Date: 10/30/2013

Participants: Tom Mahood

General search area: The northerly facing slopes of the central bowl area of Smith Water Canyon.

Rationale for searching this area:

Having now pretty much searched out the area at the southeast mouth of Smith Water Canyon, my attention has turned to the central Smith Water area as the next likely spot. For a further discussion as to why I now think this is so, please see the Comments section of my JT54 report.

Specifically I planned this route to fill in gaps in earlier coverage in this area and to remain in terrain of reasonable risk for a solo outing. Well….that was the plan anyway.

Impressions of area and findings:

Even having been down these slopes a few times prior, I was surprised at the ruggedness of the terrain. There were so many places someone could easily get hurt and equally many where they wouldn’t be seen. It makes the terrain of the SE mouth of Smith Water seem warm and cuddly. Viewing it in Google Earth makes it appear much smoother and more benign than it actually is.

Coverage level:

I’d estimate my coverage to be 80% within 75 feet of my travel path at a minimum, and in a few areas a much wider swath. I think my 50 meter swath reasoning holds for this search. In the chute areas I tried to do as much overlapping as possible to ensure I didn’t miss anything.

Unfortunately the lighting for much of the time was a bit sucktastic. Many areas I scanned with binoculars were in shadow, as the slopes I was interested in were either north or west facing. This resulted in seeing not as good as it could have been.

Comments:

The initial part of my search was focused on the side canyon originally cleared by the Sierra Madre team on 7/03/2010. Teams had been along the top and bottom of the canyon, but I was interested in covering the side slopes. While I was exploring the westerly slopes of that canyon I often stopped and spent considerable time scanning the easterly slopes with my binoculars.

This technique clearly worked as I did spot some bones tucked away in the rocks on the east slope. I couldn’t see them without the binocs, but I tried to take some zoom pictures of the area anyway. The bones appeared too white and bleached to have been recent, but I resigned myself to making the cross-canyon trek to check them out. They turned out to be fairly old Big Horn Sheep leg bones and perhaps a clavicle.

Can you see the bones? (Two locations, circled in red) This is a ZOOMED view across a fairly wide canyon. They popped out pretty clear with binoculars. Even so, I had to hike over and check for sure.

And……Here’s part of a clavicle on the left side of the rock opening.

What, didn’t believe me? This is a very zoomed look at a Big Horn sheep leg bone.

From the bones I started climbing up to a point I suspected would provide a good vantage point from which to peer down into the bowl below. From there I was planning on heading up a little higher, through some open areas near the 11.1 mile radius, then back down to another viewpoint a little easterly of the first. From there I was thinking of exiting generally the way I had entered as I thought a solo descent down the bowl was a bit sketchy for a solo trip. That idea sorta changed…..

While at the first overlook I kept getting whiffs of a sour smell, sort of a “death lite” odor. Now I wouldn’t expect much if any odor from material left out in the elements for three years, BUT from the evidence of water flow in the bottom of Smith Water Canyon it appears it had rained here within the previous two days. And a little moisture could rejuvenate odor.

Annotated image looking down toward Smith Water Canyon from the top of the bowl. Quail Wash is in the flat area to the far right. Elevation drop to that part of Smith Water in the foreground is about 900′.

Here’s a real short video I took from the first overlook point to give a sense of  the terrain:

There was a pretty good breeze blowing from the NNE. Looking in that direction, down below, there was a group of trees perhaps 80′ to 100′ beneath in the main chute. And lots of big honkin’ rocks. I started thinking maybe I should just drop down a bit and have a look, with the plan of climbing back up to exit. I pondered this after I left the overlook and explored the upper regions. And at the easterly overlook I studied the terrain beneath and thought I could see several reasonably safe routes all the way down to the originally reported odor location, from which I knew I’d be home free. Still I needed to continuously remind myself that discretion was the better (and safer!) part of….something.

The upper entrance to the chute was not bad at all, but I knew what lay below. I took things very slowly and moved with extreme caution. I also traversed a great deal in order to cover as much area as possible since I didn’t want to go back. On a few occasions in the chute I thought I again smelled something foul and am pretty certain it wasn’t me.

I made my way out of the chute and over to the trees I had seen above and used as a marker. Nothing to be found there. From there I had a good look at the slope further below and it looked doable, so back I went to the chute. At that point the dry waterfalls began which made things…..interesting. I managed to avoid the craziest part of falls but was fairly confident that I could see to their bottoms clear enough.

I noted a couple of things about this descent. The first was that how easy it would be for someone to get themselves seriously injured here. The idea of someone tired and dehydrated making it safely down seemed very unlikely. But that’s not obvious until you are well into the descent and committed.

The other thing that was strongly on my mind is I really felt like I could come across Bill at any moment. That’s a feeling I’ve seldom had on these searches, perhaps because I’ve become an expert on NOT finding him. But here, everything felt absolutely right, down to the rocky cliffs just above acting as a reflector to the Serin Drive cell tower.

But, as has become a tradition for me, I was wrong again. No Bill. As I descended below the dry waterfall area of the chute I no longer was able to pick up any sense of odor. Along the way I gave a lot of vegetation a quick sniff test to see if that was what it was from, but I could never locate it. So I’m at a loss to explain what it was, if it wasn’t just my imagination. I am fairly confident I cleared the rocky areas in the upper chute, and even if I missed some small portions, “stuff” should have been scattered after three years. And this area was absolutely pristine.

Looking at the easterly slopes of the central Smith Water bowl from near the bottom. The location I took the pictures from on top is the small, pointy peak almost at the right edge of the ridgeline. The chute is the shaded rocky area just to its lower left. Be advised this image makes it appear MUCH less steep than it actually is. Looks easy, doesn’t it?

This is a zoomed in view of the upper chute area from below. In its center are the dry falls I wrote of. The peak I first noted the odor from is the point on the right and it seemed like it was coming from the rock area. Again, terrain in this image is steeper than it appears.

So….I don’t know. And I’m uncertain how much weight I should place on it. I expect a few more trips into that bowl area so perhaps a detour could be made to further explore the upper reaches of that chute.

The tracks my GPS recorded of the lower part of my descent back down into Smith Water are a bit wonky. I was checking my GPS unit at the time to ensure I was on the correct path for an earlier earlier route that avoided the man-eating Acacias. I was surprised to see the GPS was not showing my correct position and the error circle was very large. I expect it was due to poor visibility of enough GPS satellites when deep in the canyon and I have experienced it before. I ended up editing the tracks for the lower portion of the descent to better reflect where I was. But they are sort of approximate.

During this period of PMS GPS, I stumbled across the remains of a Big Horn Sheep carcass just off the main Smith Water Canyon. There was still a small bit of tissue on the bones and it appeared to be only a few years old. What surprised me was that I had been near here on prior trips and hadn’t noticed it. I had to be right on top of it to see it.

A look at the Big Horn Sheep carcass just off the main canyon. There were other bits and pieces scattered nearby.

Normally I don’t provide the locations of Big Horn skeletons (or other interesting stuff) I find in the back country. But this one is different as it wasn’t far from the recorded Smith Water “odor location” from the initial search. It left me wondering if this could have been the source of the reported odor? I’m inclined to think it wasn’t, as teams passing near it in Smith Water should have been able to pick up the stench if it was fresh. Or maybe it wasn’t that old. But still….Anyway, even though I took a GPS reading at the precise location I noted after the fact it was fairly far off. The location shown is my best estimate from what I know of the location.

GPS mileage for this trip: 6.9 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 723.8 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area. The black tracks are from the original search, red tracks those made since since, and JT56 shown in blue. The light blue line is the 10.6 miles radius from the Serin Drive cell tower and the orange line the 11.1 mile radius. 

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area showing a 50 meter swath of visual coverage. The darker the color the better visual coverage that area has received.

(Note: Written by Myth)

Date: 11/03/2013

Participants: Myth of the Mt. San Jacinto Forum and spousal unit.

General search area: Lower portion of the central bowl area of Smith Water Canyon, exiting out east of the bowl.

Rationale for searching this area:

As explained in JT54, this area appears to be a good fit. I tend to think Bill was not incapacitated while on his way to Smith Water Canyon – simply because this isn’t the kind of terrain you crawl or limp across. If this is the case, his cell phone was likely in his pack, off, so whether or not he went through cell coverage zones didn’t matter until he was injured.

I wished to see the terrain for myself, but I was pressed for time so I had no time to perform a thorough search. Therefore, I decided to examine a portion of the lower bowl on the guess that some effects may have been washed down one of the drainages in the bowl.

Impressions of area and findings:

This terrain is steep. We started climbing the easternmost chute, and had to bail after a bit because the terrain was very steep and becoming scary for my companion.

I found that it was much easier to traverse up this area on the shoulder areas between the slopes than it was to traverse the chute itself. This is potentially interesting when considering routes Bill may have taken.

Dry waterfalls are common and some required exiting the chute to traverse around.

Coverage level:

Went up very slowly, stopping often to scan the slope. On the shoulder areas between the chute and even outside the chute, coverage can be about 80%-90% within 75 feet, especially if looking down slope. However, sight is also frequently blocked by vegetation or larger boulders. In the chute itself, coverage was probably about 80% on average, but again, there are a lot of nooks and crannies.

Comments:

This area is very interesting and I believe would benefit from a thorough search.

I walked down the Smith Water Canyon bottom both ways. Plenty of footprints in the canyon bottom, so the bottom of the canyon gets noticeable traffic. Towards the mouth of the canyon there was evidence of recent rain. I also noted this in another area of the park the day before, but Smith Water Canyon didn’t get nearly the precipitation of the other areas I were in. Thus, I think it is unlikely that recent rain would have washed anything down into the canyon.

Close to the search area there are two clumps of vegetation. Both of these clumps have use paths through them – not only for human use. Multiple bighorn bones of various vintages were in evidence. One lower leg bone still had fur on it. There is a well-fed predator in the vicinity. None of the bones gave off any smell at all, even the fresh ones.

After ascending the slope a ways we angled to the east and descended a chute outside the primary bowl.

GPS mileage for this trip: 5.9 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 729.7 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area. The black tracks are from the original search, red tracks those made since since, and JT57 shown in blue. The light blue line is the 10.6 miles radius from the Serin Drive cell tower and the orange line the 11.1 mile radius.

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area showing a 50 meter swath of visual coverage. The darker the color the better visual coverage that area has received.

A weed-like plant that smells sour when crushed. Perhaps the source of the foul odors reported in the area?

Baseball cap found in the bottom of Smith Water Canyon, just west of the dry falls between the vegetation clump and the search area. Cap exhibits considerable wear on the crown. Hard to say of wear was from tear pushing through vegetation, from animal activity, or simply from age and elements.

Some bone fragments low down in one of the chutes was momentarily exciting since one of them looked like a fairly big vertebrae, but the fragment next to it was almost certainly a piece of bighorn pelvis. Additionally, these bones are bleached white with age. Since I was pressed for time I didn’t have time to explore around this find.

Bighorn bones of various vintages at the bottom of Smith Water Canyon.

Big horn or deer remains in westernmost vegetation clump at the bottom of Smith Water Canyon.

Yet more bighorn remains! These photos are only a sample of the bones found. If this predator was around a few years ago, would it have any bearing on what we might find?

Mmmmmnnn, tasty…A Big Horn drumstick!

More tiny bones at the bottom of Smith Water Canyon. Note tiny femur. ( And, ahem, a twig. )

Same area also contained the tiniest little skull I’ve ever seen.

Date: 11/07/2013

Participants: Tom Mahood

General search area: The ridge making up the southwesterly perimeter of the central bowl area of Smith Water Canyon.

Rationale for searching this area:

This was just sort of a housekeeping effort to fill in some blank spots in the search coverage. While it was fairly close to the 10.6 mile Serin radius, it seemed unlikely to be fruitful. But it would have bothered me had it not been crossed off the list. Also the terrain is fairly benign so I anticipated it to be rather simple and safe as a solo outing. Um, yeah. Right.

Impressions of area and findings:

As expected, nothing much to be found other than a few more Big Horn skeletons. The number of dead Big Horns in Smith Water Canyon is quite impressive. And maybe just a little bit disturbing.

A very complete Big Horn Sheep skeleton.

Another Big Horn skeleton less than 200 feet away. This region of the park is a phenomenal Big Horn graveyard.

I spent considerable time sitting on the ridge top and scanning the southeasterly portions of the bowl with binoculars. Viewing was excellent and I could easily cover acres and acres of terrain. It was disappointing not to see anything non-natural. Granted there were nooks and crannies I couldn’t see into, but much of it was very visible. The only way to really know for certain is to get eyes on the ground in that area. That doesn’t look to be fun.

A panorama of the eastern parts of the bowl. The view is towards the northeast and shows the variety of chutes around the edges of the bowl. The reported odor location coordinates are on the descending slope in the middle of the picture.

Another thought I had while looking over the bowl is that the most dangerous parts of the terrain (i.e., where someone would be most likely to get into trouble) were not only near the top of the bowl, but also in the last hundred feet or so before the very bottom of the bowl. The terrain in between these areas was generally not too bad. I hadn’t considered the low terrain in a scenario, where the slopes “cliffed out” just before the bottom, but now taking a careful look it seemed an area worth checking in the future. It is totally possible someone could get all the way down the slopes of Smith Water and take a nasty fall so close to being at the bottom. That would suck.

The central and easterly parts of the bowl continue to look plausible as a source of the cell ping. The westerly part, where I spent most of my time on this trip, felt too low and blocked by the northerly slopes of Smith Water to get a signal out. So all in all, this bowl area remains my target area of choice at this time.

Coverage level:

The usual, with coverage about 80% within 75 feet of my travel path at a minimum, and in a few areas a much wider area. I think my 50 meter swath reasoning continues to hold for this search.

Comments:

This was NOT a good trip. It started off badly by running into a big traffic backup heading out on I-10 which delayed the start. Then I managed to lose my favorite Oakley sunglasses during one of my stops to scan the distant east bowl slopes with my binocs.

Finally, I was about 2/3′s done with my planned route and generally headed back towards the canyon mouth, but up on Smith Water’s side slopes. The terrain wasn’t especially challenging so I was just tooling along. I spotted an interesting flower just below me and wanted to get a picture for Jeri. As I turned and stepped down on a rock I found it had a slick coating of soil and my feet went out from under me.

Now this sort of thing has happened to me too many times before and almost always ends painfully. As I was going down my mind was instantly doing the math and I figured this was going to be painful, but nothing serious. At the same time I was automatically slamming down the hiking pole in my right hand in an attempt to stop my butt-plant.

In theory, this was a wonderful idea and would have been an excellent course of action. Of course the theory failed to take into account the presence of a god damned yucca plant on my right side that I hadn’t noticed. They are sneaky like that.

So….I managed to bring my right wrist hard on to a yucca blade. Now I’ve been poked by those damn things more times than I can recall, and they hurt like a bastard. And occasionally I get blood running down my leg, which can be a bit messy. But I’ve never experienced, until now, a puncture that shot blood (my friggin’ blood!) a good 18″ across my pants. It was a spurter! This was, umm…disconcerting.

Now I don’t remember a whole lot from my wilderness first aid training, but one thing that’s been burned into my brain is when you see red stuff coming out, firm pressure cures damn near anything.

The gusher didn’t last long as I immediately slammed my left hand over the puncture and applied pressure. I don’t think it took more than a second and a half to do so and it’s sadly become almost an autonomic reflex. When I do this stupid-ass shit Jeri always asks “How bad is it this time?”, and I usually reply that I don’t really know, I didn’t have time to look at it.

