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. Solid canyon walls reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be loose agglomerations of huge rocks, hiding crevasses as large as living rooms. 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. " A family photo of Ewasko standing at the summit of Mount San Jacinto, another popular hiking destination in Southern California, shows a cheerful man with a salt-and-pepper mustache, looking fit, prepared and perfectly comfortable in the outdoors. From what she had read, the site sounded too remote, too isolated. Koester's database and algorithmic tools were put to heavy use during the Ewasko search. There is an unsettling truth often revealed by search-and-rescue operations: Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it. 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. 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. 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. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. Rangers quickly established that Ewasko's National Parks pass had never been scanned at either park entrance. 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. Many a national park visitor crossword clue puzzle. The response to a person's disappearance can be a turn to online sleuthing, to the definitive appeal of Big Data, to the precision of signal-propagation physics or even to the power of prayer; but it can also lead to an embrace of emotional realism, an acceptance that completely vanishing, even in an age of Google Maps and ubiquitous GPS, is still possible.
Under Pylman's guidance, search teams were sent from the location of Ewasko's car up to the top of Quail Mountain; south to Keys View; deep into Juniper Flats; and out through a number of less likely but nonetheless possible areas, in an exhaustive, step-by-step elimination of the surrounding landscape. This turned out to be correct. Many a national park visitor crossword clue printable. Still, it is a high-endurance detective operation. 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.
In June 2010, Bill Ewasko traveled alone from his home in suburban Atlanta to Joshua Tree National Park, where he planned to hike for several days. Many a national park visitor crossword clue online. 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. A bloodhound was exposed to clothes found in Ewasko's rental car, then brought on the trail. You can't look back and figure out, 'Where did I come from? ' Eight years after he disappeared, Bill Ewasko is still missing.
To hear Marsland tell it, his inaugural trip to the park, on March 1, 2013, bore the full force of revelation. Armchair detectives have at their disposal an array of internet resources, like WebSleuths, a forum with more than 140, 000 registered users dedicated to examining unsolved crimes, including missing-persons reports. Would he take the path that arcs gradually southwest, toward the town of Desert Hot Springs, or would he follow a dry wash that slowly fades into the landscape in a distant canyon? Koester has assembled a database of nearly 150, 000 search-and-rescue cases. Everywhere they went, the question was the same: What would Ewasko do? Melson also cautioned me that the original 10.
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. While the official search lasted less than two weeks, unofficially it never ended. Using cellphone data in collaboration with local law enforcement, Melson has cracked multiple missing-persons cases, including that of two teenage boys who disappeared in North Carolina. The park is, in a sense, immeasurable. The plan was that after he finished the hike, probably no later than 5 p. m., he would call Winston to check in, then grab dinner in nearby Pioneertown.
As Koester explained to me, many lost hikers believe they are headed in the right direction until it's too late. In recent years, technology — in the form of what are called lost-person-behavior algorithms — has been brought to bear on the problem. Looking for Bill Ewasko had pulled Marsland out of his studio in suburban Los Angeles and into some of the most remote stretches of Joshua Tree National Park. 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. 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. It was not just the prospect of solving a technical challenge that brought Melson into the hunt for Bill Ewasko.
Mahood has indicated in a blog post that his own search is winding down. There, avid hikers have collectively posted more than 500 times about Ewasko since May 2012. Tragically, it turned out to be a murder-suicide. ) An hour's drive southwest of the park is the irrigated sprawl of Greater Palm Springs, an air-conditioned oasis of luxury hotels and golf courses, known as much for its contemporary hedonism as for its celebrity past. 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. 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.
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. He would have turned his phone on, hoping for coverage — and he found it. That ping also supplies information that can be used to estimate distance, like how far a phone is from a given tower. 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. His photo essay documenting families struggling with opioid addiction won the 2018 National Magazine Award for Feature Photography. Pylman's involvement with the Ewasko case began soon after Winston's call. "I crossed the line from being somebody who just sat in his room and passively participated in something to being actively involved, " he said. 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. "I just went down the rabbit hole with Tom's website and started developing theories of my own. "
Spurred by this experience of looking for a stranger, Marsland realized that he should perhaps spend more time looking for himself. His goal was to learn if the ping's suggested 10. But 5 p. m. rolled around, and Ewasko hadn't called. As for why his phone pinged only once that morning, there was one especially frustrating theory. Philip Montgomery is a photographer from California who lives in New York. Ewasko, 66, was an avid jogger, a Vietnam vet and a longtime fan of the desert West.
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. He calls himself a "desert rat" and told me he is used to taking long solo hikes in the Mojave and beyond. 6-mile number cannot, in fact, be verified. "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. Her only option was to wait. "It looks kind of benign to a person who drives through it, " Dave Pylman told me. The park sees nearly 50 such cases every year. Not everyone who is lost actually wants to be found. Carey's Castle was only one of several locations on Ewasko's itinerary. Marsland, now 52, was a pop musician living in the suburbs of Los Angeles. By this time, he would have been exposed to late June temperatures hovering in the mid-90s, probably with little food or water.
Would he have diverted from the trail altogether? 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. Rangers went immediately to the trail head, but Ewasko's rental car, a white 2007 Chrysler Sebring, was nowhere to be seen. "I love being a musician, " he said, "but it isn't an intellectual puzzle most of the time.