Camping, fishing, making forts, riding quads, picking berries and the list goes on...

From daybreak to sunset, you would find Krystle Knott outside being adventurous says her aunt, Doris Goulet.

“She'd sooner be walking out in the woods, in the bush, looking at things and doing things, than in town ... a nature girl,” said Goulet, who raised Krystle for the better part of half her life in High Prairie, Alta.

“Krystle called me mom and she called [my husband], Dave, dad.”

Knott, a band member of Alberta’s Duncan’s First Nation, was last seen at the West Edmonton Mall on Feb. 18, 2005.

The 16-year-old was with Rene Gunning, 19, and according to Goulet, Knott’s troubles started six months before that.

Her mother decided to try to raise her daughter, and moved Krystle to Dawson Creek, B.C., one month before she turned 15.

The two were not getting along and Knott started to act out and hitchhike.

Initial reports state that Knott and Gunning did not know each other prior to meeting in the West Edmonton Mall on Feb. 18, 2005.

The reports say the girls told friends they were going to hitchhike together back to Dawson Creek or Fort St. John, B.C., where Gunning grew up.

Goulet believes Knott befriended Gunning because she was always looking out for others.

“She loved helping people. Like, she was very polite, she was just a very beautiful young girl,” she said.

“I always kept telling her like, ‘don't ever hitchhike, my girl. Don't you never hitchhike because you never know what's out there.’ And her, she was adventurous… She wanted to explore,” Goulet said.

Not long after Knott’s disappearance, Goulet and her husband moved to Edmonton, desperately hoping to find her.

“My husband drove, rode his bike up and down the streets until midnight every night after work, he'd drive looking for her,” Goulet said.

“And we couldn't find her ‘cause they kept telling us [it was possible] she was hooking in Edmonton.”

Knott’s case was handled by RCMP in B.C. because that’s where she and Gunning lived, but the KARE unit, an RCMP entity that investigates files of murdered or missing vulnerable persons in Alberta, took over the investigation in 2007, although neither girl was known to be involved in drugs or the sex trade.