I sat there on my ass for about 10 minutes with my hands over my head with my left hand maintaining a death grip on my right wrist. I was marveling at the amount of wonderfully bright red blood sprayed across my pants and mentally running through what I had in my first aid kit to deal with this. I don’t recommend mainlining yuccas.

After way too much time had passed I cautiously began peeling my left hand away (I was wearing my leather Petzel rappelling gloves) bracing for another spray. I was pleasantly surprised to see it had completely stopped. This pressure stuff works great!

The hole looked to be around 3/16″ across, rather small and innocuous for the amount of blood I had been sprayed with. Not a very manly wound at all. Unfortunately I didn’t have any clear water to rinse the wound, only flavored drink, so I just applied some Neosporin ointment, slapped a non-stick pad over it, covered it with a Bandaid to hold the pad in place and wrapped the whole thing tightly with a Coban wrap to keep the pressure applied.

Aftermath of the yucca attack after the bleeding was staunched. What? It doesn’t look that bad? Ummm..You’re right it doesn’t. I’m such a pussy….

I figure that was as good a reason as any to end the day so I started a descent to Covington Well to get the hell outta there. It was pretty easy until almost to the bottom. Remember my observation that the most dangerous parts of the bowl were the very top and the very bottom? Yeah, this was a good underscore to that.

I was probably less than 40′ above a nice, flat and sandy stream bottom, but the slope I was on was cliffing out. I finally found what passed for the least bad way down and ended up sliding down a very loose and crumbling slope, on my ass, with my hiking pole poised for a self-arrest. Not especially dignified. When I reached the sand at the bottom I breathed a sigh of relief and thought about how easy it would be to get seriously hurt in the very last portion of a Smith Water descent. Something new to think about anyway.

GPS mileage for this trip: 5.5 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 735.2 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area. The black tracks are from the original search, red tracks those made since since, and JT58 shown in blue. The light blue line is the 10.6 miles radius from the Serin Drive cell tower and the orange line the 11.1 mile radius.

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area showing a 50 meter swath of visual coverage. The darker the color the better visual coverage that area has received.

Looking down at the westerly Acacia grove in the bottom of Smith Water Canyon. This is the location that water, murky though it may be, can be found year round. This is also the location that these damn plants will rip the skin from your body. I like being up here.

Date: 11/17/2013

Participants: Tom Mahood, Patrick McCurdy

General search area: The upper and easterly portions of the central bowl area of Smith Water Canyon.

Rationale for searching this area:

This was intended to fill in blank areas in the search coverage to date in the central Smith Water Canyon bowl area.

Impressions of area and findings:

This area just feels right. We spent some time at the top of the bowl, looking down into it, and it seems to fit all the clues as we presently know them. It’s remote, VERY dangerous, around the 10 to 11 mile radius and could have possibly been a destination for Bill. So why haven’t we found him? That’s a damn good question, one I don’t have an answer to.

The terrain is very…..convoluted and broken up. There are lots of nooks and crannies, as well as dangerous drop offs. One would expect someone attempting a descent to the bottom of Smith Water to take an obviously easy route. Those were the sort of routes we took on our earlier trips down these slopes. These current search tracks we are making are what I call “brute force” routes, where we are just filling in the blanks on the map. So between our early trips and these current ones, we have some pretty good coverage of the bowl area. Of course it’s not perfect, as there as some many places to hide here. But still, we’ve probably covered 75% of so of the bowl area.

It IS maddening.

Coverage level:

Coverage is estimated to be about 80% within 75 feet of our travel paths at a minimum, and in a few areas a much wider area. I think my 50 meter swath reasoning continues to hold for this search.

Comments:

I thought I was sticking Patrick with the nastier of the two routes we covered, as I usually try and do that. Unfortunately I misjudged this time and he was at the bottom snoozing while I was still stuck up on a ridgeline, looking for a way down. As a result I am getting a bit more interested in this “last 100 feet” concept I’ve been exposed to the past couple of trips.

What I’ve inadvertently found is that upper reaches of Smith Water Canyon are somewhat hairy, but it’s usually possible to find a line down. The middle portions are OK as long as you don’t do anything obviously foolish like try and descend in a chute. It’s so much easier and safer to stay on ridge spines instead.

The problem is when you get within maybe a hundred feet of so of the bottom. The flow in the canyon has cut some pretty decent cliffs in most areas making the very last part of the descent the worst. Now that’s not true everywhere, but it is in a lot of cases. And it’s usually fairly close to the 10.6 mile radius.

I’m thinking this last hundred feet above the canyon bottom on the southerly side needs to be looked at. This might be most safely done by climbing up the northerly slope, at intervals, and scanning the southerly slopes with binoculars. Seeing as how there’s not a whole lot left in the bowl area within the 11.1 mile radius to clear, this might be an effort coming up soon.

Oh yeah…and no blood this time so not a bad trip!

GPS mileage for this trip: 13.0 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 748.2 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area. The black tracks are from the original search, red tracks those made since since, and JT59 shown in blue. The light blue line is the 10.6 miles radius from the Serin Drive cell tower and the orange line the 11.1 mile radius.

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area showing a 50 meter swath of visual coverage. The darker the color the better visual coverage that area has received.

Because apparently I hold the belief that one can’t own too many multicopters, I decided at one point to include a 3D Robotics Y6 in my menagerie. With 6 motors it would be something of a heavy lifter (what I was going to lift, I have no idea) and was something a bit different. I went so far as acquiring the frame kit, motors, props and electronic speed controllers (ESCs). It all tended to be a bit expensive as things get multiplied by six.

When it came time to start assembly I hit a psychological wall. While the basic design of the Y6 was very nice, the area provided for placement of the electronics, especially the ESCs, just plain sucked. It required a rat’s nest of wiring that was incongruous with the rest of the craft’s design. As a result, I just kept putting it aside hoping for an inspirational solution.

Around this time a friend of mine acquired a ready to fly QAV500 by Lumenier. Lumenier, owned by Tim Nilsen, had previously been known as GetFPV and had designed the original tricopter I built. I knew them to do very good stuff.

My friend’s QAV came with a DJI Naza flight controller. He specified this since he was primarily interested in something he could fly out of the box and not have to spend time tuning, like an APM flight controller. Unfortunately, he had a series of crashes with the QAV/Naza combo that damaged the Naza somewhat and it became less than reliable. So by the time I actually saw his QAV, it had already been through a number of crashes. And boy, was I impressed!

He had beaten the crap out of it yet the frame was holding up fine. He got the design with the aluminum arms and on one or two occasions when they got bent, he simply hammered them back into shape. In fact, when we were flying together his QAV decided to turn on its side and fell to the ground at low altitude. It was a fall that would have snapped arms on craft I designed but this just resulted in a broke prop or two for him. It occurred to me that this was the sort of frame that could withstand my destructive flying skills rather well.

After a bit of figuring, I found the Sunnysky 2216-12 800KV motors with APC 10×4.7 props were an excellent choice for a QAV. And I just happened to have 6 of them on hand from the Y6 project. So the Y6 frame went back into the box and ordered the QAV500 frame kit instead.

Having designed a few frames myself, I must say it’s a very impressive design. Easy to assemble and built like a tank. It includes silicone bobbins that isolate the motor part of the frame from the battery/flight controller/camera portion. And it’s very nice to have a built in power distribution board as part of the frame to cut down on power wiring.

Since I had a few extra APM flight controllers (who in their right mind has “extra” flight controllers???), that was my choice for the QAV. At one time I would have quickly chosen a Naza, but by now I had learned so much of how to program an APM, as well as understanding its logs for troubleshooting, Nazas held no interest. The reward for climbing the APM learning curve is immense. But still, almost all QAV500s I knew of were using Naza flight controllers not APMs, so this was poking a bit into unexplored territory.

I loaded the APM 3.01 firmware into the flight controller and just left it at the default quadcopter tuning parameters since I couldn’t find anything specific for QAV500s. I was nervous about the first flight, but I figured it should survive a crash or two without issue.

It turned out there was little need to worry. There were some small but rapid roll oscillations going on when it was just hovering. Sort of like a nervous Chihuahua. But other than that, it flew pretty damn well at less than 50% throttle. A little tweaking on the roll tuning eliminated the oscillations and it was all fine. Very stable in hover and the Return to Launch worked well. With FPV gear (and MinimOSD), an HD camera and a 3,300 mAh battery it weighed 1,609 grams, which struck me as surprisingly light. I can get flight times of up to 13 minutes with this setup.

Not long after this, firmware version 3.1 was released for the APM flight controller. This was a major release which included an “autotune” feature which can automatically tune a multicopter for you, while in the air. Considering how shit I am at tuning, I really wanted to try it, and selected the QAV to be the test victim.

After loading the 3.1 firmware I brought it up to a hover and turned on the Autotune. The QAV proceeded to spend the next several minutes having pitch seizures in the sky. This was very disconcerting to watch, but by rapidly varying the pitch and noting how the quad responded to it, the APM was deciding how to set the tuning parameters. Once done with the pitch, it started on the roll, again with the seizures. After a few minutes of that, it just stopped and hovered smoothly.

I took over control of the QAV to test out the new tuning. All I can say is “Wow!” I have never flown anything this nice. Solid control, very smooth and if desired, VERY fast. If there’s anything that might get me to stop designing my own frames, this is it. It’s now my go-to fun flying craft. No, it doesn’t fold down for transport into remote areas, but for FPV, video or mapping/imaging, it’s a dream.

The only thing I might change, in hindsight, would be to get the G-10 fiberglass arm option instead of the aluminum arms. I figured the aluminum arms would provide more strength in case of crashes and could be bent back into shape. But the thing is, since I got the QAV I haven’t crashed it (I realize by making that statement I’m now asking for it!). And what I’ve found is that much conductive material on the fame interferes somewhat with my RC receiver’s reception.

I discovered this while doing some distance testing. I got the QAV about 2,300′ out and it suddenly “failsafed”, turned around and started back to home (It’s programmed to do this if it loses the RC transmitter’s signal and will eventually return to its point of takeoff and land itself). Now granted I’m using 2.4 GHz for control (a Futaba receiver) but that struck me as rather short. I had been out to a full mile flying a fixed wing aircraft, but that was all foam. A more careful placement of the RC receiver’s antennas and changing the aluminum landing skids to Delrin plastic increased my distance to 4,500′ before failsafe so that helped a lot. But I think if I had fiberglass arms instead of aluminum I’d get even further.

All in all, a fantastic airframe, especially combined with an APM flight controller.

Side view of the QAV500. I found the model helicopter landing skids in my junk box and they happened to fit this frame quite well. The orange things are the silicone isolation bobbins that separates the upper part of the frame from the lower part of the frame with the motors. Neat design!

A quarter view of the QAV500. That little circuit board hanging off the side is the Power Module that provides clean power to the APM as well as voltage and current measurements. The circular video transmitter antenna is just visible at the far end.

Front view of the QAV500 showing the Swann HD video cam on the left and the FPV cam on the right. Just behind the cameras is the GPS. Note those nicely machined aluminum arms.

Front end of the QAV500 showing the cameras, GPS, RC receiver and APM flight controller. Still plenty of room to add more crap!

The “Pro Delrin Tricopter kit” from GetFPV.com was my first multirotor (and now that I think of it, WTF does “Pro” mean….as opposed to non-professional??). It was a very nice design but probably far too fragile for a dangerous, dumb-ass beginner like myself. I spent a lot of time repairing and rebuilding it. Part of the problem was I cheaped out and installed a KK2 flight controller. Now KK2 boards aren’t bad for what they are and what they cost (about $30 then) but they are limited in their ability to protect their craft from pilots such as myself. While they do a good job of keeping a multicopter level there is no altitude hold ability so I always found myself either shooting up or plummeting to the ground. Your mileage may vary.

As I moved up in the multicopter food chain to quadcopters I also moved into APM flight controllers. While there is a steep learning curve to them, once mastered they are phenomenal and can solidly hold an aircraft’s position both vertically and horizontally. Yeah, that’s for me. As a result, my tricopter with its stinky old KK2 board got stuffed into a corner of the garage and mostly ignored. Occasionally I’d come across it and wonder what it might be like if I could fit an APM on it. Would it be as cool as my quads?

Through a course of events I won’t bother to go into here, I eventually ended up with a supply of several clone APM boards from China which frankly left me with more than I needed. I began looking at the tricopter a bit more closely. I had a nice set of four motors, (FM4008 640KV) from my decommissioned Composite H-Quad capable of turning a wide variety of propellers, lots of ESCs, and most importantly, those wunnerful APM flight controllers. The game was afoot!

I tore down the original tricopter keeping only the main body and 10 mm Poplar arms. I spent considerable work making G-10 fiberglass motor mounts to match the original tricopter motor mounts but with hole spacings to accommodate the somewhat unusual pattern of the motors I was going to be using. Promptly upon finishing those I realized I could just slightly modify the wood arm ends and bolt the stinkin’ motors right to them. Cleaner and lighter. I eventually figure out the right thing, just not as fast as I’d like.

Tricopters are unique in the multicopter world as they actually require a mechanical servo to tilt the rear motor and prop to cause the craft to rotate. All other multirotor aircraft have some even number of motors and can speed up or slow down half the motors to induce turning. How to actually pull off this motor tilt on a tricopter is tricky, and while the original tricopter pivot design was elegant, it was fragile and subject to damage upon hard landing. As I was really, really good at those sort of landings, I modified the tail arm to use a motor tilt scheme put forth by RCExplorer. Very robust and simple. In other words, idiot-proof.

The other significant change I made was to enlarge the vibration isolated area. The APM operates best when well protected from vibration. So I combined its location with the battery holder which added mass to the suspended part of the system. This portion was suspended by the use of silicone bobbins, similar to what was done in the QAV design.

With a little effort I was able to get all the electronics stashed in a very small space. I had it in mind to try this as a simple camera platform, either for stills or video. It became, in essence, a flying camera. Not many bells and whistles beyond that.

Its 5.8 GHz video has a reach with normal antennas of about a mile, and much further with a better ground antenna. The tricopter’s onscreen display provides a visual readout of battery level, direction, altitude above launch and distance/direction back home. With a full camera load it hovers under 50% throttle and can maintain that for 13 minutes with a 3,300 mAh 4S battery. The thing is very light, coming in at 1,394 grams with a HD video camera, full FPV gear and a 3,300 mAh 4S battery.

A close up of the main body area of the tricopter showing important features. In this arrangement it’s carrying the Canon still camera.

Here is the tiny Mobius HD cam fitted on to the front of the tricopter. As it’s still being tested, in this image it’s merely zip tied onto a balsa wood block.

Performance with the APM flight controller is just damn amazing. My quads are fun, but the tricopter is like a sports car. Very maneuverable and can turn in an impossibly short space. Had I started with an APM in the tricopter I think my learning progress would have been a lot faster. Certainly I’d have less crash damage to repair. It also worked really well with the APM Autotune feature, self-tuning itself to really good values. There aren’t a lot of tricopters with APMs so this has been a good learning experience.

I did have some problems with a yaw wobble to work out. When hovering, the tricopter would slowly wiggle back and forth. Not an issue if taking still pictures, but lousy for video. After spending a lot of time trying to tune it out I realized it was due to the very flexible wood arms setting up some sort of resonance oscillation with the heavy motors and large props. By epoxying a thin skin of G-10 fiberglass sheet onto the surfaces of the rear arm, it stiffened it tremendously and almost all of the oscillation went away. I found that if I then increased the propeller size to larger props (which gives more load capacity and longer flight times) the oscillation returned. So if I’m doing still images and don’t care about oscillations I can use larger 12″ props, otherwise I stick to 11″ props. I think I’ve pushed this basic design as far as it can go with the present wood arms and I’m not really ready to invest the work necessary to go beyond it.

