for a couple of days,' said Janet.
'So for a couple of days we didn't even think about her, she told us she would be offline and we knew she'd be in an area of Arizona where there are spots not good for communication.
'It was a couple of days after that that we started thinking this is too long for a camping trip.'
Shortly after speaking to her mother for the last time Chelsea cancelled a lunch date with her friend she had planned for the following day, and a police officer found her in distress that following evening while parked near a war memorial in Williams County.
'I just was doing a photo shoot of the lost soldiers and got a little emotional, so I was crying before I got back on the road,' she told him in her last filmed exchange.
Two days later a woodcutter outside Ashfork was the last person known to have seen her.
'He thought she did not seem in distress or in need,' Chelsea's father Stephen Grimm said.
'He went back to make sure she didn't want help and she declined, so his conclusion was that she was in pretty good shape.'
Nothing more was seen of her until her car was found abandoned by hunters in Kaibab Forest on October 5, a day after her parents reported her missing.
'There is a chance she got a ride out of there,' said her father.
'She seemed to leave that car in an organized way of her own volition and taken her wallet and we think her phone and her sleeping bag among other things along with the bearded dragon.'
Her family are convinced that her love for animals would have not have allowed her to do anything that would harm her beloved pet and have hired a private detective to assist police in the search.
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