Story of missing hiker in Joshua Tree NP

[AZeagle]

Adam, I used the image embed to post a map the first time, sorry it didn't show. http://i.imgur.com/1WopVDc.jpg The area I am referencing is west of the Indian Cove star.

I definitely agree that it's a crazy or even bad idea. Just trying to think of ways he could be along the path in an unsearched area.

[adamghost]

No, I saw the map, I just couldn't follow the route you were thinking in my head.

Well, I suppose nobody knows where Bill was headed from Juniper Flat trailhead, but fresh tracks were noted the day he disappeared heading up the old road leading from there, so the assumption is that's the way he went.

I just have a hard time with the idea Bill would have crossed Park Blvd. at any point (sorry Ric). Without getting into old territory it just requires a lot of distance in the heat without a lot of logic and/or doesn't make geographical sense relative to where the car was found.

Very interesting new post on Tom's website incidentally.

[OtherHand]

Here's a real interesting paper on lost person behavior. I've read a few of these and am not sure how I missed this one until now. It's rather good and might be relevant here (putting aside the wet Oregon data!). If you don't want to plow through the entire paper the executive summary does a pretty good job. My uh,...."common sense" had me ignoring high points but the data suggests otherwise.

Let the wild theories commence..............................

[Ric Capucho]

Hi Tom,

No (more) wild theories from me, but it *is* an interesting paper.

Maybe the lack of water, plus the rough and rocky topography makes the search strategy in JTNP different from the other parks? If not, then the lack of focus on high points and ridges (and roads; more later on that) by the original searchers stands out. My observations are in no way meant as a criticism of the original search, by the way: the larger multipliers given in the paper for trails and low points shows why.

It seems the original foot search pretty much stuck to a single high point (Quail and the massif around it) and not the rest - although the helicopter did buzz a few alternative high points towards the end of the search period. The main energy of the search went into low points (canyons and Juniper Flats which I think can count as an extended low point area, compared to Quail, anyway) and of course trails.

As a friend who spent years in the Brit army told me: "In an emergency, civilians run down; but military men run up. It's how we've been trained to think". Bill was ex-military, so there might be something in that. Wonder if the writer of the paper noticed any correlation between the hikers found on high points and prior service record? And that ties in with numerous theories (such as Adam's) where Bill switches on his cellphone on the ping occasion only after reaching a promising location, i.e. some form of high point or prominence where (presumably) he can see the lights of civilisation.

The tops of JT high points often have large boulder piles on them, so clearing all of the nooks and crannies of even one would take quite some effort. Been a while since I google earthed the massif north of SWC, but I recall 4-5 prominences up there - and the entire length of the north side of SWC runs along the ping arc. Also no one ever cleared the three peaks north west of Johnny Lang (although I think the search helicopter buzzed it) but they're much further away from the ping. And then we have the smaller double peaked prominence just north west of Samuelsons - which is bang on the ping arc. Not sure if Adam would claim the peak/ridge on the north side of Upper Covington as already cleared, but the sourthern part of it is also on the ping arc.

Sheesh, there's enough boulder pile high points remaining for many dozens of searches.

Right, roads.

Hate to bang on about it, but no one ever properly checked out the boulder piles left and right of the Park Road as it runs from QS picnic area right up to the left turn where it starts its descent down to the JTNP western entrance. That left turn is bang on the ping arc, and likely to be the best and clearest ping arc location anywhere on the Park Road (anywhere in the park, for that matter). If Bill walked up Park during the small hours of Sunday morning when there's zero traffic, then he could have conceivably pinged Serin at 6:30am and then (after his phone died) found himself a nook to escape the rising sun (sunrise time that morning shows as 5:37am). He was intending to wait for the first passing car but gave out before he had the chance. Seems likely that the first traffic on Park that Sunday morning was (ironically) the searchers driving to their rendezvous.

The search narrative states that "I came back into service at 06:00 hours" and until just now I assumed he meant he arrived back at JF parking at that time. However, a sentence or two later he shows he's still at the station, wherever that is. The searchers went "back into the field at 7:25am" so I assume they assembled at JF parking and QS first - maybe sometime after 7am?

Ahh, cr@p. That counts as another wild theory. Sheesh. Sorry, Tom.

The other road that spings to mind is the one leading from Yucca Valley to the Covingtons. Not much cover there left or right and I suppose Tom's and Adam's endless drives along it might count as a repeated clearance? Might be worth a (boring) walk along both sides, although I can only imagine a rich haul of empty beer bottles and cigarette stumps.

