As Pete Carlson of the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit put it to me, "If you haven't found them, then they're someplace you haven't looked yet. As it happens, we live in something of a golden age for amateur investigations. 6 miles away from the tower at the time of registration. He managed to get much farther into the park than he expected. Acting on Melson's tip, the police found their bodies in a canal that was 50 miles away from the last tower pinged. "But there are so many areas where you can get lost and not even realize it until you're lost. Many a national park visitor crossword clue answer. From what she had read, the site sounded too remote, too isolated. Melson had been following the story of the Ewasko disappearance off and on, both through word of mouth in the search-and-rescue community and through a blog called Other Hand, written by Tom Mahood.
Still others are less fortunate. One commenter on the Mount San Jacinto Outdoor Recreation forum even suggested that a passing bird's wings could have thrown off the signal; others, more conspiracy-minded, suggested that the ping had been deliberately staged to mask the true reasons for Ewasko's disappearance. Paying closer attention to the exact moment at which the boys' phones abruptly left the cellular network, Melson arrived at a macabre but accurate conclusion: The boys had driven into water.
The most important thing for her is not just the company — not just knowing that people are still searching but that, after all this time, they still care. Perhaps the signal was distorted by early-morning thermal effects as the sun rose, throwing off Ewasko's real position. "My philosophy is: The data says what the data says, " he told me. Stretching west from Juniper Flats, where Ewasko's car was spotted, is an old, unpaved road that begins with little promise of an eventful hike; chilling winds whip down from the flanks of Quail Mountain, and the park's famous boulder fields are nowhere near. Marsland began drinking less, losing nearly 40 pounds as he reoriented his free time around this quest to find a stranger. Mary Winston still cannot bring herself to visit Joshua Tree. As deputy planning chief, he was put in charge of routes, teams and search areas. Koester has assembled a database of nearly 150, 000 search-and-rescue cases. National parks by visitor numbers. "I love being a musician, " he said, "but it isn't an intellectual puzzle most of the time. She so thoroughly pestered Ewasko about his safety that, when he arrived in California, he bought a can of pepper spray as a kind of reassuring joke.
That ping also supplies information that can be used to estimate distance, like how far a phone is from a given tower. Although Mahood participated in the official search for Bill Ewasko, helping to clear the region around Quail Mountain, the case later became something of an obsession. This data can be formally requested by the police, if, for example, investigators are trying to track a criminal suspect or to locate a missing person. Teams broke up or were assigned elsewhere in the state. You can't look back and figure out, 'Where did I come from? ' Most cellphones "ping" radio towers on a regular basis, a kind of digital check-in to ensure that they can access the network when needed. "After a while, " Carlson said to me, "where else do you look? These records reveal that, at 6:50 a. on Sunday, June 27, 2010, three days after Ewasko last spoke with Mary Winston, his cellphone communicated with a Verizon tower just outside the park's northwestern edge, above the town of Yucca Valley. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot once observed that the British coastline can never be fully mapped because the more closely you examine it — not just the bays, but the inlets within the bays, and the streams within the inlets — the longer the coast becomes. There were more helicopter flights and more hikes. This placed him so far beyond the official search area that, when rescuers first learned of the ping in 2010, many simply did not believe the data. Had Ewasko even entered Joshua Tree?
Still, it is a high-endurance detective operation. As night fell on the West Coast with no word from Ewasko, Winston tried to call someone at the park, but by then Joshua Tree headquarters had closed for the day. 6 miles turned out to be merely a rough guide — a diffuse zone rather than a hard limit around which any future searches should be organized. But any joy was short-lived: An incoming rush of voice mail messages and texts would have crashed the battery before Ewasko could place a call. Tracking down the lost, however, is more than just an effort to solve a mystery. But as the dirt road continues, hikers are confronted by cascading decision points — places where the trail diverges at junctions with other trails or where it crosses a wash or dry streambed. Since the official search for Bill Ewasko was called off, strangers have cataloged more than 1, 000 miles of hiking routes, with new attempts continuing to this day. 6-mile radius could have been accurate. There was Keys View, an overlook with views of the San Andreas Fault, as well as the exposed summit of Quail Mountain, Joshua Tree's highest point, part of a slow transition into the park's mountainous western region. "I was going through a period where I felt pretty shut in and bored and kind of isolated, " Marsland said. He had spent three nights alone in the wilderness; he would have known his phone had little power left. Although Mayo remains missing, the case affected Melson so profoundly that he and his wife started a faith-based volunteer search-and-rescue service called Trinity Search and Recovery. He made an even bigger leap, selling his possessions not long after our hike together and moving to Southeast Asia, where he plans to drift for a while before deciding if the move should be permanent. Another reportedly saw lights one night on a ridge.
Eight years after he disappeared, Bill Ewasko is still missing. It was not just the prospect of solving a technical challenge that brought Melson into the hunt for Bill Ewasko. How can we have so much information about where he was going to go, or at least where he said he was going to go — why can't we find him? His car, a battered 2001 Toyota Echo, showed marks of 20 expeditions into the desert on the trail of a man he never met in person. A computer scientist by training, Melson knew he possessed technical skills that might shed light on Ewasko's fate. That wasn't definitive proof of anything — if a long line of cars forms, members are often waved through — but it meant that there was no record of his visit. From these, he has produced a series of algorithmic tools that can be applied to future situations, helping to estimate not just where a lost person might be but also the sequence of decisions that led that person there. "The basic premise, " Koester told me, "is that the past predicts the future.
An animal trail that resembles a new branch of the path might divert downhill to a stream, for example, before winding onward through a series of ravines, ending at a dry wash — but by then an hour or more has gone by, and the path forward is now nowhere to be seen. For Marsland, discovering the Ewasko case on Tom Mahood's blog was life-changing. Joshua Tree is highly regarded among climbers for its challenging boulder fields, but its proximity to civilization and its tame outer appearance have given it a reputation as an easy destination — not the sort of place where a person can simply disappear. "It looks kind of benign to a person who drives through it, " Dave Pylman told me. As for why his phone pinged only once that morning, there was one especially frustrating theory. There is an unsettling truth often revealed by search-and-rescue operations: Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it. Trinity's tagline — "Your Father in heaven is not willing that any of these little ones should be lost" — was taken from the Book of Matthew, from a passage known as the Parable of the Lost Sheep. On July 5, 2010, 11 days after Mary Winston got through to park rangers to report Ewasko missing, the official search was called off. Some of the most widely used algorithms are those developed by the Virginia-based search-and-rescue expert Robert Koester, who wrote the definitive book on the subject, "Lost Person Behavior. " Working alone at night in his studio, Marsland found himself poring over other websites dedicated to missing persons, like the widely publicized search for Maura Murray, a college student who disappeared in February 2004 after a car accident in rural New Hampshire.
When I pointed out that he is now one of the most experienced searchers, with detailed knowledge of Joshua Tree's backcountry, he laughed. Developing this hobby was like I wasn't a musician for a while: I could be a detective. After more than a year of grueling legwork, in 2009 Mahood and another searcher found the remains of a German family who disappeared in Death Valley 13 years earlier. The next morning at a little before 8 a. m., Winston finally got through to park rangers to explain her situation: Her boyfriend was missing, a solo hiker presumably lost somewhere in the precipitous terrain surrounding Carey's Castle. 6-mile number cannot, in fact, be verified.
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