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Fellow Adventurers Still Seeking Fossett

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The Associated Press

Published: September 1, 2008

HAWTHORNE, Nev. - A year after aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett vanished on a Labor Day flight over western Nevada, friends and admirers are waging a new search for some sign of him in an area of rugged mountains.
Steep canyons and gulches choked by trees and brush on the west slope of the Wassuk Range are being combed by 28 searchers headed by explorers Robert Hyman, Lew Toulmin and Bob Atwater.

They're relying, in part, on new information from another pilot who was in the area that day that alters earlier assumptions about Fossett's likely path on what was supposed to have been a short flight. He had flown over the area many times since the mid-1990s and once hiked to the top of the Wassuk Range's 11,239-foot Mount Grant.

The main search area is just west of Hawthorne. It is only 10 to 15 miles from longtime Fossett friend and wealthy hotel magnate Barron Hilton's Flying M Ranch, where Fossett borrowed the plane for his flight.

The terrain was flown over repeatedly last fall in what was described as the largest aerial search for a downed plane in U.S. history - the Nevada National Guard and the Civil Air Patrol scoured 20,000 square miles - and also was extensively searched on the ground.

However, Hyman said there's a lot of area that didn't get close scrutiny.

"While I feel he's under our nose here, he's in an area that's extremely hard to get to. It's the vertical terrain, it's the dark terrain, and it's the trees, the vegetation," Hyman said.

"If that aircraft didn't go straight down and kind of angled in under a stand of pine trees, it's going to take someone physically walking upon that scene to find it," said Lyon County Undersheriff Joe Sanford.

"It's hard to believe in this day and age that someone could disappear like this - until you go up in an aircraft and look at how rough the terrain is," Sanford said. "It's absolutely amazing."

The difficulty of finding Fossett's wreck prompts comparisons to pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, who disappeared on an around-the-world flight attempt in 1937.

"They're both incredibly inspiring people," Toulmin said, adding: "If we don't find Steve Fossett, people are going to be coming out here for the next 50 years until he is found."

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