RichardK wrote:I have never been to the Juniper Flats trailhead, but I looked at it on Google Earth. You would have to be blind to drive by and not see a car parked there.
I drove past it a couple of times this weekend. It is very obvious from the road, and very obvious whether any vehicles are parked there or not, but it is also a narrow road where you have to keep your eyes on the road. I can see how somebody might get the details of how a car parked there is oriented, wrong if they just drove by as opposed to pulling into the lot and taking a look. Like I said, a spot where you don't feel too safe staring into the parking lot for long if you are driving, since the road doesn't have margin for error. The parking lot is also slanted relative to the road, which may make accurately remembering a vehicle's orientation fuzzy.
After all, Bill's car was eventually found Saturday afternoon where hiker Mendoza saw it Thursday afternoon.
Exactly. As far as conspiracy theories and murder goes, it seems as if somebody murdering Bill wouldn't then mess around with driving his car, potentially leaving fingerprints on it, or being caught "putting it back" after Bill has been missing for a day or two and searchers may be in the vicinity. Abandon it anywhere else! Murder needs a motive, too - why follow him into a park halfway across the country where a ranger will see you enter at the entrance, why mess around with his car in JTNP ... there is more holes in such a theory than in the theory that he was out hiking and through a series of unfortunate occurrences got into trouble.
Does anyone have experience with a backcountry injury that makes walking difficult or impossible? Something like a broken leg or a badly sprained ankle or knee. Without hiking poles, would Bill have even been able to stand? If he could get upright, how well could he hobble along? How much distance could he have covered once injured? Several miles or no more than a few hundred feet? Could the place where he was injured, the place where the cell tower was pinged, and the place where he eventually passed away, all be fairly close together?
I don't have much experience with a backcountry injury, thank goodness. But I do have a personal anecdote from my weekend excursion into JTNP.
On Saturday, my spouse and I hiked ~ 4.5 miles into the backcountry to go explore an old mining site. We were well prepared with topo maps, satellite views, an understanding of how we wanted to approach our hike, and also armed with a GPS tracking our route, and a compass to back up what the GPS was saying. I navigated with the GPS, my spouse with the compass, so we sanity checked each other instead of relying on one person to figure it all out.
We reached the mine site by scrambling through some washes, walking down others, cresting a few saddles, following an old mining road for a while. It was fun and not too strenuous.
We planned to hike out a different route, to see more sights. This route would follow a big wash trending south, then cut across a saddle and exit into an east-west wash that would lead us back to our starting point. After going down the small wash the mine was located in and reaching the big wash, we happily followed it down. The walking was easy, much better than our entry route.
I still need to look at our GPS track to confirm, but we were misled by the topo and satellite views into thinking it would be a lot easier to cut out of the wash than it was. Long story short, we had to stay in the big wash until we were nearly at its end, way to the east of where we needed to be. Cross-country scrambling ensued. We went up a ridge and down into a nasty little gully, full of jumbled rocks and hungry acacia bushes. Lots of up and overs. Both of us with two hiking poles, mind you. It was at this point that I thought about Bill, and about how it would have been impossible ( truly impossible ) to follow this route with any kind of lower extremity injury. There was a
lot of scrambling needed. Some drops off the rocks were 3 feet or so. That's further than you can safely drop if you are crawling or you don't have two good legs to land on and brace with. No going around, either - the sides of the gully were too sheer. You could easily get into a spot where you might have been able to get around something, but once you dropped down one scramble, you were committed that way, no going back up.
Once we emerged from that gully, we were in a little maze of hills and gullies, and a careful examination of the topo map and some compass use got us up a nice little hidden wash and back on track. All of this with the sun setting, mind you. We had head lamps and were properly prepared and thinking clearly, not panicked because we had plenty of water and some gear for emergencies. If you are in a hurry, a panic, or in pain, you may well make some regrettable choices, instead.
So, all that to say: I really don't see how Bill, if he had a broken leg or badly sprained joint, would have been very mobile. He didn't have any hiking poles, which are a great help in situations like that. The vegetation in Joshua Tree doesn't have nice straight, sturdy limbs, so he wouldn't have been able to improvise something. Sure, there are some areas that are smooth enough that you could crawl or butt scoot along, weaving around bushes and the like. ( And yeah, almost everything has thorns on it. At one point I got snagged by an acacia and I have the row of punctures across my thigh to prove it. ) But anything rocky would be completely out of the question. Getting out there and scrambling some cross country really re-enforced that fact with me.
I didn't get to do any searching or much recon of my own on this trip, due to weather and prior commitments. I'm hoping for another outing in February.
I did drive past the Juniper trailhead Friday, as mentioned. Friday was very rainy. I would have thought about going partway up Queen mountain perhaps, but the top was shrouded in low clouds. Visibility would have been very poor. We did Lost Horse Mine instead - just out and back, not the loop. We spent quite a bit of time in the clouds and all of it in the rain. I would not try to whack cross-country up slopes in that kind of weather!
Saturday we did the mine trip I mentioned. Sunday, we would have gone to Hexahedron mine, but our Saturday trip wore us out some, and the kicker was me sitting down in my camping chair only to have some cheap plastic part sheer off, spilling me sideways out of the chair and right into a piece of stacked firewood with a sharp edge. Gave me a really nasty deep bruise on the thigh, almost right where the acacia bush got me earlier. That impaired my left leg to the point where I could not step up very well at all. I could walk flat just fine, but stepping up was bad. I wasn't going to try laboring up a slope in that condition, not to mention get into trouble due to it! ( This is another case where the difficulty of uneven terrain with any kind of injury was driven home for me. ) So we nixed Hexahedron and walked out to Samuelson's Rock instead. ( Thanks for the suggestion, OtherHand! It was a cool spot. ) From there, I sat for a while and stared up the slopes and pondered things. I really hope to get up there in February and take a look.
Another thing that I paid special attention to: general ability to check out terrain for interesting things. Sometimes, visibility is good, but other times, I don't think I would have spied something if it wasn't within 15 or so feet from me.
A question for OtherHand, or anybody else, really: I think I should invest in a PLB. I've been doing without one so far, but I'm constantly wanting to range further afield. Does anybody have a recommendation?
