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. Marsland began drinking less, losing nearly 40 pounds as he reoriented his free time around this quest to find a stranger. 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. The park sees nearly 50 such cases every year. 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. 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. Many a national park visitor crossword clue locations. Reddit, too, has become a gathering place for online detectives, with multiple threads about the search for Bill Ewasko.
He would be all right. Mahood has indicated in a blog post that his own search is winding down. There is an unsettling truth often revealed by search-and-rescue operations: Every landscape reveals more of itself as you search it. He calls himself a "desert rat" and told me he is used to taking long solo hikes in the Mojave and beyond. Every square inch, it seemed, had been covered. His photo essay documenting families struggling with opioid addiction won the 2018 National Magazine Award for Feature Photography. Everywhere they went, the question was the same: What would Ewasko do? For Marsland, discovering the Ewasko case on Tom Mahood's blog was life-changing. 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. Tragically, it turned out to be a murder-suicide. ) By Saturday afternoon, June 26, volunteers were arriving from throughout Southern California, and an incident command post was established near a bulbous natural rock formation known as Cap Rock. National parks listed by number of visitors. Had Ewasko even entered Joshua Tree?
Carey's Castle was only one of several locations on Ewasko's itinerary. The Melsons immediately drove to Donnell Vista, where Mayo disappeared, to help her family continue the search. "Getting into missing-persons cases was a way for me to stimulate my brain, " Adam Marsland told me. But rather than retreat, he pushed on, walking up the side of Smith Water Canyon. "It looks kind of benign to a person who drives through it, " Dave Pylman told me. Locating the car did indicate that Ewasko was — or had at one point been — inside the park, and the rapidly expanding search effort immediately shifted to Juniper Flats. 6-mile radius could have been accurate. Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.
Solid canyon walls reveal themselves, on closer inspection, to be loose agglomerations of huge rocks, hiding crevasses as large as living rooms. 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. What's more, the trail appeared to have had no visitors for at least a week. A computer scientist by training, Melson knew he possessed technical skills that might shed light on Ewasko's fate. The park is, in a sense, immeasurable. It is this domesticated, unthreatening version of the desert that many visitors last see before driving into Joshua Tree's wild interior. On July 5, 2010, 11 days after Mary Winston got through to park rangers to report Ewasko missing, the official search was called off. 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. Koester has assembled a database of nearly 150, 000 search-and-rescue cases. 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. From what she had read, the site sounded too remote, too isolated. "Even now, if they find Bill or not, there's still no closure. As Koester explained to me, many lost hikers believe they are headed in the right direction until it's too late.
Not everyone who is lost actually wants to be found. Her only option was to wait. He would have turned his phone on, hoping for coverage — and he found it. Included in Mahood's trove of information were some enigmatic cellphone records. 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. Each search team was sent to test a different answer to these questions.
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. 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. 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. What's more, the 10.
He last wrote a feature for the magazine about aerial surveillance in Los Angeles policing. Rangers went immediately to the trail head, but Ewasko's rental car, a white 2007 Chrysler Sebring, was nowhere to be seen. "I was going through a period where I felt pretty shut in and bored and kind of isolated, " Marsland said. Well-trained searchers, he said, will perform methodical eye movements to allow themselves to take in the full visual field, scanning continuously for any abnormalities in the landscape — a footprint, broken branches, a discarded piece of clothing — that could suggest another decision point. Spurred by this experience of looking for a stranger, Marsland realized that he should perhaps spend more time looking for himself. 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. 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. Another reportedly saw lights one night on a ridge. 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. 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? 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.
"As far as closure, there's no such thing, " she told me. By May 2014, the total mileage accumulated in these unofficial excursions by interested outsiders had surpassed the original search-and-rescue operation. She knew he might still be in a region of the park with limited cellular access, but the thought was hardly reassuring. Unfortunately, the list included sites as far-flung as the Salton Sea and Mount San Jacinto, each more than an hour's drive from the park. As for why his phone pinged only once that morning, there was one especially frustrating theory. 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.
"It was a big moment for me, and it led to a lot of other good things happening in my life. The park seems to pull people in and only sometimes lets them go. 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. Geoff Manaugh is the author of "A Burglar's Guide to the City. " 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. Would he have diverted from the trail altogether? 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. "It was enclosed by rocks, and you couldn't really see it from the side, " Marsland told me.
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. 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. 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.