Story of missing hiker in Joshua Tree NP

[adamghost]

I couldn't follow the geography from an internet kiosk in the Philippines, and I know what it's like to explain a complicated theory and not have people follow you into the weeds, so that's why I was thinking a map would be good to have a look at. Richard, it sounds like you've done the math on this. My knee jerk reaction was that it's just a long way to the other side of Park Road in the middle of summer, but I've frankly never been down to where Bill's parked his car, so I want to stay open. It's not like any of my ideas have produced Bill!

"Those two bottles are a very big clue, that, IMO, leads to one of two options: either he had more than two bottles with him, or he (thought he) had a water cache near Quail (and the two bottles were just for Lost Horse)."

Well, I can think of at least one other option it might suggest, e.g., he never intended to be out for very long, for whatever reason.

I don't get how a guy who flies out from Georgia has a cache. If he left it there the prior year, it wouldn't be logical to bet your life it was still there intact.

BTW, does anyone have anyplace they'd like to be looked at? I compromised my knee on the last trip and I'm still assessing my backcountry hikeworthiness (though I managed to make it to the Sekumpul Falls in Bali a few weeks ago), but it's sort of a tradition for me to go out there and poke around after I get back from a long trip. I'm out of ideas (and as I've said before, incline to the belief that he's not there), but I'm open to taking a look somewhere for the fun of it if someone has a pet theory.

[OtherHand]

Ideas? Sure, I have ideas.....but they are all very bad. But hey, since you asked, anyplace between Quail Mountain and Smith Water Canyon would be just fine.......

[Hikin_Jim]

Ideas? Sure, I have ideas.....but they are all very bad.

Well, at least there's been a certain consistency throughout.

HJ

[RichardK]

Adam - Take a map with all of the search tracks marked on it, both original and follow ups. Cut out those areas. Whatever remains is where Bill is.

The brevity of the cell phone ping is a clue. The popular view is that Bill was injured and spent 2 1/2 days struggling to reach a ping spot only to have his battery die. That's great melodrama for the movies, but I don't believe a word of it - too much coincidence. The likely explanation is that Bill was on the move with his phone turned on in an area of little to no coverage. He walked through a finger of reception pinging the tower and kept on moving back into the coverage shadows. That is why all the searches of ping spots have been fruitless. Bill didn't stop at any of them. He was just passing through.

[adamghost]

Yeah, but that's the problem...there's just not that many places for him to go. Once he's pinged the tower anywhere near SWC, he's basically almost out. He's not going up north side of SWC. And I've looked every place he might have conceivably gone from UC.

I do think it's just possible that he backtracked from SWC towards the helicopters, but I'm not sure my knee is up to that. We'll see.

[Myth]

The water bottle issue is an interesting one. Even in the Midwest, let alone hot Georgia, hikers don't take just two bottles of water with them. I usually take 5-6 regular size bottles for an eight hour hike in 50-degree spring/winter weather, and I'm very amateur. Ewasko was an experienced hiker and had reportedly (IIRC) hiked JTNP previously; I literally can't/don't believe that he had two bottles of water to his name on a desert summer day. Those two bottles are a very big clue, that, IMO, leads to one of two options: either he had more than two bottles with him, or he (thought he) had a water cache near Quail (and the two bottles were just for Lost Horse).

Interesting point. We assume the two bottles of water because that is what Bill was shown to have bought before entering the Park, as I recall.

However. We are also led to believe that he was an experienced hiker who've been in JTNP before. So we agree - only two bottles of water doesn't fit the profile.

I'm wondering if he had water with him already. If he's an experienced hiker, he probably owned containers - water bladder, dromedary bag, maybe a bunch of Nalgene bottles. These are containers one fills up at home ( by which I mean, he filled them at the condo he was staying at, not that he filled them in Georgia! ).

Maybe Bill did enter the Park with an ambitious plan, and he figured he'd top off his water supply with two more bottles.

This is giving me something to think about. I've never been able to reconcile the ping ~3 days after he left his car with someone who could still be ambulatory - you can't do that in the desert on two bottles of water. But, you could do it if you had a gallon or two total with you and you only moved when it was cooler and waited out the heat of day in a sheltered spot ...

Another point of interest: if he was up in the Quail Mountain area, the higher elevation would mean a temperature that's 4-5 degrees cooler than the temperature down on the flats. This may have helped, too.

