"I crossed the line from being somebody who just sat in his room and passively participated in something to being actively involved, " he said. 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. Many a national park visitor crossword clue puzzles. " This turned out to be correct. Acting on Melson's tip, the police found their bodies in a canal that was 50 miles away from the last tower pinged. The Ewasko search also continues to attract dozens of commenters to an irregularly updated thread hosted by the Mount San Jacinto Outdoor Recreation forum. And now Ewasko's case, like Joshua Tree itself, was becoming fractal: The more ground the search covered, the more there was to see.
"Getting into missing-persons cases was a way for me to stimulate my brain, " Adam Marsland told me. Marsland began documenting his hikes for Mahood's website, posting lengthy and thoughtful reports over the course of more than four years. 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. He is currently writing a book about the history and future of quarantine. Although Joshua Tree comprises more than 1, 200 square miles of desert with a clear and bounded border, its interior is a constantly changing landscape of hills, canyons, riverbeds, caves and alcoves large enough to hide a human from view. He was drawn to the thrill of seeing clues come together, the tantalizing sensation that a secret story was about to reveal itself. There, avid hikers have collectively posted more than 500 times about Ewasko since May 2012. In the spring of 2017, a Pasadena woman disappeared after a visit to her local pharmacy; she was found two days later, wandering and confused in Joshua Tree. Mahood, a former volunteer with the Riverside Mountain Rescue Unit and a retired civil engineer, demonstrated his considerable outdoor tracking abilities with the case of the so-called Death Valley Germans. Some hikers speculated that perhaps Ewasko finally reached a high-enough point where he was confident he could get a clear signal. He purchased hiking gear at a Los Angeles outdoors store, booked himself a room at a nearby hotel in Yucca Valley and set off at 6:30 a. On July 5, 2010, 11 days after Mary Winston got through to park rangers to report Ewasko missing, the official search was called off. Many a national park visitor crossword clue today. "I remember thinking that this is exactly the kind of place where you would expect Bill to be: someplace where he had fallen down, he couldn't get out and you would never find him. Marsland began to feel a pull that internet research alone could not satisfy, so he decided to head out to Joshua Tree and join the search for Bill Ewasko.
In recent years, technology — in the form of what are called lost-person-behavior algorithms — has been brought to bear on the problem. "It looks kind of benign to a person who drives through it, " Dave Pylman told me. He would have turned his phone on, hoping for coverage — and he found it. By May 2014, the total mileage accumulated in these unofficial excursions by interested outsiders had surpassed the original search-and-rescue operation. 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. At first, he said, Ewasko appeared to be a typical lost tourist: someone who goes out by himself, encounters a problem of some sort, fails to report back at a prearranged time and eventually finds his way back to known territory. Tragically, it turned out to be a murder-suicide. ) We were hiking into a remote region of the park known as Smith Water Canyon, where Marsland had logged more than 140 miles, often alone, looking for Bill Ewasko. In a sense, Melson knew, there were two landscapes he needed to explore: the complicated rocky interior of the park and the invisible electromagnetic landscape of cellphone signals washing over it.
There, a 6-by-9-foot map of the area was taped together and layered with each team's daily GPS tracks and the routes of helicopter flights. Learning that Ewasko was a fit, accomplished hiker added to Pylman's confidence that he would be found quickly and perhaps even "self-rescue" by finding his own way out. "That said, " he added, "if I had any new ideas that seemed worth a damn, I'd be out in Joshua Tree in a second. " When Mike Melson became interested in the Ewasko case, it was nearly two years after Ewasko's disappearance, in the spring of 2012. Reddit, too, has become a gathering place for online detectives, with multiple threads about the search for Bill Ewasko. A computer scientist by training, Melson knew he possessed technical skills that might shed light on Ewasko's fate. In 2005, Melson and his wife, Bridget, read an article about Nita Mayo, an English-born mother of four who had disappeared in the Sierra Nevada. Don't worry, Ewasko told her. 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. A bloodhound was exposed to clothes found in Ewasko's rental car, then brought on the trail. The three-day gap — and the ping's unexpected location — inspired a series of theories and countertheories that continue to be developed to this day. Ewasko, it was assumed, simply could not have survived that long without food and water, in clothes ill suited for the desert's extreme temperatures.
It was not until the afternoon of Saturday, June 26, nearly two full days after Ewasko failed to call Mary Winston, that a California Highway Patrol helicopter finally spotted Ewasko's car at the Juniper Flats trail head, nearly a 90-minute drive from the Carey's Castle trail head. The intensity that many of these investigators bring to their work suggests a fundamental discomfort with the very idea of disappearance in the 21st century: People should not be able to disappear, not in this day and age. "I'm just one guy looking around, " he replied, "and maybe somebody else might even do a better job. There were more helicopter flights and more hikes. As they compound over time, these minor decisions give rise to radically different situations: an exposed cliff instead of a secluded valley, say, or a rattlesnake-filled canyon instead of a quiet plain. A loose group of sleuths with no personal connection to the Ewasko family — backcountry hikers, outdoors enthusiasts, online obsessives — has joined the hunt, refusing to give up on a man they never knew. 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. Worse, Koester said, simply turning around can be impossible, as the route back is camouflaged by rocks or brush. "After a while, " Carlson said to me, "where else do you look? Anticipating what a stranger will do when confronted with decision points in an unfamiliar landscape is part of any search-and-rescue operation.