According to Melson's measurements, Ewasko's phone could have been anywhere from a quarter-mile farther away to very nearly at the base of the tower itself, if you factored in reflections off mountains and rocks. This was the first time Ewasko's phone had registered with any towers since the morning of his disappearance, suggesting that his phone had been turned off until that moment to conserve battery life — or that he had been trapped somewhere without service. 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. 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. Many a national park visitor crossword clue printable. 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. Had Ewasko even entered Joshua Tree? By this time, he would have been exposed to late June temperatures hovering in the mid-90s, probably with little food or water. 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? Rangers quickly established that Ewasko's National Parks pass had never been scanned at either park entrance. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week. 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.
6-mile number cannot, in fact, be verified. It was not just the prospect of solving a technical challenge that brought Melson into the hunt for Bill Ewasko. "The basic premise, " Koester told me, "is that the past predicts the future. 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.
6-mile number apparently came from a single technician. 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. 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. Every square inch, it seemed, had been covered. He is currently writing a book about the history and future of quarantine. In other words, this hugely influential data point, one that has now come to dominate the search for Bill Ewasko, could, in the end, have been nothing but a clerical error. The park is, in a sense, immeasurable. He managed to get much farther into the park than he expected. 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. Many a national park visitor crossword clue game. In a sense, she said, people like Marsland, Mahood and Dave Pylman are doing it for her, looking for a way to end this story that remains painfully incomplete. 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. Anticipating what a stranger will do when confronted with decision points in an unfamiliar landscape is part of any search-and-rescue operation. From what she had read, the site sounded too remote, too isolated. While the official search lasted less than two weeks, unofficially it never ended.
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. 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. 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. 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. I'm just the guy that went. "The thing I remember the most, " Pylman said, "was the frustration of: How can this be? Many a national park visitor crossword clue locations. What's more, the 10. He last wrote a feature for the magazine about aerial surveillance in Los Angeles policing. The Melsons immediately drove to Donnell Vista, where Mayo disappeared, to help her family continue the search.
As it happens, we live in something of a golden age for amateur investigations. 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. 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. And now Ewasko's case, like Joshua Tree itself, was becoming fractal: The more ground the search covered, the more there was to see. What's more, the trail appeared to have had no visitors for at least a week. 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. Philip Montgomery is a photographer from California who lives in New York.
There is an unsettling truth often revealed by search-and-rescue operations: Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it. But 5 p. m. rolled around, and Ewasko hadn't called. A handful of other trails within the park also featured on his list. 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. Rangers went immediately to the trail head, but Ewasko's rental car, a white 2007 Chrysler Sebring, was nowhere to be seen. Nonetheless, Winston said, she appreciates the extraordinary efforts of the original search teams and remains grateful for the attention of people like Marsland and Mahood. 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.
Everywhere they went, the question was the same: What would Ewasko do? Tracking down the lost, however, is more than just an effort to solve a mystery. Included in Mahood's trove of information were some enigmatic cellphone records. Still, it is a high-endurance detective operation. Reddit, too, has become a gathering place for online detectives, with multiple threads about the search for Bill Ewasko. 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. 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. "I just went down the rabbit hole with Tom's website and started developing theories of my own. "
The ping was a welcome clue, one that shaped several new routes during the official search operation, but it also presented a mystery: According to this data, Ewasko's phone was 10. Regional resources had been exhausted. 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. Marsland began drinking less, losing nearly 40 pounds as he reoriented his free time around this quest to find a stranger. "Getting into missing-persons cases was a way for me to stimulate my brain, " Adam Marsland told me. Carey's Castle is so archaeologically fragile that, to discourage visitors, the National Park Service does not include it on official maps.
Melson brings an unusual combination of religious clarity and technical know-how to his work: part New Testament, part new digital tools. "I think all of us need some sense of a far horizon in our lives, " he said. 6-mile radius could have been accurate. 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. Melson also cautioned me that the original 10. "I'm just one guy looking around, " he replied, "and maybe somebody else might even do a better job. Ewasko left a rough itinerary behind with his girlfriend, Mary Winston, featuring multiple destinations, both inside and outside the park.
Armed with the cellphone data, Melson drove to Joshua Tree in person to explore Covington Flats, one of several possible sites where Ewasko's ping might have originated. Ewasko had apparently changed plans. I had to crawl right up to the edge of it and look down, and I remember being so afraid that I would fall into the pit myself. 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.
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. Koester has assembled a database of nearly 150, 000 search-and-rescue cases. 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. 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. Perhaps the rocky landscape of Joshua Tree acted as a fun-house mirror, splintering the signal's accuracy one jagged boulder at a time. 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. 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.