Between a Rock and a Hard Place - Aron Ralston [145]
At 9:07 A.M. on Thursday, Steve Patchett sat in the kitchen of his Albuquerque home and considered what needed to be done next with the search. As a union electrician, Steve was presently without a job—which usually happened for four to six weeks every six months or so—so he had time to dedicate to the search planning. He first dialed the Emery County sheriff’s office on his home line and was transferred to Captain Kyle Ekker. The two men reviewed the status of the search initiated by their conversation the previous afternoon. Kyle explained that the first search hadn’t turned up any clues.
“We had our guys out at the Black Box with some of the search-and-rescue team on off-road vehicles, but they didn’t find anything. Two deputies went out to Joe’s Valley, which I don’t think was on your list, but there’s a lot of hiking out there. Nothing there, either, though. We called everybody back in just before dark.”
Steve asked, “Did you get anyone down to Segers Hole?”
Segers had been next on Kyle’s list, but he hadn’t dispatched anyone, because it was nearly a three-hour drive from Castle Dale, in the northwest part of the county, down to the remote and unpaved southern region. With the increased manpower of the day shift, Kyle could afford to send a deputy with some volunteers from the county’s search-and-rescue team down to the Muddy. He said, “It’s a long way, but we’re going to check there. I was waiting for daylight and a couple more pairs of eyes, but that’s next. Is there anything else you can tell me?”
Steve paused and considered all the information he’d reviewed. It was mostly a hunch, but he told Kyle, “I’m pretty sure he’s in your county.”
Kyle promised to update Steve when the reports came back from the more far-flung locations, and thanked him for his involvement. After hanging up, the captain looked at his maps and thought through a short list of other places he would have his deputies and the SAR volunteers check while they were on the way out to Segers. “We’ve already covered the upper corners of the county,” the captain thought, “and most of the trailheads in the central part of the county. If he’s in the county, he’s down south. Where do people go down there? There aren’t even any roads.” But one dirt road, the Lower San Rafael Road, cuts a sidewinding curve through the southern section of Emery County, down into a no-man’s-land at the fringes of Canyonlands. “Maybe there, over in the Robbers Roost area,” he thought as he pored over his enlarged map of the county. There are dozens of canyons and dry washes out in the Roost, most on BLM land accessible from the Lower San Rafael Road and its continuation, the spur that dead-ends in the Maze. Kyle knew the Maze drew considerable numbers of people through Emery County down into Wayne County. It’d be worth a call, he figured, even if he didn’t send his guys over the county line.
Kyle dialed the Hans Flat ranger station at the entrance to the Maze District of Canyonlands, inquiring about a red Toyota Tacoma truck at nine-fifteen A.M. Ranger Glenn Sherrill answered the phone and immediately recognized the vehicle description. That truck had been at Horseshoe Canyon since the weekend.
“I was just there. I saw that vehicle, oh, three days ago, and it’s still there,” he told Kyle.
Typically, fewer than ten people visit Horseshoe Canyon each day, with maybe a few more on the weekends. Nearly everyone hikes in and out of the canyon in half a day. The National Park Service posts rangers in the canyon every day at the Great Gallery to monitor visitors and protect the five-thousand-year-old petroglyphs. Since they are typically the first to arrive and the last to leave the trailhead each day, the rangers are accustomed to finding the dirt parking lot empty, or with one or two vehicles