But the main reason I wanted to get this thing working was its transportability. It’s also why I wanted to keep the original body mostly intact. With the removal of only two screws the two front arms fold back and the entire tricopter transforms to a package that can easily be slipped into a backpack. Bring along the RC transmitter and FPV goggles and you have a minimalist setup for getting good images or video of remote backcountry locations.

The various components of the tricopter prior to assembly at a remote desert test area. This all fits nicely into a large backpack and transports very well.

The assembled APM tricopter at a remote desert test area. The white plastic sheet keeps sand from being blown into the camera during takeoffs and landings.

It’s a nice tool to have…..

I had spent some time flying my first Bixler 1.1 around using FPV and was getting quite used to it. I was also occasionally crashing it and it occurred to me it would be nice to have some spare parts. Checking online I found that Hobbyking’s USA warehouse was selling the airframe kit (no motor or electronics) for the crazy-cheap price of only $42! So I had to have a spare.

I had been crashing my original Bixler often enough to have concerns about what might happen if I finished building out my Techpod. If I ran that sucker into the ground, when fully equipped, we’re talking serious money. So I got to thinking about setting up my “spare” Bixler 1.1 as sort of a mini camera ship and an interim development step. If that worked out OK, then I would be comfortable completing the Techpod. Wow, that seemed like a good idea, not the sort I usually get. Or maybe it was just an excuse to build something new.

As is often the case with me, I start on these projects and things get out of hand. I’m always looking to make things just a bit better.

The first black hole of work effort was the electronics pod. I had found descriptions of similar things online which are removable pods containing the flight controller, camera, battery and all the other electronics needed to keep it flying. Considering what a mess the inside of my original Bixler had become, it seemed a good idea.

And it was actually a great idea. At the very top of the pod I concocted is the GPS. On the main platform are the Futaba RC receiver, APM flight controller and FPV camera. Beneath those are some more electronics and a holder for my Canon A2200, 14 megapixel camera which peers down through a circular hole in the fuselage bottom. I rigged up an Arduino set to run as an intervalometer for the Canon, taking pictures at intervals and would retract the camera lens prior to landing. I made up some multiple pin quick connects allowing for the electronics pod to be quickly disconnected from the rest of the aircraft, including the servos. Just constructing the electronic pod was a geek orgasm, but I wasn’t yet done. I was just warming up.

A top view of the electronics pod showing all the upstairs stuff. FPV camera on the far left, RC receiver in the middle with the APM flight controller below it, GPS to the upper right and the onscreen display board just to the left of the GPS. Wunnerfully laid out and it will never look this nice again.

A view of the electronics pod showing the still camera placement as well as the connectors that joins it to the rest of the aircraft.

Somewhere online I came across a reference to someone equipping their Bixler with a removable tail section (the Internet is a terrible thing…). I thought, “Yeah, that sounds neat, but I bet I can do it even better!”. And I did. I relocated the elevator and rudder servos far to the back in an effort to counteract all the extra weight I figured I’d be adding to the nose. Then, multiple visits to a serious hardware store provided me with quarter inch threaded nylon fittings I could use to make the entire tail section removable. I think I had in my mind some idea of putting it in a backpack, which would have been quite cool. I am my own worst enemy sometimes.

Tail/elevator attachment arrangement. The black doodads are machined Delrin rods that have been threaded to accept the 1/4″ Nylon bolts shown. The white things in between provide a seat for tightening the bolts.

The threaded Delrin rods glued into the tail.

The end of the fuselage showing the white Nylon bolt seats glued in place. These spread the load from the Nylon bolts and keep them from crushing the end of the fuselage when tightened.

Looking down through the bolt holes where the tail section will go. The tops of the white Nylon bolt seats are barely visible inside the holes.

The assembled tail section showing the Nylon bolts in place. I used cap nuts to be able to simply tighten these by hand. I probably could have got by with only one connection bolt but I always expect the worst, so I used two. The servo link to the elevator hasn’t been connected yet.

I placed the video transmitter in the tail boom, as had worked well in previous fixed wings, and added a seriously upgraded motor and speed controller. At this juncture the point of no return was reached as it was time to glue the two fuselage halves together. So far, so good and no going back.

The fuselage before gluing together, showing the major components and wiring layout. That’s the video transmitter and antenna at the right side. This is insanely well organized at this point, but it won’t last.

I modified the wings in a couple of ways. I added three pin connectors for the aileron servo wiring at the wing roots so when I connected the wings to the fuselage I could just plug in the servos. And rather than use the Bixler scheme for attaching the wings to the fuselage (I had already damaged my original Bixler in crashes as a result of using it) I used a popular method of utilizing Velcro tape. Combined, this made for easy wing installation and a safe release in case of impact. Not that that would ever occur.

But wait, there’s more! To strengthen the wings I went to the trouble of laminating them. This was a method, developed in recent years by modelers, to improve the rigidity of foam wings by laminating a thin film of a mylar-like material on to their surface. Usually this material is the same stuff used for laminating paper and is sold by the roll. There is a heat activated adhesive on one side and the film is simply “ironed on”. Well, maybe not “simply”, as there are all sorts of pitfalls to avoid (and I found them all). But in the end it provides a lot of extra strength.

Oh, but wait again! There’s even more! Since this aircraft was intended to fly some distance out, visibility became an issue. Even if flying autonomously or via FPV, I still wanted to be able to see it as far away as possible. A plain old white aircraft wouldn’t cut it. After a lot of study online, I managed to come up with a truly garish paint scheme that was not only highly visible, it was painful to even look at.

Basically, when looking down on an aircraft, fluorescent colors are good against the ground (or hunting for downed aircraft, again, not that that would ever occur). When looking up against the sky, dark colors are best. This resulted in a International Orange/Black mixture that was certifiably appalling. But it was visible, and that satisfied my inner engineer.

A beauty shot before I wreak any havoc upon it. I mean “beauty” in the sense that you overlook the “OMG, MY EYES ARE BLEEDING!!!” paint job. But you ain’t gonna lose this sucker.

So if you’re still reading this drivel at this point you may have noticed how long the aircraft’s description has become. That’s quite a lot of words. Now translate that word crap-pile into construction time and we’re talking months. It was well thought out and carefully constructed. I had invested a LOT of time into it. And this now emerged as a big problem.

I was afraid to fly the damn thing.

If it were just something I had bought and could easily replace it would be no big deal if I crashed. But this was all custom made and fit, one of a kind. It was my baby, part of me. And I fly like an idiot. I thus realized I had made a serious strategic error.

I put off flying it for a number of weeks then finally headed out to Moreno Valley with Patrick to give it a test. Not much to hit there. Except the ground. I fired up the motor and Patrick tossed it into the air. And all went well for about 10 seconds.

As God is my witness I thought turkeys Bixler’s could fly! I have no idea exactly why it crashed, other than I was overcontrolling like mad. The APM wasn’t doing anything as I was flying in Manual mode for the launch. It probably made it about 200′ away before impacting the ground hard enough to end flight for the day. The electronics pod had broke loose and possibly ripped off one of the ailerons. The wings had flexed so much on impact that some of the obnoxious orange paint had flaked off. It was a minor mess.

Oh the humanity!!! Doesn’t look quite as pretty at this point, after its first crash. But it’s going to get worse.

The carnage really wasn’t too bad but I parked it in the garage and sulked over it for a few weeks. Eventually I felt guilty and started repairing the damage. I stripped out all the excess gear, like the camera mount, and was going to see if it would fly with just the APM and FPV gear. Baby steps, apparently, were what I needed. Time to try again.

Back out to Moreno Valley for round two. Seeing as how I had already munched it up pretty bad, I was less nervous about doing it again. Failure wasn’t an option, it was a high probability!

Patrick, tosser that he is, again did the launch honors. I managed another 10 seconds or so before the traditional impact into our planet. Surprisingly there wasn’t much damage and we were able to relaunch from that spot. In hindsight I probably should have quit while ahead.

I made maybe 15 to 20 seconds on that second attempt at what could loosely be called “flight”. This was both good and bad. Good in that it was my longest flight of that aircraft to date. Bad in that it let me build up considerable speed before reaching the inevitable conclusion. And it hit hard. How hard? Well, it left a friggin’ crater. Not a big one, but a crater none the less. Bits of the electronic pod were scattered about and the crater was surrounded by a colorful cloud of International Orange paint flakes. To make it all the more fun, Patrick was recording the FPV video feed for these two attempts so it’s preserved for posterity and your amusement. At the end he’s holding up a very deformed aircraft and pointing the camera at me, indicating the crater.

What’s left after the crater crash. Yeah, it’s gonna be a looong sulking period for this one.

A closeup of the nose. That nose is just ever-so-slightly kinked, isn’t it? I should be kept away from this sort of stuff.

So that’s where this stands. The airframe is really messed up at this point so the sulk period before rebuilding will be much longer. I really don’t know why I’m having such issues. The balance is OK and all controls appear to operate properly. But something about its response just doesn’t feel right. I shall ponder it a bit.

Multicopters are SO much easier….

Date: 1/07/2014

Participants: Tom Mahood

General search area: The middle and lower portions of the central bowl area of Smith Water Canyon.

Rationale for searching this area:

This was intended to fill in blank areas in the search coverage to date in the central Smith Water Canyon bowl area. The majority of effort was spent observing the bowl area from high points on the opposing (northerly) canyon slopes.

Impressions of area and findings:

Rather than being an “on the ground” effort, the majority of time for this trip was spent observing the bowl area from a point approximately 200′ above the canyon bottom on the northerly slopes. This location provided an excellent vantage point for studying the lower 2/3rds of the bowl with various optics. The very upper parts of the bowl were not quite as visible, due to the upward looking angle. But the viewscape did cover a great many acres.

I was especially interested in examining the “last hundred feet” concept I discussed in the writeup for JT59. I am reasonably satisfied I visually cleared those areas between the (not-so) dry waterfall and Acacia grove on the west to approximately the start of the easterly Acacia grove. Areas easterly of there were somewhat out of my view so remain a possibility.

Looking southerly into the entire central Smith Water Canyon bowl. This viewpoint is about 200′ above the canyon floor, on the northerly canyon slopes, just easterly of the dry waterfall.

Coverage level:

Combined with previous efforts into the bowl, I’d estimate the total search coverage of the lower 2/3rds of the bowl area to be well in excess of 90%. There may be a few remaining hidden places but very few.

Comments:

Um….well….. If you’ve poked around this website you’ll know I’ve been fooling around quite a bit with small drone-type aircraft. A small, camera equipped multicopter that could be transported into the field would be ideal for searching these sort of areas. And I just happen to have a couple of those critters. One of them is a tricopter that would be perfect for searching the bowl area.

Now land controlled by a Federal agency, especially the National Park Service, is bound to have rules. Lots of rules. The sort of rules that would prevent operation of radio controlled aircraft over their property. So doing due diligence I scoured the JTNP website as well as the National Park Service’s overall rules. Would you be surprised if I told you there were a lot of them? But, interestingly, there’s no prohibition I could find regarding use of radio controlled aircraft. Knowing what wet blankets the Park Service can be, it just didn’t seem right that they would allow something as fun as RC aircraft in their parks. So I called the JTNP headquarters.

I explained to the nice man I had a small, electric helicopter that I was interested in using to take pictures of rock formations within the park (all quite true), and wondered if that was OK. He responded that was a new one for him (and here I thought this was the 21st century) but he’d check. I could hear him having a conversation with someone else and when he got back on the phone he said, “No, it’s not allowed”. I then nicely asked him if he could point me to where I might find such a prohibition as I had looked on their website and couldn’t see anything. He responded he had no idea as he had just asked a Ranger and that’s what the Ranger told him.

OK then!

So, use of RC “drone-type” aircraft within JTNP is at best a gray area, and quite possibly prohibited. And I usually don’t go out of my way to violate laws, even if they may be nonsensical.

If such a thing were permitted I would have loved to have brought my very quiet tricopter along, with four batteries. The vantage point I climbed to on the northerly canyon slopes would have made for an excellent launching point. The four batteries would have allowed me do three still imaging flights and one video flight. I would have been able to image a great number of acres, probably most of the bowl and the canyon walls. Hazarding a guess, I might have been able to acquire over 500 still images that would have been very useful for study. Unfortunately, I wasn’t allowed to do such a thing. Pity. But….Rules are there to be followed. So it never happened.

Hey, an update!! It was brought to my attention that there ARE rules against fun flying stuff in JTNP. There was a compendium of regulations (i.e., fun things you can’t do) adopted by the park on February 25, 2013, which is probably why I missed it.  Here’s a link to the entire cheery list. But the pertinent part is as follows:

From the Superintendent’s 2013 Compendium of Designations, Closures, Permit Requirements and other restrictions imposed under discretionary authority.

So it’s a good thing I didn’t do that. I wouldn’t want to put any visitors (other than myself) in jeopardy, imperil property make any noise….

Frankly, at this point I’m almost dead out of ideas worth venturing out there to check. This trip brings the count to 60, a very high number and larger than I ever anticipated getting to. There are one or two spots left I think I’d like to look at, but basically at this point I’m flummoxed. I’m thinking at this point I may take a bit of a hiatus from the effort to think about it all. It should be a solvable problem and really should have resolved by now. And that bothers me. So I think I may let it rest a bit and do a bit of poking casual around out there that won’t end up getting written up as trip reports, because, you know, there are rules.

But it’s not over.

GPS mileage for this trip: 4.3 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 752.5 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area. The black tracks are from the original search, red tracks those made since since, and JT60 shown in blue. The light blue line is the 10.6 mile radius from the Serin Drive cell tower and the orange line the 11.1 mile radius.

Overall tracks to date in the central Smith Water Canyon area showing a 50 meter swath of visual coverage. The darker the color the better visual coverage that area has received.

Ummmm, what, why and how???

I choose to blame Patrick again. While he was poking around for information on the Captain Jenks Mine for that hike we did, he came upon a document titled, “Historic Resource Study, a History of Land Use in Joshua Tree National Monument“, September, 1983 by Linda Greene. It contained all sorts of interesting background data concerning early mining activities in the park. And there was brief mention of something called the “Ruby Lee Mine”. Huh?

Now some may be familiar with the Ruby Lee Mill Site, and it’s a popular hike in the southeast portion of the park. And while the mill site was associated with the mine, the mine was nowhere near the mill site, it was much further west. But where?

Greene didn’t have a lot to say on the subject of the Ruby Lee mine. This is the extent:

Well, that sounded interesting, especially the unvisited part. A quick Internet search failed to turn up anything else regarding the site, and especially no trip reports. This was quickly getting much more appealing.

But where exactly was this sucker? Greene’s description put it in the center of Section 2, a Section being a full square mile. That’s a lot of territory to begin with, compounded by the fact she hadn’t actually visited the site. So it was off to Google Earth, the friend of every adventurer.

Sure enough, GE showed what looked like an old road scar heading north into that general area out of Porcupine Wash. It was almost impossible to see and tracing it required using the time slider to view older aerials as well as peering at things in perspective view with my eyes slightly crossed. I find that helps a lot. As does wishful thinking.

