Story of missing hiker in Joshua Tree NP

[sk43]

Perry,

My photo of the parking lot shows it to be gravel. What looks like a diagonal painted line in the Narrative photos must be something else.

As others have noted, eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable. The parking lot extends 350 feet or so back from the main road. Easy to miss something. No reason to think the car was moved.

[OtherHand]

Yep, the Juniper Flats trailhead parking is gravel, so no striping. It seems sorta obvious the idea is to park headed in, as there are wheel stops along the perimeter. But since Summer visitation was so low (at the time, it's picked up since) it's understandable that someone might just do an easy parallel park.

[Ric Capucho]

My bad, gravel it is. Sorry all.

How does everyone feel about the contrary parking? Glaring and controversial? Or not such a big deal?

Ric

[bretpct]

My bad, gravel it is. Sorry all.

How does everyone feel about the contrary parking? Glaring and controversial? Or not such a big deal?

Ric

Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. It's a big lot. But now that I think of it, I wonder how Mendoza parked his car.

I think most people, with no defined parking spaces, would park the same way as the other cars already there.


Also, regarding swiping his pass, I've seen the rangers set up two lines at the main entrance before. Those who didn't have a pass were lined up to pay at the booth, and those with passes were allowed bypass that line, show their pass and drive in. I've even experienced this at Yosemite before. I came in one night after the booths closed, and on my way out the next day I flashed my pass at the ranger and he waved me through.

There is no ranger monitoring the southern entrance to the park. You can just drive in, and you're supposed to stop at the visitor center and buy a pass. It would take about an hour extra to get to Juniper Flats trailhead via the southern entrance.

[RichardK]

Here is how they park when the lot is full, February 17, 2018.

[Ric Capucho]

As a contrast, a google maps image of a more quiet time...

Ric

[RichardK]

I found the superintendent's report for 2010, the year Bill disappeared, here:

http://www.npshistory.com/publications/ ... r/2010.pdf

These newer reports no longer list a personnel roster. The summary of personnel actions for the year is on page 4

The HR staff completed in excess of 373 personnel actions, 21 vacancy announcements, purged and prepared more than 130 OPF‘s for shipping and scanning for implementation of eOPF‘s, 6 Retirement cases, numerous employee relations cases including one removal for cause.

Was Mike Grayson the one who got fired?

[Perry]

Yesterday I did my first search for Bill Ewasko and went with sh44. This wasn't planned very well, but we did it. Originally we were going to go on Monday and spend some time over the weekend figuring out where to go. Looking at the weather forecast, Saturday looked much better, but we both were visiting family yesterday evening so the whole trip was rushed. We had talked about searching west and south of Quail Mountain, but as we drove into the park decided to search west of the mouth of Smith Water Canyon instead. The goal was to search what had not been searched, but this was based on my memory of what Adam's map looked like, so there was some re-searching of areas that had already been covered, but we did manage to search a new area too.

With the holiday crowds I thought we would see somebody else searching for Bill or hiking to Smith Water. Not a soul. The bushwhacking wasn't very much, and we didn't see any snakes. We did see a hawk with an interesting wing pattern, some strange fruit growing on a bush, juniper berries that hadn't been picked off by tourists, animal bones, yuccas or nolimas with blooms, various types of cactus, and there was a bighorn staring at us from another ridge. I think I saw a little purple cactus too.

track-52618-95420am.kml

(46.41 KiB) Downloaded 1496 times

[Perry]

Here are some shots I took of the slopes to the southeast of Smith Water. I'm not sure if my old telephoto camera has enough detail to be useful, but this technique with a newer camera could be very effective. For more detail, or for digital analysis, I could share them as TIF files, but instead of being about 700k, they are about 9MB each.

[Cy Kaicener]

Missing and injured New Zealand hiker rescued in Joshua Tee
https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/lo ... 647365002/