Ric

[adamghost]

The other road that spings to mind is the one leading from Yucca Valley to the Covingtons. Not much cover there left or right and I suppose Tom's and Adam's endless drives along it might count as a repeated clearance? Might be worth a (boring) walk along both sides, although I can only imagine a rich haul of empty beer bottles and cigarette stumps.

I did walk part of it. It wasn't that bad, but I pretty quickly decided it wasn't worth continuing. There's not a lot of shade, and thus not much to draw Bill away from the road. There is an area with a bunch of joshua trees and such a little further north, fairly far off the road. I considered checking that out on a later trip but it really just didn't seem worth doing based on the previous try. Anybody else is welcome to try it.

If there's one place no one in the world ever got a call out, it's up around Park Road, as I can attest from the time I got back from a very long slog in the darkness to find one very flat tire.

So those are the reasons I wouldn't want to try it. I've been trying my knee out (got a nice new brace) the last few days up in Kern County and I've been managing pretty well, so in a month or two once I'm back in fighting shape I might be up for another trip out. I've been thinking for a bit that Bill would have headed/stuck to high ground, both to try and get a cell phone call out and because it's leagues cooler up there. If Bill's had 2 1/2 days with no reception I can't see him risking his battery waving the phone around somewhere down in a canyon Sunday morning.

I would say Upper Covington is as cleared as anyplace could be. I can think of one or two spots where maybe something could have been missed, but it's not difficult or heavily covered terrain and I feel like I've memorized that whole area. And Tom's been there a bunch of times too.

I was pondering this on the way home today and I still feel like if this is indeed a straight lost hiker scenario (and I'm already on record saying it's my best guess that it's not), then I think the ping spot has to be that one remaining place on Smith Water, and if that's the case, the only thing that makes sense to me is either that he wiped out trying to come down towards Quail Spring (a logical move because it seems like it's the easiest way down, except it's so not), or backtracked towards Quail Mountain because he saw the rescue helicopters up there. The other thing about that area over UC or elsewhere is, as Myth has pointed out, it's much easier to miss a body up around SWC.

I'm still haunted by something I saw my very first trip out there. I climbed up to the top of Smith Water Canyon, intentionally taking a really crappy way up so as not to duplicate Tom's efforts, and I found a pit. It was formed by tall rocks and obscured by trees around it. I had to edge my way right to the lip of it to look in and make sure Bill wasn't there. He wasn't, but by God, that's exactly the kind of place where someone could drop in and you'd never find them. As far as I know no one else ever found that pit (and I could never find it again). Where there's one, there might be another.

To me, then, the most likely area is south and east of the "Smith Water ping spot." 34° 2'5.20"N, 116°15'47.32"W. I still incline to the idea that Bill isn't in the park at all, but that does not have much to do with not having found him. We all could have missed him.

[Myth]

Hate to bang on about it, but no one ever properly checked out the boulder piles left and right of the Park Road as it runs from QS picnic area right up to the left turn where it starts its descent down to the JTNP western entrance. That left turn is bang on the ping arc, and likely to be the best and clearest ping arc location anywhere on the Park Road (anywhere in the park, for that matter).

Many of those rock piles have well-worn use trails around them because a lot of regular park visitors circle them, not to mention rock climbers for some of them. They see a lot of regular park visitor traffic. Doesn't mean there can't still be something to them, of course. I have actually visited quite a few of them in the years since Bill disappeared. I'll see if I can find my GPS tracks from then to see which ones are left. If you have any particular piles you'd like checked out, post Google links to them here and I'll make sure to check them out next time I'm in JTNP ( sometime this November for sure ).

I'm still haunted by something I saw my very first trip out there. I climbed up to the top of Smith Water Canyon, intentionally taking a really crappy way up so as not to duplicate Tom's efforts, and I found a pit. It was formed by tall rocks and obscured by trees around it. I had to edge my way right to the lip of it to look in and make sure Bill wasn't there. He wasn't, but by God, that's exactly the kind of place where someone could drop in and you'd never find them. As far as I know no one else ever found that pit (and I could never find it again). Where there's one, there might be another.

Now see, that is exactly the kind of thing I talked about. I have walked past two or three of those spots during my trip up above Quail Spring and peered into them with just that thought. Heck, even on some more benign slopes there are gaps between boulders that can easily hide a person and are choked with vegetation. If you fall into one of those, you'd be well hidden too. A lot of these are six, seven feet deep, which is plenty deep to be too deep to get out of. We all imagine we'd just haul ourselves out of such a thing by jumping to grab the ledge and pulling ourselves up but that is a really, really hard thing to do - especially if there's a lip, or the top of the boulder is a little sloped and hard to grip, and they are just too far apart to scoot up between them . Yes, I saw plenty of those where, if I'd slipped and fell into them, I would not have gotten out by myself.