So, it appeared something might be there. Time to ramp up the research. Most of this was done at the Riverside County Recorder’s office looking through old mining claim records. But I also ended up getting some history of the players involved from Ancestry.com, enough so that I created a separate page for the history of the Ruby Lee Mine, as well as Ruby Lee herself. She was an unusual woman to say the least.

The February, 1936 claim documents filed for the Ruby Lee failed to narrow things down much. They only specified the Section number (although Greene reported it located in the center of the Section). But it turned out there was another claim filed in that Section, the Broken Hill claim, made by Charles Landford and Chester Pinkham. It was filed a year before the Ruby Lee, in January of 1935.

I drew up the two claims and they were very similar, aligned North-South. Miners laid out their claims so that they follow where the ore vein is estimated to run. Going back to GE, I saw that the center of Section 2 matched very nicely with a prominent North/South ridge spine. About 1,400 feet to the east there was another North/South spine, which is where the possible road scar seemed to end. On this basis I figured the Ruby Lee claim was on the west, in the center of Section 2, and the Broken Hill claim was on the east, with the road.

The layout of filed corner markers for the two Section 2 claims. The dots are supposed to be rock cairns locatable in the field.

My original assessment of the claim layout in Section 2. The boundaries of Section 2 are the red square, the red lines are probable road segments and the green lines possible road segments. The prospects on the far right side are the Jenks Mine.

So, how to get there and check it out? This was one crazy-ass, remote place. There was no obvious good way to get to it, only less bad ways. The idea of making it an overnight hike was kicked around, perhaps via the original Porcupine Wash access route. However at this point in my life I only sleep on the ground if there’s a really good reason to do so. A “good reason” being a crashed alien spacecraft or better. I wasn’t satisfied this couldn’t be done as a day hike. I’m dumb like that.

On our earlier exploration of the Captain Jenks Mine, Patrick and I had used a “non-traditional” approach (“non-traditional” being a euphemism for stupid and ugly), coming off the main park road and heading southwest into the mountains via a wash. While at the Jenks Mine we had looked down to the northwest and observed the massive Washington Wash, which passed by the Ruby Lee area. But it was a loooong way down and the Ruby Lee was around the same elevation as the Jenks Mine area. That could be a nasty climb coming up from that wash.

So after considerable planning, I was able to come up with route leaving the paved Park Road, traveling southwesterly up Washington Wash, then climbing up a spine to the Ruby Lee area. The “spine climb” turned out to be only 1,200′ up, which wasn’t as bad as many more stupid things we’ve done. And the total planned initial distance was about 12 miles, suitable for a long day trip. This being the lower part of JTNP, if done during a cool time of year, say early March, it could be a perfectly agreeable hike. That was the plan anyway. These things always sound so reasonable when described to me by the voices in my head.

So we set the date for March 6. At the last minute Patrick had some schedule issues and couldn’t make it (or perhaps he was having Jenks Mine trip flashbacks) but Pete Carlson was more than happy to do stupid things. Which is why at 8 AM on March 6, Pete and I were standing at some seemingly random spot on the road in Joshua Tree, looking off to a mountain range a couple of miles away and going, “Huh?”

Remember the “cool time of year” aspect? The forecast was for 81 degrees at the truck, pretty damn warm for early March, but doable (In fact it was hotter, up to 86 degrees when we finally got back). Pete had 4 liters of water and I had 4 3/4 liters and off we went.

So it begins…..About to head off to the low point in the distance. The start of those hills is two miles away.

We were just sort of following the drainages up onto the alluvial fan formed by Washington Wash, knowing it would bring us into the canyon. So how were we able to find the one little washlet that went into a side canyon, parallel to Washington? I don’t know, but we did, but after only a little confusion we climbed over into Washington Wash where we should have been.

Travelling up Washington was a dream. There had been a little bit of rain a week earlier and it left the sandy bottom hard packed. We kept referring to it as the sidewalk. In only two hours we had reached the base of our ascent route.

Our ascent route is up the spine towards the upper left part of the picture.

The climb really wasn’t that bad. Steep, but good, solid footing. On the way up we were able to look across a canyon and eyeball our proposed descent route. To maximize our coverage of the Ruby Lee area, I had us going up one spine (where I guessed the Ruby Lee claim to be) and back down via the spine with the road scar (where I thought the Broken Hill claim was). The descent off that spine looked possible, if not wunnerful, but not something I’d want to go up. And in an hour, we were on the top of the route we had chosen.

Our descent route, as viewed from our climb up. The descent is down that debris field in the center of the picture, ending at the bend in the wash. How bad could it be?

The view, looking up from Washington Wash, was of very rough and jumbled terrain. But once on top it was relatively flat and rolling. Moving along the top of the spine, we quickly noticed the old road scar on the spine to our east. That was our exit route. At the high point of our ascent spine, we came upon a rock cairn. As this was in the center of where I had plotted the location of the Ruby Lee claim, I guessed it to be the discovery monument (which in hindsight I was probably wrong about). We looked around for other corner markers but didn’t see anything.

Looking easterly towards the road scar.

We eventually joined up with the old road and had a close look at it. It was very hard to see, and often I had to refer to the segments I plotted on my GPS to follow it. Other times it was more visible, with rocks lining its edges. We followed it a bit southbound toward Porcupine Wash but eventually had to stop as it was going in the wrong direction from where we needed to go. More adventuring to be had!

Turning back north, we traced the old road on its way to the other spine. When doing my GE searching I had noticed some things that were possibly road scars but wasn’t sure. On our way back we had a look at these and they turned out to be natural features. Nothing interesting.

One of the more defined road segments.

Heading out on to the spine, the road eventually came to an end. Just below that point was a small open cut or prospect tunnel, clearly mining workings. Next to it was a decent sized cairn which sort of looked like a discovery monument. But searching around the area failed to turn up any trash or other human debris. In fact, other than the road scar and a few cairn, we saw no evidence of human presence at all. No rusted cans, wood, broken glass or pieces of wire. This seemed somewhat odd for a site supposedly worked from the 1930s up to at least the 1950s.

A prospect at the Ruby Lee site. That cairn of rocks just above it may be the discovery monument for the claim.

Continuing beyond the prospect, we came upon a couple more cairns and noted their locations for later study. Then came time to descend.

A typical corner marker photographed with zoom. If wasn’t worth climbing down for a closer look.

The first part was a small descent of several hundred feet to a small saddle, which was sort of a pain. I had brought only one hiking pole and I’d consider it a two pole descent. Pete, OTOH, didn’t bring any poles and had only trail shoes on. This was quite a handicap for him, to the point where I could almost keep up with him. But not quite.

Looking down, about to start our descent. First stop is that vague, small saddle in the left foreground. Then over the edge into the abyss.

The second big drop was sketchy due to the looseness of the terrain. We were both getting rubbery legs. In my case I suspect I also wasn’t quite hydrated enough as I finished my first 3 liters on this descent and it was getting warmer dropping into the canyon. We thought that getting to the canyon’s bottom would leave us home free, but it was a bit jumbled until we broke out onto the wonderful flat, openness of Washington Wash. We crashed here a while to rest and I downed another full liter of water, over-hydrating a bit and adhering to the “better in me than on me” philosophy. That left me 3/4 liter for the 5 mile trip out. It didn’t seem like a lot but it was all downhill on a good surface. We finally reached the truck, around 4 PM, having covered 14.0 miles. We were pretty beat.

A few things in hindsight (which is just another way of looking out of your ass)….

I think I initially had the two claim locations transposed. I put too much weight on Greene’s description of the Ruby Lee being in the center of Section 2. After analyzing what we observed, and plotting out the few corner markers we came across, I now believe the scar we saw on the second spine was that of the Ruby Lee claim and the cairn its discovery monument. This is also consistent with it being a worked site. The cairn we came to on our ascent route was most likely for the Broken Hill claim which has no record of it ever being worked. Based upon this, here’s the way I think the claims actually lay out in Section 2.

After visiting the area, what I believe the claim layout to be. The blue line is our GPS tracks.

Also, I don’t think this is really a “hard” hike. The distance and climb is very similar to an ascent of Quail Mountain from the Juniper Flats trailhead. Of course the Quail Mountain hike has a defined trail for much of the approach, which makes for easy, mindless walking. And a trip to the Ruby Lee does require good route finding skills as it’s all wilderness. This is further complicated by its lower elevation location, limiting access to essentially the cooler months of the year.

I think what made this trip harder for us was the descent route we used (I use the word “we” even though I picked it….Pete’s stupid to listen to me anyway). It made sense on paper not to backtrack to the route we used to ascend into the area. But again, with that looking out of my ass view, the descent would have been so much easier via that route it would have been worth the backtrack.

Beyond saying that, I can’t recommend it as a hike. First, you really have to know your stuff to be travelling around such a remote area. Do something stupid and you could die. And secondly there’s nothing to see there. That was the real surprise and disappointment to me. There are many very interesting mining sites in JTNP. Unfortunately, this isn’t one of them.

But hey, that itch was scratched.

Oh….yeah…..just one more thing. Now that you’ve read the book, see the movie. I did up a modest video of the hike below. Notice what a bastard I am, making you read all those stinkin’ words before I tell you can just sit on your fat ass and watch a video instead? I’m sneaky that way.

(And a whole lotta other stuff)

OK, this is going to be a very roundabout trip, and a lot of damned text. Unfortunately I have no pictures, just an overabundance of words. But if you manage to stay with me you just might get a lost mine story out of the deal.

Ruby O. Lee was born May 6, 1887 in Henry, Illinois. The daughter of an ironworker, she was raised in Henry, there meeting her future husband, John Fredrick Rule, a local farmer. They married in June of 1907 and in December of that year Ruby gave birth to her only child, Gwendolyn.

In the early 1920s, the Rule family moved from Illinois to Oklahoma and things began to get interesting. Ruby and John divorced on July 9, 1927 and apparently Ruby made a beeline for California as she was living in Los Angeles by 1930. Interestingly, she didn’t take her daughter with her. Gwendolyn stayed in Oklahoma, eventually obtaining a degree from the University of Oklahoma.

It’s pure speculation on my part, but Ruby struck me as something of a free spirit. Divorce was a big deal back then, and an even bigger deal was leaving behind a daughter. And where does Ruby go when she bolts? She ends up not only in Los Angeles, but in an apartment on Northwestern Avenue which is filled with actors, writers and other members of the entertainment community. Fun times!

So anyway, it’s 1930 and 42 year old Ruby is living in unit 615. The census records list her occupation as “Masseuse”. Just a few doors down in unit 611 happens to be a 51 year old “carpenter” by the name of Charles W. Landford. I used the quotes around the word carpenter as that’s what he was doing at that moment to make ends meet. But through most of his earlier life he had been involved in various aspects of mining, slowly moving from the gold fields of Montana, through Nevada and finally California. Landford had been married at one time (wife’s name Ethyl), but by 1930 had been divorced.

See where this might be going now?

In the early 1930′s, Landford had been doing a lot of prospecting in the easterly parts of what is today Joshua Tree National Park. At that time there were fairly rich gold deposits being pulled out of some areas, such as the Dale Mining District. With a partner by the name of Chester Pinkham, in 1935 Landford filed a number of claims in an area southerly of the already claimed Captain Jenks mine (Then known as the North and South Slope claims). These claims included the Combination #1 and #2, Cross Country, Ridge, Offset, Gateway, Silver Peak, and……the Broken Hill claim.

Then on February 23, 1936, from out of nowhere one Ruby Lee Rule, a farm girl from Illinois, living in Los Angeles, files the Ruby Lee Lode claim adjacent to Pinkham and Landford’s Broken Hill Claim. This was followed just three weeks later on March 14 with the filing of a Mill Site claim called the Ruby Lee Mill Site almost 5 miles to the east, on the other side of the mountains. Thus arises the Ruby Lee Mine and Mill Sites

Now, again, comes more speculation. Did Landford talk Ruby into grubstaking him for his work out there and was the mine a (worthless) way for him to pay her partially back? Was Ruby looking for something different and exciting? Or was it a scheme to hide ownership?

It may well have been some variant of the latter, especially considering the filing of the Mill Site claim. Here’s the BLM’s current definition of a Mill Site claim, which probably isn’t too different from what it was in the 1930s:

A mill site must be located on non-mineral land. Its purpose is to either support a lode or placer mining claim operation or support itself independent of any particular claim. A mill site must include the erection of a mill or reduction works and/or may include other uses reasonably incident to the support of a mining operation. Descriptions of mill sites are by metes and bounds surveys or legal subdivision. The maximum size of a mill site is 5 acres

And 5 acres was precisely what Ruby claimed. What I find intriguing is the claim being located at what is today called the Ruby Lee Well. At that time there was water there. And in a desert, sometimes water is as valuable as gold. Today, however, the water is long gone, a victim of lowering ground water.

Did Landford and Lee have hopes the mines in the vicinity of the Captain Jenks mine would be successful and the mill site would serve the whole area? The provision of water and milling services to area mining operations could prove lucrative as it was the only water for miles around.

If that were the case, Landford and Lee crashed and burned. Aside from some extractions out of the Captain Jenks mine, none of the area claims proved commercially viable (a quirky bit more on that shortly). By the late 1930s almost all mining activity had ceased in that general area, and the start of World War II put an end to everything remaining.

But what of Landford and Lee? They may have not been a match made in Heaven, but they were a match made in the desert. By 1940 they were living together in a duplex on Serrano Street in Los Angeles. The 1940 census sheet diplomatically lists Landford as her “lodger”. Public directories show them continuing to live at that same location at least up through the late 1950s, each with their separate names, presumably unmarried.

However at some time between then and when Ruby died on March 27, 1975 at age 87, she eventually married Landford and became Ruby Lee Landford. Ruby currently resides at Forest Lawn cemetery in Glendale. Landford outlasted Ruby by three years, dying on January 17, 1978 at the exceptional age of 99.

Wow, that’s a lot of text and you’re tired or reading, aren’t you? But wait, there’s more, and it’s…..quirky (my favorite flavor). Maybe even a lost mine. Enter a new player onto the field, one Aloys Antone Dietemann.

Dietemann, a plumber by trade, but with an interest in mining. Dietemann claims to have acquired both the Ruby Lee Mine and mill site claims in 1948. In the early 1970s the government filed suit against Dietemann, declaring the two claims invalid. The resulting administrative court decision in 1976, ultimately invalidating the claims, turned out to be a rich source of background data on the claims. What follows is a summary, but keep in mind some of it is only testimony and not necessarily the true story.

Dietemann testified that he worked the mining claim in the late 1920′s and early 1930′s and that about 250 ounces of gold were removed from the Ruby Lee mining claim during that period. This seems odd because the claims weren’t filed until the mid 1930s and Dietemann’s name doesn’t show up on any of the claims filed in the area.

Dietemann further testified operations were halted around 1936. He stated that following his World War II service in the Navy, 10 tons of lead were removed from the claim which he personally used in his plumbing business between 1948 and 1950. Dietemann testified that from 1948 to 1961 or 1962, 125 ounces of gold were removed from the claim. He sold the gold to a dentist. That’s a lot of gold for a Joshua Tree area mine!

OK, here’s the absolute, best part. As part of his testimony, Dietemann stated that there are “perhaps one million tons of ore on that [Ruby Lee mining] claim”. He stated that in 1973 he dynamited one of the tunnels on the claim to cover up the main vein “to keep it from the public”.

Oooooh, baby! The Lost Mine of the Ruby Lee. Wait……I need to copyright that quick.

