OtherHand wrote:There's been an article posted about using some advanced probabilistic techniques to find Bill,
available here. Not exactly light reading, but some might find it of interest. I think it highlights a few areas that could be searched more carefully, but there aren't any major revelations.
The reddish areas just west of Samuelson's Rocks on Figure 7 would not be a bad place to search if Bill is in the search area. But the last few words, "if Bill is in the search area", is key.
The search area needs to be as wide as possible since we only have a few solid facts to work with:
1.) Bill was at or near Monterey Ave. at 8 AM on Thursday, June 24. At that time, he was driving westbound on I-10, intended to be out of the park by 5 PM, and planned to take dinner in Pioneertown.
2.) His car was not at the trailhead at 10:20 AM on Thursday. He should have reached there by 9:15 if he headed there directly, drove at a normal speed, and did not stop anywhere else.
3.) His car was at the trailhead, facing west, at 5:30-6 PM on Thursday and at 4:56 PM on Saturday.
4.) The search effort at Juniper Flats started at 6:46 PM on Saturday. 700+ miles were accumulated during the initial organized search, and an additional 1000+ miles were covered since the initial search ended.
Everything else is either unknown/speculative (the amount of water he took on his hike, injuries he may have suffered during his hike, his hiking destination(s) that day, his reasons for not going to Carey's Castle, etc.) or cannot be proven beyond a reasonable doubt (the bandanna might not be Bill's, the witnesses claiming differing accounts of Bill's vehicle on Friday and Saturday may not be credible, someone else may have been using Bill's phone on Sunday morning, the cell phone ping distance may not be accurate, etc.)
So we need to start with a blank slate of a hiker who is at Juniper Flats with an unknown destination. Given the maximum amount of water he was thought to have carried (three 12 oz bottles) and weather conditions typical of late June, where are the furthest points he can reach in each direction if he were headed out on a one-way trip?
Once that is determined, we can begin setting the search boundaries. Park Road would be a good northerly boundary, as there is no way Ewasko would have continued going further north after reaching a road. The area just west of Covington Trailhead would be a good westerly boundary since that is about as far as you can realistically go at that time of the year with only 36 ounces of water. But the search zone in the article should be expanded by at least 3 miles to the east and to the southwest. If anything, hiking east would be more logical than hiking west given the limited amount of water he had and how late in the day he started. As for the southwest direction, I could see him trying to reach the area between Sky Valley and Indio Hills if he ended up near Stubbe Springs and got lost. While hiking under the full moon to avoid the heat, it would be incredibly tempting to try and reach the lights near the 10 Freeway instead of heading for an invisible destination to the northeast (your car or Keys View Rd) and possibly getting even more lost or going in circles. If you make it, you'll get to civilization below, and even if you can't get there, you may have a decent chance of pinging one of the towers in the Coachella Valley if you stick to a ridgeline.
The final steps would be to exclude all of the areas within the search zone that are either unclimbable, have been searched on foot before, are easily visible from an aerial search, or are very close to a road or popular trail. The article does this but, IMO, gives undue weight to the cell ping.
So what locations do we have left? Near the northwest area of the search zone, we have the hill west of Samuelson's Rocks that was identified in the article. Near the center part of the zone, we have the possibility that Bill attempted a cross-country shortcut route from near Quail Mountain back to his car.
And the east and south-southwest edges of the search zone would be the areas that I think he's in - near Ryan Mountain or in the rugged terrain 2-4 miles southwest of Stubbe Spring.