I've also descended by Quail Spring and as I've mentioned before, that was the only time in my life I really could have kissed the ground when I made finally it down! Never was flat earth, previously taken for granted, so precious to me! The pucker factor on that descent is huge.

My money is still on that area. I keep hoping to have time to make it out there again and not finding any.

On that note - OtherHand or others, what is the best route to get back to that area above Quail Springs / Smith water, in your opinion? I traveled in from Quail Mountain, which wasn't too bad. Those slopes look like they'll make for a grim ascent, though.

Final thought: http://whiteblaze.net/forum/showthread.php/97087-Wardens-seek-hikers-aid-in-finding-woman-lost-from-Appalachian-Trail-Kennebec-Jour/page94 is about a hiker lost from the Appalachian Trail, whose remains was recently found. A lot of speculation on that thread and people who won't believe it was a normal lost hiker scenario. The most interesting thing is where she was found. In retrospect it seems a logical place, but that was not where they looked first and some of the line search / grid search type patterns went practically right by her, yet she wasn't found because of terrain. Still, there is just enough confusion about the leads in the initial search that some people firmly suspect foul play there.

Me, I believe it much more likely Bill was injured and is in JTNP. I've done enough cross-country in JTNP to think the terrain is often tough enough that a single stumble or moment of distraction can bring you to grief.

[AZeagle]

Jesse Capen was found in the Superstitions after a 2-3 year search. He fell from a cliff and landed in some kind of pit or slot halfway down. They found him with binoculars.

“We had been out there searching nearly every weekend for three years and this particular time we were scouring an area where a small daypack was located and had a few articles in it and we started scouring the cliffs,” Cooper told FoxNews.com. “And then we were able to spot a boot in a crevasse 35 feet off the floor, making it nearly impossible to see from any direction. He was in a tight spot and that’s why it took so long to find this young man.”

Drones would make such a difference in these cases.

[zippetydude]

Yes. I'm not at all in favor of them being used by Amazon to deliver stuff, buzzing all over the place and ruining our clear skies. Even the number that are likely to be flown just for fun by hobbyists in the next few years is staggering, so you could call me dronephobic. That being said, it seems to me that SAR, using a battery of 25 or so of these, could locate almost anyone in just a few hours. The drones could even be rigged with recognition software so that the slightest unexpected color, texture or heat signature could be detected and investigated without relying only on human eyes to make the discovery. If a battery of 25 were to be deployed, say flying 200' apart at a low rate of speed, like perhaps 10 mph, they could cover 100 square miles in just 10 hours. The level of inspection would be unprecedented - picture with several cameras and FLIR, looking from a distance of only 100' or so, almost nothing would escape detection. I think it's only a matter of time until something like this is implemented. For cold cases, perhaps not. But for emergency situations where the people being searched for are still alive, it would be a no brainer IMHO.

z

[OtherHand]

On that note - OtherHand or others, what is the best route to get back to that area above Quail Springs / Smith water, in your opinion? I traveled in from Quail Mountain, which wasn't too bad. Those slopes look like they'll make for a grim ascent, though.

Quail Springs is situated the back part of a bowl that faces sort of easterly. Going either up or down the back part of this bowl, just above Quail Springs, is, as you've found......interesting. Going up either the northerly or southerly "arms" of the bowl isn't too bad. Not easy but not terrible stupid. Keep in mind that I'm sort of judging this relative to just general Smith Water, so yeah, these are good ways to go. I'd probably lean toward the northerly arm being the slightly easier of the two since the ascent isn't as steep. Going up one and down the other would be a fine way to spend an afternoon if your dentist cancels your root canal appointment.

[Myth]

Oh jeeez, just looking at that terrain in Google Earth has brought the memories flooding back. Yiyiyi. What am I doing, thinking about going back in there!

Sure, on the computer screen the north arm seems a little bit nicer - though the top part looks a bit stupid, and by "a bit" I mean "a whole lot"! In other words, typical of the terrain - even the lesser of the evils is still pretty evil.

This reminds me again why I think an overnight is the best way to explore up there - so much effort and fright expended to get up and down, might as well have a nice long time in the relatively benign upper reaches ... and it does get kinda nice up there for parts, once you're there.