So, what did the other side have to say about this? Well, the Park Service hired a mining engineer by the name of Paul Knowles to examine the claim in February and March of 1973, the second time in the company of our man Dietemann. Knowles testified the samples he took showed no commercially viable minerals for extraction with only small traces of gold, silver and lead.

Dietemann hired a mining engineer of his own, Robert Dunfield. My mining engineer can beat up your mining engineer. Dunfield visited the site in December of 1975 and took five samples. Four of the samples produced squat, but the fifth assayed at 0.225 ounces of gold per ton, at that time worth $40.95. However this was still less than the government engineer’s estimate of $60 per ton to extract, transport from that location and smelt the ore. And a valid claim requires commercial viability. Ooops….

At the mill site Engineer Knowles found there was only a cabin (now removed) and a pile of ore, apparently from multiple sites in the area. Since there was no milling equipment, and had not been for some time, this did not bode well for the validity of the mill site claim either.

On September 8, 1976 the final decision was released. The claims were declared invalid. The court found that while there may have been viable ore deposits on the claim, they were not apparent to a trained mining engineer. Further, Dietemann apparently made no effort to direct the engineer to the location he felt had valuable deposits. The court said the government had no obligation to explore beyond the current workings of a claim to determine validity. The Lost Ruby Lee Mine will stay lost.

So the case was closed and the Ruby Lee Mine faded into memory. Dietemann died in 1982. Eventually the Park Service removed the cabin at the mill site (as they seem to like to do) and all that remains today is a small ore pile and the site’s name carved on a rock. The hike to the mill site today is somewhat popular, although it’s often referred to as the “Ruby Lee Mine hike”. But it’s not….Not by a long shot.

Note: Report written by Adam Marsland

Date: 3/22/2014

Participant: Adam Marsland

General search area: Ridge and slope southwest of Covington Trailhead

Rationale for searching this area:

Since my last trip to the area, something’s really been nagging at me about the Bill Ewasko search, and the recent mysterious loss of the Malaysian plane, with its oddly similar data points, brought it into focus.

I still believe that the most likely source of the cell ping is the spot that Tom and I visited on consecutive days in JT51 and JT52, a thread of cell coverage on an open spot above Smith Water not far from the 10.6 mile radius. And I still think the most likely place for Bill to be found is in the steep hills above Quail Spring, where I tried and mostly failed to search my last time out, five months ago (which is slightly different from Tom’s opinion, which is just as well, since there’s no point in us looking in the same place).

But.

We’ve all focused on the location of the ping, and what it tells us about where Bill might have been and where he was going. But perhaps as important as the where is the when. 10.6 miles from the tower puts Bill about that same number of miles, give or take, from his car. Bill disappeared on Thursday. The cell ping came at first light Sunday morning. That means that Bill was out for three nights. And yet not only has no confirmed trace of Bill ever been found, but no trace of any place he might have bivouaced, either. There are lots of places high up above Smith Water that would make swell places to camp for the night. And it’s fairly easy to guess from examining them whether somebody, man or critter, has put in any time there. And yet no such trace has been conclusively found, by any of the searchers, at any time. Nor any water bottles or possessions or anything else. That strikes me as a little odd.

But the thing that has really been nagging at me, and I finally was able to put my finger on it, is that Smith Water, while a good further from Bill’s car than would be expected on a day hike, is not that far, even accounting for the rough terrain. I unwittingly blundered halfway back to Quail Mountain from Quail Wash on JT55 and that only took a few hours. We’ve all scratched our heads over what could have befallen Bill that he’d be incapacitated out of cell range for 2 1/2 days before he was able to ping the tower. But there are only a few places that that ping could have come from, and they’ve been pretty well searched. He’s not in the immediate vicinity of those spots. So how is it that Bill is so injured that it takes him 2 1/2 days to cover anywhere from 1 to 10 miles (depending on where this hypothetical injury occurred), and yet as soon as he’s pinged the tower (and at the point when the search and rescue has begun in earnest), he’s so able-bodied that he disappears from the scene to points unknown, never to be found? The timeline doesn’t seem to add up. It requires him to be stuck in a fairly small area for two days, then ping a tower in passing, and then immediately vanish some inaccessible place when your only logical exit points are obvious and well-traveled. Or some other equally weird scenario.

So, back to what’s been bugging me. We know there was another hiker that was lost around the same time and area as Bill who eventually was found. That person related of wandering around for days in a daze, not really sure where he went or why (Note from Tom: That was Ed Rosenthal, missing in the Black Rock area in September, 2010. More here) .

But that doesn’t seem to apply in Bill’s case, because from the Quail-Smith Water area, there’s really nowhere to go. You either stay in the highlands or come down, and coming down means the canyon, Quail Wash, or the Samuelson’s Rock area heading towards Park Road, all of which are heavily traveled areas. There’s no point in going back to Quail Mountain; that’s where you’ve come from. And once you’re on the high ground, you can see the way out, so no reason to stay in the highlands, unless you are waiting for a helicopter (a defensible strategy, and there are plenty of places to do it, but he doesn’t seem to be in them). There’s nowhere to wander to; nowhere to go but down. And indeed, the devil in this area is getting down. It still is the most likely scenario; a catastrophic fall trying to get down from the highlands above Smith Water. But…

The only place where one could theoretically wander forever is the area south of Covington Flats, west and/or south of the overall search area. And that’s what’s been nagging at me. And then pondering the Malaysian Airlines question, with its mystery of pings and maximum flight ranges, it hit me: what if Bill was never injured at all? What if he never went to Quail Mountain at all? What if, instead, he got off the trail closer to his car (perhaps at Stubbe Springs, as Tom and early searchers had theorized), heading west, and had actually been wandering around down there, trying to get out, for two and a half days? What if the ping was actually Bill, having fought his way clear of no man’s land, on his way back to his car? That made a lot more sense — if Bill was off in the rugged lands west of Juniper Flats, it would explain why no trace of his passage had ever been found. It would also make sense of the odd timeline. It wouldn’t tell us where Bill was, since there’s still that pesky 10.6 mile radius to contend with, but it would suggest different places to look and different motivations for being there. This was the half-formed idea that I went to begin to check out, and though I wasn’t totally sold on it at the time, a closer look at the map on the return home does make it seem like it could be a possibility. I also had other reasons for wanting to search this area, more on that to follow.

Impressions of Area and Findings:

The height of land between Covington Trailhead and the adjoining flat to the west is not terribly steep, and once you’re up, it’s fairly easy to negotiate and pretty country to boot. Once I got to the top, the obvious flaw in my theory became apparent: there’s a road in the adjoining area west that runs quite a ways down south to Upper Covington Flat, and if Bill did come up through the mountains from the south or west, wouldn’t he come upon and then stick to that road? Probably. But help — and his car — would only be accessible by getting over the hill to the Covington Flat area (and consider that if Bill was still able bodied Sunday morning and was the directed individual he is supposed to have been, he may have still been thinking in terms of getting back to his car), and though there is a connecting road, it is pretty far to the north. Likewise the terrain south of this height of land, and the canyon that connects the two flats which lies opposite Smith Water Canyon, is pretty rough (and well south of the ping zone). The topo map says there is a connecting trail from Upper Covington to the Riding and Hiking Trail, but I couldn’t see it from where I was. At any rate, the ascent in the area I was searching did not look too bad. So it is conceivable that Bill might have crossed over this area, and possibly pinged the tower coming over, though it would be closer to the 11.1 mile range. I got plenty of bars wafting in and out of my Verizon phone, and even a little 3G, but I couldn’t get a text out. It’s a borderline area. So that part fits.

The other interesting thing is despite the close proximity to the Covington trailhead, and the comparatively easy terrain, it soon became clear that no one ever comes up here. With Smith Water and the California Riding and Hiking Trail readily available nearby, there’s no reason to. Signs of human passage were nil. As far as I know, no one had ever searched this particular area, and I saw no indication that anyone had ever been there. There also were fewer dead animal bones than usual, though I saw multiple tracks (including one paw print).

Coverage Level:

Fair. I was on an amble, and I took my time to look around, but there was plenty of ground I didn’t cover. With the exception of a balloon and some odd contraption with two narrow plastic flasks found near the bottom, there was nothing man made at all. Anybody wishing to expand on the search could do it easily in a few hours. It’s pleasant country and not at all inaccessible.

Comments:

This hike was undertaken on the way home on the last day of a 30 day road trip around the country doing my day job. In the course of my travels a number of folks had asked about Bill. I did not realize to the extent people had followed this story and in fact one friend had stumbled across the story on Tom’s page not realizing I was involved. It made me feel a little bad that after the flurry of activity last fall there hadn’t been much on-the-record searching, and it made me want to dip my toe back in again. But the last trip out, where not only had I failed to hit my intended search area but I couldn’t even find my own car on the way back for the third time in a row (and it had a flat tire to boot) had left a bad taste in my mouth. I tuckered myself out, looked like a fool, and didn’t accomplish very much. And I had a friend who happened to a stringer for NPR with me to witness it all. No fun.

After 30 days living out of my car, I was stiff and flabby, not to mention tired and ill-provisioned. I didn’t feel particularly up for anything too risky and I darn sure wasn’t psychologically or physically ready to slog my way back up to Park Road from Quail Wash and fumble around for my car in the dark one more time. So I needed something relatively easy that would still contribute in some way to the search. Clarifying my vague ideas about the unknown (to me) area south and west of Covington trailhead by getting a first-hand look at the terrain, and searching the low mountains southwest of the trailhead, filled the bill.

I honestly did not buy my own theory that much, but I enjoyed the hike a great deal. It was fairly easy going, the landscape was pretty, and although I didn’t feel like Bill was lurking around the next bush, it didn’t feel like a total waste of time either. And after surveying the landscape and checking out the map on my returning home, I’m starting to feel like this idea — that Bill might have been ambulatory and wandering around west of Stubbe Spring for the first two days — might have some merit to it. It does seem to fit the few facts we have a little better, not to mention it’s more logical geographically to where Bill parked his car, though it is a bit odd that he would have gotten so far into the wilderness that he was lost for two days, and that he then would have wound up that far north. Odd, but not impossible — and something odd did indeed happen. I don’t know if today’s search area would be the place to look but this scenario might conceivably mean that after pinging the tower Bill could have crossed Covington Flat Road over to the north side of Smith Water heading for Joshua Tree, or headed up the Covington Flat Road, as Tom theorized in JT37 and elsewhere. It doesn’t exactly change the basic problem, but it does offer a new perspective to attack it from, and new possibilities to think about.

GPS mileage for this trip: 4.3 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 755.8 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

JT61 tracks are shown in dark blue with the theoretical viewscape as a red band. The original search tracks are shown in black, and searches since then are shown in red. The 11.6 mile radius is the light blue curved line and the 11.1 mile radius is the light orange line.

Video:

Date: 4/3/2014

Participant: Tom Mahood

General search area: Steep southerly slopes of Smith Water Canyon easterly of the central bowl area.

Rationale for searching this area:

As coverage in the Smith Water Canyon area has accumulated, there were three remaining areas not yet covered by ground search due to the steepness of the terrain. This trip covered those areas optically from a high point on the northwesterly slopes of the canyon.

Impressions of Area and Findings:

There were three primary areas of interest, two near the canyon bottom and one further up a side canyon. In the case of two of the areas, their steepness precluded safe ground coverage. Beyond that, none of them seemed like plausible locations in an absolute sense. However they represented three of the few remaining holes in the coverage in Smith Water Canyon.

The two areas nearest the canyon bottom (and near the 10.6 mile radius) are very steep and rugged. To examine them I found a prominent saddle located about 500 feet above the canyon bottom on the canyon wall opposite these areas. From there I was able to get a very good view of the two nearest areas using binoculars, as they were only about 1,300′ away. The third area was about level with me and perhaps 2,000 feet away.

Coverage Level:

50% – 60%?? It was very hard to estimate. Much of the area was easily visible. However when viewing from only one spot, sightlines are often obscured by rocks.

Comments:

There is really no likely reason I could think of that Bill might have ended up in any of these three locations. That said, they represented some of the few holes left in the ground coverage and really had to be checked out. Realizing the ugliness (and danger) of trying to do it on the ground, a “virtual search” from the opposing canyon wall made sense.

The location I selected on the northerly canyon slopes was only about 750 feet southerly of the location that Patrick and I were at on our JT44 trip where we did something similar. However on that trip we reached our location in a descent from from above, coming from Lower Covington Flat. To get to the spot for this trip I climbed up from below, something that sounds more reasonable when planning it out than when actually looking at it. Of course that could be said of many things I end up doing.

As I’ve grown to loathe Smith Water Canyon a bit, rather than descend and return the way I came, when exiting I continued climbing and headed directly toward Lower Covington Flat. Once the climbing ends and the top is reached, it’s really a pleasant area up there. The surrounding views are great and it’s almost never visited. And there was serious wildflowerage going on.
GPS mileage for this trip: 5.0 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 760.8 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

The tracks for JT62 are shown in dark blue, the original search tracks are in black, and searches since then in red. The light blue line is the 10.6 mile Serin cell tower radius, and the orange line the 11.1 mile radius.

In this panorama looking southeast, the three areas of primary interest are outlined in red. The central Smith Water bowl area is the right third of this picture.

A telephoto image of the furthest area of interest. My binoculars gave me an even closer view than this.

Wildflowerage

My original ground station was built the way it was simply because I had a plastic case that had been lying around my garage for too many years. It wasn’t really large enough to hold all of the junk I wanted it to hold, and its latching wasn’t terribly positive. Then one day, while wandering through a local electronics shop, I stumbled upon a much larger Pelican-style case for only $39. Yay, new ground station!

If anything, this new black case is too big, but as a typical engineer I was seduced by its cheap price. I not only can keep all the ground station accessories in it, I can also store my video goggles there and probably enough food to get through a zombie apocalypse.

The small black box on the white surface is the DVR. The display just above it is the voltage readout.

10″ LCD display.

The receiver is a diversity Duo 5800 by ImmersionRC for both near and long distance. The screen is a 10″ LCD from Lumeneir. On the panel is a voltage readout for the ground station’s internal battery, as well as a place to stick a digital video recorder (for lasting remembrance of aircraft carnage)

Is that a construction tripod in your pocket or are you just happy to see me? That’s the diversity video receiver on top of the mast with both the long and shot range antennas.

While this is a big improvement from my previous ground station, it is, well…big and heavy. As in 11 pounds heavy. The tripod I had been using seemed a little questionable for this load so I began looking around for something more heavy duty. Turns out in the world of photography heavy duty = expensive.

Fortunately, I hang out in the world of Home Depot. I found that construction tripods (used for safely supporting multi-thousand dollar items of equipment like transits) could be had for as little as $60. So the tripod, while not as sexy as a photo tripod, is not going anywhere. I suspect that it could support me, were I so inclined to attempt pirouettes on its top. But I think I’ll leave that as a thought experiment….

My resurrected tricopter was starting to edge into the “adequate” category. Not great, but adequate. It was somewhat transportable and it had a sophisticated APM flight controller, but…. (there are always buts). Fight time was a bit limited at 13 minutes. But that was carrying my fairly lightweight Canon A2200. If I wanted to carry my much heavier, GPS enabled Canon SX230 HS, well, that was a problem. I might as well strap a brick onto the sucker.

This problem resolved itself during a day of testing when the tricopter failed to pull out of a rapid descent and plowed into a brush covered hill. As much as I’d like to blame the aircraft, it’s always, somehow, pilot error. In any case, after 45 minutes of searching I turned up the following. While it doesn’t look too bad in the picture, the frame was essentially totaled.

