Date: 1/15/2011
Participants: Pete Carlson,Tom Knudson, Patrick McCudy, Tom Mahood
General search area:
From Quail Springs Picnic Area, westerly to Lang Canyon, then to westerly slopes of Lang Canyon and cell phone coverage zone near Lang Mine.
Rationale for searching this area:
Ongoing clearing of Lang Canyon. We had not really yet explored the area of cell coverage around Lang Mine, and there were gaps in coverage from the initial Ewasko search.
Impressions of area and findings:
Much of the area was quite open and exposed, although there were large areas of rock outcroppings.
Coverage level:
Good, however because I failed to load the cell zone area into my GPS before the search, we didn’t realize we had missed the lower areas of the cell zone until after the search. We ended up descending further south than we initially planned, but it was the way the topography suggested was a reasonable decent.
Comments:
For this trip we had a reporter along, Tom Knudson from the Sacramento Bee. He was interested in what we were doing and eventually wrote a story for the paper called “Death by GPS”. This story only obliquely mentioned the hunt for Bill, but mostly explored the larger issue of people trusting their vehicle GPS units and getting into trouble. Tom did quite well, even though the rocky chutes on the west slope of Lang Canyon were very rugged. We all were cognizant of the fact that it’s very bad luck to kill a reporter, particularly one who had won a couple of Pulitzers. Halfway back to the trailhead, we stopped and Tom interviewed both Pete and Patrick, as they have much more SAR experience than I. It was quite an interesting day, if not fruitful in terms of finding Bill.
Here’s Patrick’s version of the day’s events.
GPS mileage submitted for this trip: 17.7 miles
Cumulative GPS mileage submitted to date: 182.2 miles
JT12 GPS tracks (T. Mahood)
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