My working theory is still this: he is in that south-east area above Smith Water Canyon. For me, everything fits. OtherHand's theory fits. It is not far-fetched given the itinerary and terrain. The reason he's not been found despite the search tracks knotted all through that area is because it is so rugged. I've been up there and there is so many crannies ... and if you're someone trying to survive in the desert, you'll be in one of the many rock shelters up there, where it is cooler than outside. Not somewhere a helicopter or a hiker who's not poking into every cranny on purpose would see you. Or, if you took on too much and went to Smith Water from Quail, you may have cliffed out - again in rugged terrain. There are many crannies on that slope that you could fall into and not be seen unless someone makes the effort to peer in.

While I'm thinking about it, I wanted to reiterate again that the terrain is extremely difficult to travel in if you're not able-bodied. People dragging themselves for miles is something that only happens in the movies. An easy experiment is to lie down on your lawn, or even on carpet, and try to drag yourself somewhere. That's about how easy it would be to drag yourself through the sandy desert, and your lawn or carpet is presumably not as thorny as the desert!

This winter I hope to make it out to JT for a search again. I just have to convince my other half to tackle another day of madness on steep, sandy slopes ... I fear his memory is too good to fall for that

[Andy]

Long time lurker here... Forgive me if this has been covered, but wouldn't a search along the "Ping Line" itself be warranted? I realize that it is probable that Bill or at least his cell phone drifted into and out of this zone (or lost power there), but perhaps a search along this specific route would produce something. My thought being that if someone were to walk say west to east along this specific line, they would at some point have a higher likelihood of at least crossing paths with Bill's track. This also being at a point where some event may have taken place. With a lot of luck another clue just may surface. Full disclosure that I have no experience in what I'm talking about.

[Ric Capucho]

Interesting.

If the two water bottles might have been supplementary to his usual supplies then that leads me to two ideas:

1. Bill carried far more water than we might hitherto have suspected. Might explain why he's thought to be still being ambulatory after three days in the wilderness.

2. Or, Bill might have spent those missing hours prior to reaching Juniper Flats cache-ing his extra water elsewhere prior to relocating to JF parking. Until now, the theory of "follow the water" meant SWC because that's the only possible source of natural water near Quail. But a self established cache might lead him to press on cross country from Quail or wherever to... where?

Ric

[adamghost]

Myth is absolutely right about the nature of the terrain up above SWC. Of all the places I've visited, it "feels" most right and it's the place someone could be most conceivably stashed away. My skepticism has a lot less to do with none of us finding him than with just the rest of the story not quite adding up to me. But we've already covered that; it's more constructive to ponder other possibilities. And more poking around SWC might be in order. With caution, of course.

Long time lurker here... Forgive me if this has been covered, but wouldn't a search along the "Ping Line" itself be warranted? I realize that it is probable that Bill or at least his cell phone drifted into and out of this zone (or lost power there), but perhaps a search along this specific route would produce something. My thought being that if someone were to walk say west to east along this specific line, they would at some point have a higher likelihood of at least crossing paths with Bill's track. This also being at a point where some event may have taken place. With a lot of luck another clue just may surface. Full disclosure that I have no experience in what I'm talking about.

Because of how closely the line aligns with SWC, hewing along the rising walls of each side of the canyon, it's just not really topographically tenable. The last time I was there I attempted to do this with a short stretch of the line, but you could visualize that theoretical line going straight up the side of a steep cliff-like abutment to a spot maybe 100 meters above you. You can see that the terrain is not navigable and that it's pretty unlikely a cell phone could ever get a signal out, so it's not really worth the risk of trying it because the likelihood, from that vantage point, is pretty small.

[Ric Capucho]

Perhaps a small aircraft or helicopter would do the trick.

And I've always imagined following the entire ping arc starting east on HW 62 at Indian Cive near Twenty Nine Palms then sweeping down along the arc cutting through the north parts of Wonderland, across Park, Quail Springs, SWC, Upper Covington, by then heading due west into the insanity of the badlands west of UC, and then finally popping up near Big Morengo and back on HW 62.

The original search narrative paints a compelling picture of trained spotters in a small aircraft spying out of place objects such as litter and whatnot even from a few hundred feet above the terrain.

If nothing else, it would allow Tom to draw a nice red ping arc right across his map of GPS tracks.

Ric