The end of my resurrected tricopter. It was, as all good crashes are, spectacular.

I wasn’t too upset about the incident, as it now meant I got to build entirely new shit! And to that end I had already laid my grubby paws on a very cool tricopter airframe kit, called the Titan, by Fortis Airframes.

This was a great choice for a number of reasons. The most important was that I wanted to get away from all these damn custom things I had been building. Yeah, they were cool, but replacing a broken arm, if it was a built-up, composite design, could take a week. Sometimes it’s better to buy than build. And Fortis offered a good selection of inexpensive replacement parts. Check that box off big time!

Beyond having the ability to resupply my weekly airframe carnage-fests, Fortis’s design was damned good! The arms were designed to fold for transport, held in place by stretched O rings. These also will snap free in the (unlikely) event of a crash and absorb energy. It was fabricated out of Delrin plastic which is fairly flexible and forgiving. This was an airframe designed to be tossed around and abused, perfect for my sort of flying. The battery/camera holder was a wonderfully elegant and simple design, with it suspended and vibration isolated using four pieces of Tygon tubing. Many of the components were fastened together with zip ties so they would release at the zip tie rather than break something important.

Having spent more than a little time myself wrestling with the difficulties of multicopter design, I know good design when I see it, and this was very good. Finally, it’s a small, midwest company and made in the USA. I like to support those sort of outfits. It’s beyond me why Fortis doesn’t get more buzz for their product.

Fortis had some recommended motor/prop combos for their kit and the prop sizes ranged from 8″ up to 11″. Since I had a good idea of the weight I would be carrying, I played around with eCalc to see what the results would be with even larger props. I settled on some pretty beefy T-Motors MN3110-26 (470KV) turning either 14″ or 16″ props. With this configuration, eCalc was projecting 15 and 17 minute hover times, respectively. That would be great!

I also went with the carbon fiber arms, further reinforced with wood dowels glued in their centers. Another thing new for me was to try the new Castle Creations Multirotor ESCs. While they are somewhat more expensive than Chinese imports, they are amazingly small and light and the workmanship is first rate. So this was going to be an interesting build!

Moving a lot of the parts over from my crashed tricopter allowed me to get the Titan together very quickly. Because I was using somewhat large props with a relatively slow turning motor I decided to do a sync test before actually attempting a flight. This is because some ESCs can lose synchronization with the motors with the large prop/low KV combination, and well….just fall out of the sky. It would be similar to a car popping out of gear. And since Castle Creation ESCs were new to me I thought it wise. The easiest way to test for sync issues is simply tie the tricopter down and aggressively work the throttle up and down and see if the motor keeps up.

I decided to start testing with the “smaller” 14″ props, and if those worked I’d move up to 16″. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I tied the sucker down and opened up the throttle. Suddenly there was a commotion and bits when flying. I shut it down and had a look at what new horror I had perpetrated. To my surprise, the tail motor and prop had completely detached themselves from the rear arm. I didn’t see that one coming.

Note the dangley motor/prop affair on the right side, shortly after the first WTF? moment.

OK, probably my fault. The tail yaw mechanism is held in place by the nifty zip ties and perhaps I overtightened them with my zip tie gun, thus weakening them. I replaced the ties and carefully tightened them. Opened the throttle….and same thing. The tail motor and props decided to go walkabout. This was very odd.

I got in contact with Zach Cunningham, the owner/design of Fortis to see what he might know. He was extremely helpful, even though he hadn’t heard of this happening before. After several email exchanges I decided to replace the two 18 pound rated zip ties holding the yaw mechanism in place with two 40 pound zip ties. That’s some serious holding ability.

Ummmm….No. It lasted maybe three seconds then let loose again. Crap. More email exchanges with a very surprised Zach. Me, I’m less surprised as I’m used to having things I build go south on me. But it was annoying.

After several weeks of screwing around I came to some conclusions. I feel I was asking far too much of the design by installing large motors and props. The rear yaw mechanism is constructed out of Delrin, which is flexible, and is held together by slots and tabs. I think the large forces I was generating simply flexed the Delrin enough to pop the tabs out of place and total failure quickly ensued. This is a pattern I’m all too familiar with. The design is more than adequate for the range of prop sizes Fortis recommends for “normal” use. Normal bores me though.

So….Plan B. I had already constructed a yaw mechanism of my own for my dead tricopter. It’s a design called “RCExplorer” style, named after the guy who popularized it. It’s a VERY strong arrangement, based upon a heavy nylon hinge. Since I was beginning to realize I was deal with large forces, I also upgraded the tail servo to something heavier.

The massive RCExplorer-style yaw mechanism. In case of a nuclear holocaust, this and the cockroaches will survive.

To my pleasant surprise, testing showed this all stayed together, with no random bits heading off into different directions. It did have the unfortunate side effect of making the tricopter more tail heavy, thus requiring weight be moved further forward.

So, on to the first flight test. With the 14″ props I was running at 67% throttle at hover. That’s not really great, but the total weight for the flight was 1565 grams (heavy!) This included 152 stinkin’ grams I had to load on the nose to get the CG right. With my heavy Canon GPS camera on, it looked like I could get maybe 13 minutes of flight time with the 14″ props on a 4S 3300 mAh battery. But I wanted more.

So next step was to kick it up to 16″ props to see about longer flight times. Houston, we have a problem. Turned out the tricopter wouldn’t hold altitude. It moved up and down several meters. This is a classic result of too much vibration, where the accelerometers in the flight controller are fooled into thinking the aircraft is moving, when in fact it is not. Checking my APM flight controller logs indeed showed crazy levels of vibrations, vibrations that weren’t there with the 14″ props.

So began round one of vibration reduction. Anything that could wiggle was replaced. This included Fortis’s nice silicone pads under the front motors. I mounted the APM on double layers of Zeal vibration isolation material. And I increased the thickness of the rubber O rings holding the arms in place to reduce chances of their flexing. The result? Meh. Vibration down a bit, but still way beyond acceptable. Hovering in autonomous modes remained erratic.

Round two had me swapping out my purdy and nicely installed Castle Creations ESCs for more generic Chinese speed controllers. Why? Hell, I don’t know. I couldn’t see an obvious reason for the vibrations and I was finding the Castle ESCs to be a bit odd. I really didn’t have a lot of trust in them. So snip, snip, solder, solder. This was all turning into another custom build, something I had hoped to avoid.

Flight tests showed the vibrations were still there. This was becoming a resoundingly mediocre aircraft. My only option was to go back down to 14″ props which would allow me to fly my heavy camera for maybe 13 minutes. I really didn’t gain anything with the 16″ props as the vibrations caused such large swings in my flight controller’s throttle output that flight time wasn’t lengthened. And worse, it couldn’t be trusted to hold altitude. So I figured it was going to be 14″ props and 13 minutes. Still, it folded up nicely for transport.

The slightly modified Titan tricopter with the heavy Canon SX230 on the front.

A closeup of the body, showing all the ‘lectronic goodness contained thereon. Note the nifty O ring shock release on the arm in the foreground.

The Titan tricopter folded up, ready for transport.

Proof it flies. Or maybe it’s just been Photoshopped in.

What it looks like taking the Titan tricopter to the field. All that’s needed is an RC transmitter , video goggles for FPV and a small DVR to record goggle video.

I used it a bit in the field but it was annoying the hell out of me. There was what I wanted it to do, and what it was actually doing. I had held to something of a lofty design goal that I’d like to be able to fly my heavy Canon SX230 GPS camera for a full 15 minutes. This was falling short, held back by the vibrations of larger props.

And I had also screwed things up a bit when I replaced the Castle ESCs on the arms. I managed to put the generic Chinese ESCs on the wrong side of the arms, so when they folded the ESCs got in the way and prevented full folding. In the interim I spent a couple of hours on the Internet learning the intricacies of the Castle ESCs and with that knowledge had become my ESCs of choice. And changing back the ESCs was going to be a messy task.

At this point there wasn’t much left of the original Titan tricopter other than the two front unmodified carbon fiber arms and the Delrin body. And in consideration of the vibrations, I was now beginning to eye the body suspiciously. It was, after all, designed to flex. So it became apparent that I could live with what I had….or do a complete rebuild.

Thus arises the Tri^2.

I wasn’t happy about it but it was clear to me I needed to do a complete rebuild of the tricopter if, “I wanted to do it right”. I hate those words. But there were a number of things I needed to fix. I wasn’t happy with the Delrin body and the Castle ESCs needed to go back on to the arms. I was also now leery of the O ring arm retainers, as they were a potential source of vibration. They were great for smaller props, but were never considered for props the size I was using.

I had also come across some very interesting vibration isolating motor mounts from an outfit called AGL Hobbies. They have some nicely designed stuff, all made in small quantities. And I found a lot of good things said online about their motor mounts. They weren’t terribly expensive and it looked like I could make them work on my 10 mm square carbon fiber arms.

The first step was to replace the Delrin body, and for that I had been looking at G10 fiberglass sheet. G10 is cheap (Amazon sells it) and easy to cut/machine. It’s about 20% heavier than Delrin, but it’s four times as strong and about six times as stiff. So, theoretically, I could end up with something even lighter, yet stiffer and stronger. Sounds good.

I wish I could regale you with how I designed the replacement G10 body using finite element analysis and 3D CAD. In truth I just put the Fortis Delrin body plates into my flat bed scanner, scanned them into a graphics program, and edited the edges to make it a slightly more beefy shape. It worked. The G10, being only 1/16″ thick, was easy to then cut out with a small bandsaw.

I gave up on the Fortis O ring arm retention methodology and returned to the Delrin Pro tricopter scheme of using 4-40 screws as clamps and pins. It would still allow for folding, but a screw would have to be removed first. That’s not a deal breaker if the damn thing works.

I had a lot of trouble with the Delrin landing struts on the Fortis airframe poking things when the frame was folded and inserted into a backpack. Since I had plenty of cheap G10, and I now knew how strong it could be, I whipped up some ultra-lightweight landing struts. These are held in place with nylon screws and wingnuts, and fold down to nothing when removed. Again, some assembly required, but if it works….

Finally, the vibration isolating motor mounts arrived and they turned out to be excellent! I wasn’t sure if I could adapt them from their intended use on 21 mm carbon fiber tubes to my 10 mm square carbon fiber arms but they worked. Because the rear arm has the yaw servo mechanism on it, and it was already rather tall, I decided to use the motor isolators on only the two front arms.

I took to calling this one Tri^2 since it was far removed from the Fortis design and it seemed more advanced than just a “Mark 2″. As the design improvements to me seemed more exponential, I like the “squared” part. Geekiness abounds.

My first test flight was with the 14″ props. Visually it was very stable, but hovering at 67% throttle. It’s desirable to have your hover closer to 50%.

Changed the props to the 16″ props. Acccck! Up, down, up, down….It wouldn’t hold a solid altitude. Looking at the flight data logs showed the vibration levels were somewhat improved over my previous attempts using 16″ props, but still well out of bounds for decent flight. Adding insult to it all, I found with these larger props it was still hovering at 64% throttle. That was hardly an improvement from the 14″ props.

Well, that just really sucked. It was a whole lot of work for almost no gain in flight capabilities. I was pretty much out of options as I had pulled every trick I could think of with that frame. I wasn’t sure where the vibrations were coming from, but they were there.

While I was sulking about this I happened to place a Hobbyking order. For the blissfully uninitiated, Hobbyking is a Chinese Internet company selling RC planes, copters and equipment at ridiculously low Chinese prices. They are known for their great pricing and long shipping times. Anyway I noticed they were selling very light carbon fiber propellers very cheaply. I’ve never used CF props so I thought, “What do I have to lose?” I ordered some 14″ props, since I knew those worked OK on the tricopter. Then I said screw it (or a reasonable facsimile thereof) and ordered some friggin’ 17″ props. They were all of $9 each, about what I was paying for USA made plastic props. Yeah, I know I had enough problems with 16″ props, but maybe there’s an “other side” to it. It’s a theory, anyway.

After some time the props arrived and I was impressed. They looked like good quality and didn’t need much balancing. I had built a motor test stand for prop/motor testing (I concede I may have got too deep into all this) and put the Hobbyking CF props on it.

The 14″ props were about worthless. They provided less thrust and consumed more power than my plastic 14″ props. But the 17 inchers…..They were interesting. They weighed about half of my heavy plastic props (and it’s rotating mass!) but put out considerably more thrust.

I quickly put the 17″ carbon fiber on the Tri^2 and headed out for a test. A rock-solid hover! On top of that I was hovering at 47% throttle, another success. And this thing was quiet, real quiet. Review of the flight controller’s data logs showed the vibration levels were way down, into the “good” levels. Looks like I might just win this after all.

After all the changes the tricopter still seemed a little hefty at 1,672 grams, with the heavy Canon SX230 camera. However…..a 4S, 3,300 mAh battery gave me a flight time of just over 17 minutes! I did not see that coming. Swapping out the Canon for a much lighter Mobius HD video camera, in a brushless gimbal, and kicking the battery up to a 4,000 mAh size, I had a flight time of just over 20 minutes. That’s long enough to start getting bored. And the sucker handles really well.

So, it looks like I exceed even my optimistic design goals of a 15 minute flight with the Canon camera, and all is puppy dogs and rainbows, right? Um, not so much.

I’ve found that with a certain amount of forward motion (or holding position in a wind) some sort of vibration does surface. It manifests itself as “jello” in the video or as a larger number of blurred images from the Canon still camera. My feeling is it’s due to the fundamental flexibility or resonance of the fairly small 10 mm square carbon fiber arms. And there’s not much I can do about those arms. It’s frustrating as I have more than my desired flight time, but the flight quality really curtails what I can do with all that air time. I’d say it’s at 75% of where I want it to be.

But you know, AGL Hobbies has that neat 21 mm diameter carbon fiber tubing their vibration isolation mounts are made for. And 21 mm CF tubing is waaaaay stiff. And a variant of my current body plate can still be made to fold with round tubes. And I still have lots of G10 fiberglass.

I guess this next one will be Tri^3……

The Tri^2 in flight. The copper wrapped box on the top right is the FPV camera. I wrapped it in a ground plane so it wouldn’t mess with the tricopter’s GPS reception. The vibration isolating motor mounts are visible on the two front arms.

A closer look at the G10 fiberglass body. Futaba RC receiver is at the top middle, with the GPS receiver at its rear. The APM flight controller is stuck on the middle level.

What all this crap looks like when you lug it into the field. Four batteries is four flights, or about 60 minutes with a safety margin.

Assembled in the field and ready for fun, adventure, mischief or whatever…..

Date: 5/14/2014

Participant: Tom Mahood

General search area: Upper southerly slopes of central Smith Water Canyon.

Rationale for searching this area:

I was looking for an easier route into the upper areas of Smith Water Canyon. This area was also a hole in the ground coverage.

Impressions of Area and Findings:

Compared to the lower slopes of Smith Water Canyon, this is relatively mild terrain. While there are areas of steepness, they are easily avoided. At one point, using binoculars, I noted what appeared to be bones about 200 feet below my position. Although it wasn’t on my planned route I downclimbed to verify what I thought I was seeing with the binocs. While I was disappointed (but not surprised) to find they were merely old skeletal remains of a deer, it validated my ability to discern items out of place in the landscape. That’s what I tell myself anyway when this happens.

Coverage Level:

80%.

Comments:

The upper areas of the southerly slopes of Smith Water Canyon have growing interest for me. Granted they are outside both the 10.6 and 11.1 mile Serin cell tower radii. However they are now much less explored than the lower slopes of the canyon and may be the next location to look closely at.

One of the main reasons for this trip was to explore a potential “minimum energy” route reaching into these upper canyon areas. By minimum energy I mean a route that while not necessarily easy, provides access for the minimum amount of difficulty possible. I’ve done this in the past, laying out a route on a topo map, saving it to my GPS and sticking to it in the field.

To that end this route was very successful, as it was surprisingly easy. Certainly it was far superior than the ugly, direct climb from the canyon bottom. Taking my time and fooling around, it was only around 90 minutes from the Lower Covington trailhead to the upper canyon reaches. Further explorations into this upper area will likely be via this route or a minor variant. As an added bonus, these upper areas have adequate cell phone coverage to get a call out if necessary.

GPS mileage for this trip: 5.5 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 766.3 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

The track for JT63 is shown in dark blue. Original search tracks are in black, and tracks since then in red. The light blue line is the 10.6 mile Serin cell tower radius and the orange line is the 11.1 mile radius.

Looking northeasterly into the upper portions of Smith Water Canyon. This is typical of the upper terrain, much more agreeable than the lower reaches.

Note: Report written by Adam Marsland

Date: 5/24/2014

Participants: Adam Marsland, Teresa Cowles

General Search Area: Immediately west of Upper Covington Flat

Rationale for searching this area:

A new possibility has been raised that Bill might have become lost somewhere westerly of Stubbe Springs and made his way north to this point, pinging the towers two and a half days later.

Impressions of Area and Findings:

The area from Upper Covington Flat to the low lying hills one mile west is relatively easy terrain. The area is fairly level (though slightly sloping upward to the east) and the hills themselves are not that steep. Joshua and other small trees dot the area, but there is little brush to impede travel. To the west of these hills, however, the terrain plummets downward precipitously and spectacularly.

Coverage Level:

We did miss some areas, but we covered quite a lot of it. Perhaps 65% coverage. Tom also searched this general area on JT 48.

Comments:

My last trip to Joshua Tree, though it encompassed a low probability area with corresponding expectations, had shaken loose in my head a new theory of Bill’s disappearance, that was further refined after looking over maps of the area and running my ideas by Tom.

The question of why Bill would be as far north as he was, why he would travel to Smith Water Canyon, why it would take him two and a half days to get there (and if it was because he was seriously injured, why he seems to have then removed himself somehow from the heavily searched area), and how he would not ping the tower in the interim has been the most confounding aspect of the mystery of Bill’s disappearance.

The idea that formed in my head after looking over the area at Covington Trailhead on my last trip out, and then looking over maps of the area to the west and south, is that Bill could have been hiking in the Stubbe Springs area (much more logical than Smith Water, or even Quail Mountain, relative to where his car was parked, how late he started, and what his planned exit time was), and lost his way in the mountainous region to the west, consuming two and a half days finding his way back to some point north at which time he re-emerged, pinging the tower, and then came to grief. This would fit the facts we know better, and also answer something that’s bothered me since the very beginning of the search: why, in such a lightly traveled area, where signs of human passage stick out like a sore thumb, has no sign of Bill or any place he might have bivouacked ever been observed in any of the numerous searches? If Bill had been ambulatory but far from the search area, that would answer this question.

After verifying this possibility on a map, I ran the idea by Tom and asked him to shoot it down. He offered two objections. One is that the terrain in the Stubbe Springs area (which I have never visited) would tend to lead Bill southwest towards the Desert Hot Springs area, and that the topography would make it difficult for him to wind up where he would need to be for this theory to work, which would be in the area west of Upper Covington Flat. Tom’s second objection was that he did not believe there was any Serin coverage that far to the west. However, Tom and I were both bothered by the fact that the rugged western area had not been searched — and neither of Tom’s objections, while valid, absolutely ruled out this new theory. The more I thought about it, the more it nagged at me, and I resolved to get out there on the first relatively cool day I had free this summer.

That day turned out to be today, and with friend Teresa Cowles (who has proved on past occasions to be a much better observer than me), made a spur of the moment trip out to Joshua Tree to have a look at this area. We arrived at about 3 p.m., with a warm but pleasant sun high overhead, which gave us a heading to follow due west from the parking area at Upper Covington Flats backcountry trailhead to the area in question.

Our destination was the low hills one mile or so to the west, which roughly fell in these perimeters. This is a lightly traveled area, though Tom did do a search here once previously on JT 48. For the purposes of testing out this theory, I hoped this trip to the area would satisfy my own curiosity about these questions: did the topography allow for Bill to enter this area from the south? Could Bill have pinged Serin tower from this location? And should the search be expanded further west from this area?

We did not find Bill, but we were able to answer all three of these questions.

I have a Verizon phone; Teresa has AT&T, so were well equipped to test out the ability to send and receive. As we got close to the area in question, we were rather surprised to discover (given the topography and my experience with cell reception in the Smith Water area) that I was able to get a text out to her in a low area just as we were starting to climb into the hills.

As we got a little higher, we surveyed the topography and at first it seemed there was no way we could see to get up to the area from the south without either hitting an impassable mountain or dropping down into Coachella Valley. But a closer inspection revealed a somewhat steep, but totally navigable, wash making its way up from below. The wash, to the best we could see it, would offer a path upward that would be shielded to the southwest (and presumably from cell towers in Palm Springs) by high mountains. It was the only way in, but it was a way in. The topography made it clear that if Bill came to this area, it was through this wash.

Now, to pause a moment: assuming there was a way that Bill could make his way up this wash from the south and west, why would Bill pursue such a path when the terrain should have led him in a different direction? It makes me think back on the various hiking misadventures where I had tried to bushwhack my way to my original location by continuing to turn right or left, but being forced (often without realizing it) by topography or road design further and further from my desired destination.

If Bill was NOT injured and was in fact ambulatory for the two and a half days leading up the ping, and given his background, his mindset may not have been on obtaining or waiting for search and rescue but simply in getting back to his car and driving out. While it may be unlikely, it is conceivable that that may have led him to pursue an unconventional path once he had become lost — not following the natural terrain because it would have been taken him further away from where he wanted to go.

After surveying the area to the south, Teresa suggested that we go down and investigate where the wash came up to meet the relatively level land below the bluff we were on. Fanning out (she going more eastward), I went straight to the spot that seemed to offer the easiest and most logical exit point from the wash. Standing at that point, I got out my phone to check for reception. I was shocked to discover that I was able to get a text out, even though it was a depressed point just coming out of a wash and surrounded by higher ground. I could see a small sliver of land from the Coachella Valley below, so I theorized that I was actually bouncing of a tower somewhere down there. To check this and view other possible but more difficult exits from the wash, I moved further south, meeting Teresa on a high bluff overlooking a large chunk of the valley below. Teresa confirmed she’d gotten the text I had just sent. At this spot with better line of sight to the valley below both Teresa and I had bars, so this seemed to confirm the Coachella cell tower theory — until I tried to get a text out from there. I could not. Teresa, on AT&T, had reception and tried to call me. The call appeared to ring through from her phone. My Verizon phone, however, stayed silent. I had no reception.

We decided then to proceed north toward higher ground to further search the area and test our phones out. I also wanted to gain impressions of the land to the west. Teresa went straight north whereas I followed a meandering course, partly in the remnants of the wash (which did continue, narrowed and less steep, past the point where I had gotten the text out) which continued north and slightly west and upward. I observed that there were depressions in the wash that could have been very old footprints. There was no way to know, but it was notably for the lack of those kind of depressions in other areas we had searched.

I followed the topography up to its logical ending point, and started looking around. Here I got a dramatic answer to the question: if Bill had actually continued all the way up the wash (or got out and walked nearby), could he have then turned west? The answer is: unless he was suicidal, no way. The land fell away very steeply and dramatically at every point to the west, ranging from extremely steep with no traction to an almost sheer drop. I did my best to scramble along the top to look down, but it seemed very unlikely anybody would fall here (it would be easy to avoid), and insane for anybody to try to exit this way. If Bill had come up the wash and out, no matter at what point, he either would have gone east or north. Not west. From the looks of it, barring an unlikely catastrophic fall, the low lying hills west of Upper Covington Flat would probably be the hard western limit of where to look for Bill.

Teresa and I met up again at a height of land northwest of where the steep area was. At this point there was a great view to the southwest and large swaths of the valley below were visible. If I had earlier gotten reception from Palm Springs, my phone should have been lit up like a Christmas tree here. Instead it read “no service.”

We paused and considered the implications of this. Before we started out I had figured, at best, we might get a few bars at the height of land to our north that could possibly be from Serin tower. Instead, we got a text out at the most logical exit point from the only route into the area from the south, but were not able to duplicate this in nearby higher areas with better exposure to the southwest. We were left with the surprising conclusion that, in all probability, at the exit from the wash somehow we’d likely pinged a tower to the north — Serin. (Since this is a bit confusing, I’ve attached a graphic to illustrate the pattern of topography and cell reception we observed in the area)

Exhibit prepared by Adam Marsland to accompany his JT64 report.

We decided that we should make as thorough a search of the area to our east, between these hills and the road, as we could manage in the daylight left remaining. We headed north, then east, then turned south, fanning out for maximum coverage, Teresa a bit east of me, criss-crossing Tom’s earlier east-west search on JT 48. Once we got back to our original path, we then retraced a parallel path back toward the wash, and then back to our car on a more southerly heading than the one inward. Twice, in these areas, texts Teresa had sent earlier were delivered to my phone, indicating there were more intermittent slivers of coverage to the north and east, completely out of sight of the Coachella Valley.

The area was covered with small trees, spaced out at reasonable intervals, which made the going fairly easy. There were so many of them it was impossible to eliminate the entire area, as Bill could conceivably have expired underneath any bush. However, one would expect some kind of trace of his passage to be visible from a near distance, and we saw very little out of the ordinary. Besides a few animal bones, there was only one thing I would consider unusual. Near the wash exit, I found an area under a tree that looked like it had been swept out. I always look for indications like this for where Bill might have rested or swept, and rarely find any. The swept-out area, however, extended around half of the perimeter of the tree, and the pattern of depressions indicated it had been made by an animal and not humans — perhaps a resting point for mountain lion or goat.

Other than that, all we found were traces of balloons. Many, many balloons, in fact. I don’t know what it is about the wind currents that lead them here, but if you are missing a balloon, I suggest looking in the area west of Upper Covington Flat.

After covering nearly 7 miles, we made it back to the car, not sure what to think about Bill, but knowing we’d answered the questions we came out here to ask:

1. It is indeed possible that Bill came up through this area (assuming that there is a viable path from his car through the wilderness up to that wash, which we do not know).
2. Given the terrain, it’s hard to imagine Bill being any further west than this point.
3. Precisely at his most likely entry point to this area there is indeed a sliver of coverage that is probably from the Serin tower and that, I discovered to my surprise when I got home, is almost smack dab on the 10.6 mile radial line.

But the fact remains: we didn’t find Bill, and Tom on his earlier search of the same general area (albeit with a slightly different rationale) didn’t find him either. From this point, Bill would have most likely headed east and a little south toward a low draw that would appear to be his quickest and easiest path back to the valley his car was in — and that was the route I tried to take back to my own car. It was not difficult going at all, and one has to assume once he either reached the road to Upper Covington Flat or the trail that stretches southward from that point, he would have found his way out.

The other possible route would be northward. We went this way a little, before turning east and south. Going here was a little harder, but nothing particularly difficult. It’s just hard to understand why he would go this direction; neither Teresa and I remembered being able to see Joshua Tree village at any point in our travels in this area, and that’s the only logical reason to head northeast. It’s possible he might have been going for high ground, and there was a height of land to the north that we did not search (we had originally planned to go there to check for Verizon coverage, but since we’d already found it at the head of the wash, there was no reason to), but other than that…it would be an odd direction to take.

The terrain in this area is not at all difficult, and the area between the wash/low lying hills and the road to Upper Covington is not large. Between Tom’s earlier search and ours, it seems to have been fairly well covered. And yet, finding a sliver of possible Serin coverage right on the 10.6 mile line at the most likely entry point into the area was…well, creepy.

The one good thing personally: after a few months of yoga and hiking and losing weight, I felt in much better shape compared to my last jaunt out here two months ago. I might ALMOST be ready to slog down to Quail Wash again.

GPS mileage for this trip: 6.8 miles

Cumulative GPS mileage to date: 773.1 miles

GPS tracks for this trip in Google Earth kml format

GPS tracks for this trip in Garmin gdb format

GPS tracks for this trip in gpx format

The track for JT64 is shown in dark blue. Original search tracks are in black, and tracks since then in red. The light blue line is the 10.6 mile Serin cell tower radius and the orange line is the 11.1 mile radius.

Somewhere on the order of 20 years ago, when mountain bikes were much newer and something of an amusing novelty to the hikers whose paths were crossed, Jeri and I did a bit of mountain biking on Santa Catalina Island.

Catalina, as it’s known by anyone in Southern California, is one of California’s coastal islands located about 22 miles off the coast of Long Beach. It’s a big sucker at about 22 miles in length, and on those rare, clear Southern California days it’s visible from the mainland. So much for the geography.

Most of the island is not public land. In the 1900s  it was the private property of the William Wrigley family (as in Wrigley gum and the Chicago Cubs, and so on), and other than the small town of Avalon, wasn’t open to the public. That changed in the 1970′s when ownership was transferred to the Catalina Island Conservancy, a nonprofit organization established to protect the island’s resources. Suddenly, vast amounts of previously off limits land was now opening to some public access. And with that we’re done with history.

So sometime in the mid-1980s we must have read a story in the LA Times about mountain bikes being allowed on the island and thought that sounded like a cool thing to do. Remember kids,  this was in the dark times before the Internet and information was spread by things called newspapers.

There were, and are, regularly scheduled ferries between Catalina and the mainland, taking just over an hour to make the trip. And for just a few dollars more, they would also haul your bike. Sure, why not….we’re in. We also managed to convince (ever notice the word “convince” starts with the word con??) a number of friends and coworkers into also thinking this was a good idea. And over the period of one fun Summer made multiple trips to Catalina, riding just about every trail that was available. We were so deranged we even thought it would be fun to bike into a remote beach campground and go skin diving. Biking and salt water don’t mix well.

This adventure period all drew to a close for a couple of reasons. One was that we saw all that was available for us to see at the time. There were still a great number of dirt roads left on the island, but the Conservancy hadn’t opened them to bikes. The other consideration was that the Conservancy was tightening up control of the assorted crazy bikers it was letting into the back country. Instead of the free bike permits we were used to getting, we were going to be required to join the Conservancy and have to pay dollars. This didn’t sit well with the cheapskate engineer-type bunch that typically made up our riding group, so we moved on elsewhere and happily let Catalina recede into the fog banks. And now we’re done with the backstory….aren’t you glad?

So, kicking a plodding narrative along, we flash forward to January of 2014. Hey, it’s now the Internet age and I happen to wonder if they still do mountain biking on Catalina? Jeri and I are now both old but still in need of at least a little adventure. So I point da Google toward the Catalina Island Conservancy to see what turns up. Oh, wow….

Seems that much more of the island has been opened to both hiking and biking. You can now hike the entire island length on the Trans-Catalina Trail, and bike almost the entire length. There are now even two ways to ride out of the town of Avalon. Plenty of hiking and biking maps available online. Membership in the Conservancy at some level is still required but that feels like less of an objection these days. In fact, at the higher membership levels (i.e., you give them more tax-deductable money) you get fringe benefits. Things like discounts on ferry transportation, enhanced camping locations and a friggin’ annual bike permit.

I pitched the idea of joining the Conservancy to Jeri and she eyed me warily. She was all up for visiting the island, as she had been in the past. But she’s older and wiser now and well aware of the stupid ideas I can concoct and how nasty-hard the terrain can be to bike. I, OTOH, have gotten more sneaky in my pitches to compensate for her defenses. I suggested we join, then just do a day trip to “check things out”. No bikes, just in and out of Avalon on the ferry, and maybe a short hike up out of town. She acknowledged this could be fun and cautiously agreed.

So we planned a proof of concept trip for the end of March, 2014. There is a high speed ferry running between Newport Beach and Avalon (the Catalina Flyer) that takes only 1:15 for the crossing. This particular ferry (there are two companies doing this) only does one trip daily, arriving in Avalon at 10:15 AM and leaving Avalon for Orange County at 4:30 PM. Not a lot of time for biking, but plenty for us to do some hiking and see how Avalon has changed in 20 years.

The trip turned out great. Avalon was….well…a big surprise. The last time we were there it was a tacky tourist trap with marginal restaurants we weren’t eager to stop at. Now, well it’s all damn nice! It looks like the town has spent a lot of redevelopment money sprucing things up and closing off streets to create pedestrian malls. A cruising through Yelp turned up quite a number of what appeared to be good restaurants in town.

Part of Avalon’s revival seems to be due to the presence of large cruise ships that anchor for the day just outside the harbor. The ships then spew forth their Norovirus-laden passengers to wander around Avalon in annoying, stinky golf carts bothering the locals. At the end of the day the cruise ships move on somewhere else to inflict their overfed clients on another coastal community. That’s the downside. The upside is it all paid for a really nice docking area the ferries also use. But if you can ignore the temporary cruisers, Avalon is a very fine place. And, important note here, the cruisers seldom leave town. Go for a hike or bike and humanity vanishes.

So Jeri and I did the tourist thing, hitting the various places that were free to us as higher level members of the Conservancy. And the hike was very fine too. We did a 4 mile loop called the Garden to the Sky trail that climbed to the very spine of the island at 1,500′. While it was cruiser-crazy below in town, we saw a total of four people on the hike.

The screen grab below I stole from the Conservancy shows our hiking route. It’s the path in light blue. Those other colors? Ah, yes, those. Those are part of the mountain bike trail system with the colors showing the steepness along the way. We will ignore that for the moment….at our own peril.

So Jeri and I wrapped up the hike and managed to find Original Jack’s Country Kitchen, breakfast served all day (or until they close at 3 PM or whenever the hell they feel like it, whichever comes first). Bacon and cheese omelets: They not just for breakfast anymore! Seriously, excellent food, and after chowing down, we dragged our sorry asses back to the ferry and the mainland.

So we were both really surprised at how nice Avalon was, the great food opportunities, the ease of making the crossing and the possibility of some very nice bike rides. The problem was, I was doing the planning. I should never, ever be allowed to plan these sorts of things. It can result in, oh I don’t know, the Avalon Circle of Death Ride.

Like so many unfortunate events in my life, this all seemed like a good idea at the time. I swear! Looking at the mountain bike trail maps showed a route circling the town of Avalon. This was new from our visits many years prior as the only way out of Avalon was a truly hellacious climb heading toward the airport. And this narrow paved route is shared with vehicles on their way to other parts of the island. Granted the traffic is very light, but the road is narrow and crazy-steep.

This loop route would allow us to climb out of Avalon on a somewhat less steep dirt route with no traffic. We would then ride along the island’s spine for a while, slowly climbing to a maximum elevation of about 1,700′, followed by a screaming descent back down into Avalon on the pavement. A narrow road isn’t a problem if you’re moving at or above the speed of regular traffic. Or so the theory I pitched to Jeri went. The total length was “only” about 13miles, half of which I gleefully pointed out was downhill. What’s not to like?

Sure, there were all those red portions on the route map, signifying very steep grades. But we had done worse (um…years ago!) and besides, that’s probably only there to scare the tourists. We were too smart for that. Or at least I was.

I was a little unsure of our timing. We would arrive in Avalon at 10:15 AM and have to board the ferry back by 4:30 PM or we were spending the night. But more important than missing the ferry was missing a bacon and cheese omelet at Jack’s Original Kitchen. They officially close at 3 PM, so I figured we needed to be in the door by 2 PM. So, the goal was to be back in town by 2 PM. That gave us 3:45 to do a measly 13 miles, half of which I repeatedly kept pointing out was downhill. How hard could that be? Piece of cake!

Well, there are always a few complications. Minor things, really, nothing to worry about. Complication 1 was that we planned this loop bike ride for the fairly cool month of April, the 29th to be precise. Turned out that ended up smack in the middle of a Southern California Santa Ana Wind event. When the Santa Ana winds blow, air off the high desert flows down into the Los Angeles basin and is heated by the resulting compression. It ends up being much hotter at the coasts than in the actual desert. That, and it can be extremely windy. So after we already had our tickets lined up, the forecast for the LA area was to be in the upper 90s. In god damned April. But was I worried? Hah, no! Catalina is surrounded by the friggin’ Pacific Ocean. That should keep it manageable. Even so, we loaded up out Camelbaks with three liters of water each and carried maybe another liter on the bikes.

Tiny complication 2: The ferry arrived a bit late. Nothing too major, but by god we were on a schedule! And this was further compounded by having to go to the Conservancy office in Avalon to get our bike permit. The upside to this was it’s an annual permit, good for both biking and hiking, so we wouldn’t have to spend time on future trips getting permits. We could just get off the ferry and blow. But not this time, and it was not until 11 AM that we started up the rather steep road out of Avalon. Bah, three hours…still lots of time.

The route, up past the old Wrigley mansion, was pretty steep. The good part is that it was still paved at this point. The bad part was it was full of cruisers in golf carts. It felt great when we finally reached our gated turn off, the dirt road began and we said farewell to humanity. We had a fairly decent dirt road all to ourselves, and there was even some shade. This shade was becoming more of a desirable thing as it became later in the morning and we climbed out of the marine layer. It was becoming, er…hot.

Considering the steepness of the road, Jeri was doing pretty well, I busied myself with observations such as my bike computer wouldn’t display a speed below 2.8 mph. It would just go to zero. I noted that a lot.

As we continued to slowly climb I was trying to get a handle on our timing. This was difficult as our climbing speed was ridiculously slow. But I knew this would (should??) be balanced out by screaming downhills at some later point. And I also knew we could just turn it around at that point and be back in town, all downhill, in 30 minutes. So onward we climbed.

At about 4 miles into the dirt we had reached something of a high point at 1,500′. From here we could see most of the remaining route across the bowl from us and what lay ahead. it didn’t look great. The route ahead was going to drop several hundred feet, then climb up the far side of the bowl before it flattened again. We were at something of a point of no return. If we continued, we were committed to complete the loop as there was no way we were going to climb back up to our current location. I asked Jeri what she wanted to do, and she unfortunately deferred to me. I have shit judgment for these sort of things, so I’m all, “Sure, let’s go!”. I am, of course, an idiot.

As we were treated to our first downhill stretch it became obvious that climbing back up this wasn’t going to be an option. And we also noticed how hot it was getting. It felt as if the dirt road was radiating heat. It was starting to take its toll as our energy began seriously flagging.

It was generally downhill until we reached a saddle and started another long climb to regain the elevation we had just lost. This was the same saddle we had hiked to on our previous visit. Unfortunately bikes weren’t permitted on that trail, otherwise we would have bailed at that point back to Avalon.

The next half mile of climb could charitably be described as grim. I knew I was feeling really bad myself, and I have some experience doing stupid, pointless things. I was becoming increasing concerned with Jeri’s condition by the sound of her labored breathing and her dwindling pace. While I was considering calling a medical emergency and descending via the off limits trail, we stopped, ate and drank a liter or two of water. That seemed to revitalize Jeri and lot.

By this time we were more than halfway around the loop and the climbing had eased considerably. The bacon and cheese omelets still seemed unlikely given our timing. But given our lousy condition it was just important to get the hell out of there.

The route had one more kick in the ass for us. It went past one of the island’s communications towers. These towers are placed…..where class??…at the highest point! So there was one last shitty climb to be done. I’m pretty sure I could smell smoke coming out of my thighs. I’m less sure if I heard a string of expletives behind me as Jeri was breathing too hard to be cursing. Still, we’ve been married long enough for me to know what she was thinking, and it wasn’t pretty. On the bright side (wait, there’s a bright side?) it wasn’t bad enough to make her start sobbing. I’ve done that a few times and it is extremely unsettling to see. I think it’s also considered spousal abuse in 17 states.

Finally cresting at the damn tower we started down, immediately joining the paved road between Avalon and the island’s airport. Well maybe “paved road” is being overly generous. It was more a collection of rough, gnarly, filled in potholes that coincidently happened to be as wide as a narrow road. Yeah, it was still a screaming downhill, but we were screaming for reasons other than I expected.

There can be too much of a good thing and downhills are one of them. This was so steep that I became concerned our old-school mountain bikes with their rim brakes might get so hot from the braking that we’d blow a tire. I’ve seen it happen. and it can be dangerous. Considering our speed and the steep dropoffs adjacent to the “road”, it was pucker time.

Mercifully we eventually came upon a repaved portion of the road and the smoothness allowed us to ease up on the braking. We blew into town, generally adhering to posted traffic regulations (maybe) and made it to the front of Jack’s amazingly just after 2 PM. I grabbed the bikes to find a place to lock them and Jeri headed for the restaurant. They told her they were thinking of closing early that day (it has its charm), but I suspect the desperate, slightly crazed look in Jeri’s eyes made them seat her anyway. A few minutes later I stumbled in and had maybe the best bacon and cheese omelet ever.

Somehow I think Jeri was less than pleased with the day’s outing. I’m not certain why, but I got that feeling from the look received when I suggested this will all seem like a good adventure in a few days. Actually, it’s been more than a few days and it still seems like a really bad idea.

In hindsight (i.e, looking out of one’s ass), the heat was a huge factor. This is a very difficult ride even on a cool day. And although we were drinking at a very high rate, the dry air was sucking out our moisture faster than we were replenishing it. And due to the damned (but good) omelets we felt we were under a time limit, True, it was self imposed, but it kept us from resting as much as we should have to compensate for the heat.

Oh, we found out later it was 93 degrees in Avalon that day. Damnnnn…..

Sadly there are no images of this unfortunate adventure. It was awful enough that neither of us had the enthusiasm to take any. Too bad, as others should learn from our mistakes. I do have an image I stole again from the Conservancy’s website showing the route we took around Avalon. We did it clockwise. Note all the red. It’s such an unpleasant color.

Given the disaster this turned into (surprise, surprise!) I decided to lay low a while before suggesting a mountain biking return to Catalina. I knew I had to offset this death ride somehow. But I’m sneaky, I’ll think of something.

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I figured I needed something pretty good to offset the Avalon Circle of Death ride with Jeri and I found it in a very nice ride out of Two Harbors on Catalina.

Two Harbors is a remarkable place. Physically located 2/3s of the way down the island from Avalon it is a world apart. It, and the surrounding rural area, is home to less than 300 people.

There are very few services at Two Harbors. A restaurant, open only in the evenings, a small cafe, open during breakfast and lunch, a surprisingly well stocked general store, a small harbor with ferry pier and anchorages, and a campground. That’s pretty much it. It’s the anti-Avalon. No cruise ship tourists here, it’s dead quiet. It does pick up on weekends when boaters travel over from the mainland in their boats and anchor at Two Harbors for the weekend. But overall it’s a very small and wonderfully quiet place that few mainlanders have visited. It does have the somewhat grim distinction as being the place Natalie Wood drowned.

The neat little community of Two Harbors. That’s the ferry pier in the middle of the cove and the restaurants and offices are behind it in the trees. To the left of the pier and above the beach is the campground.

I have vague memories of biking at Two Harbors many years ago and thought it was worth a look again. Turned out there was a nice dirt road heading out of Two Harbors toward a place called Parson’s Landing near the west end of the island. The ever useful Santa Catalina Conservancy 3D bike map showed the ride to be about 8 miles out and relatively flat. There was a 400′ climb in the last mile just before the road dropped to the beach at Parsons Landing where a campground is located. Unlike our disastrous Avalon ride, we could turn around at any time on this ride and return to Two Harbors. Still scarred, Jeri was somewhat skeptical but I promised her we could turn back at any time. So we set the day for May 21st.

The bike route from Two Harbors (left side) to Parsons Landing (right side). Note the lack of red, other than the last mile to Parsons landing. Easy riding!

Getting to Two Harbors is a little different. Ferry service to it is more limited and leaves out of San Pedro (This is the Catalina Express, not to be confused with the Catalina Flyer which only goes to Avalon). Further, the ferry stops first at Avalon before continuing on to Two Harbors, then on the return from Two Harbors to San Pedro, it again stops at Avalon. That’s a lot of boat time for someone like myself who is prone to motion sickness.(I’m a wuss). Also the ferries servicing Two Harbors tend to be rather small, amplifying the ocean experience, not necessarily a good thing.

Come trip day the weather was perfect. No Santa Ana winds this time. After a quick look around what passed for “town”, a small cluster of buildings, we hopped on the bikes and headed northwest out of town. We didn’t need to stop for a permit as we already had an annual one.

This was a NICE route! It hugged the coast a couple of hundred feet above the water with scenic vistas the entire way. The road, while dirt, was very good with little grade. The road provides access to a number of summer camps located in various coves along the coast. While it was still before Memorial Day, some of the camps were already operating and we could see kids down below. While we came across a few pedestrians walking along the road on the way to Two Harbors, traffic was non-existent. We saw a total of two vehicles on the road during our bike ride.

The start of the road out of Two Harbors to Parsons landing. It’s really a pretty good road.

Looking back down the coast toward Two Harbors, located to the right of the white rock in the distance.

Yep, Jeri’s happy. Why? Cause this ain’t the Avalon ride! The road is visible in the background and note that it’s at the same elevation.

One of the many secluded coves along the bike route. Hard to believe this is still California.

After a very enjoyable outbound ride we reached the last mile before Parson’s Landing. This last mile had a 400′ climb, then a steep descent to the beach. The climb, while short, kicked our asses. Or maybe we were just flashing back to the Avalon ride. So we paused for a while at the top, looking down at Parsons landing and trying to decide if we should ride down. If we did, it meant riding back up. The deal was sealed when we observed about a hundred kids from a nearby Boy Scout camp hike into Parsons Landing. There went the neighborhood.

Looking down at Parsons Landing, 400 feet below. Naw….I don’t think so. It’s nice up here.

The turn back point. Even the bikes are ready to go back.

So we turned around and headed back to Two Harbors where there were a couple of cheeseburgers with our names on them. The ride back was equally pleasant to the ride out and in no time we were back firmly planted in cafe seats pounding down cheeseburgers after having covered 16 miles. Waiting for the ferry we lounged around and enjoyed the quiet. At 4:15 when the ferry showed up, we were two of about 8 people who boarded. After a cruise along the scenic Catalina coast and a stop at Avalon to pick up more people, it was a fast and uneventful trip back across the channel to San Pedro. Jeri was not displeased and I think I’ve balanced out Avalon.

In all, this was a great trip, one I’d certainly do again. I suspect the road might be fairly busy in summer as the camps fill but probably still OK.