The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012)

Ehhhh.

SAR varies a lot depending on the team, agency, and coordinator. I think it's reasonable to remind people that these are largely volunteer efforts, but it's also reasonable to call out and criticize problems with SAR when they arise. These can be due to poor training, insufficient funding, an inexperienced or unenthusiastic coordinator, or a corrupt sheriff's office. (They exist.)

It's been a while since I last read through Tom's stuff, but as I recall, his main gripe was with the Inyo County Sheriff's Office (and, in the Ewasko case, NPS).

And he's right: because SAR operations, in the US, usually fall under the management of law enforcement agencies, you get as side effects the usual problems associated with law enforcement -- poor information management, big egos, paranoia, credit-seeking, and an emphasis on security over getting the job done, among other problems. This is especially problematic on big incidents where multiple agencies are involved.

CalOES exists in part to get all the kids to play along in the same sandbox, but that sometimes doesn't happen until the operation gets enough attention for a CalOES bigwig to appear in person, and then suddenly the various sheriffs involved start acting like adults.

(Purely for background: I've been in SAR for several years, currently on a hiatus but was extremely active and responded to numerous incidents across the state. I was trained and certified in incident management, was a team leader, and an instructor for several different skillsets. I've butted heads with sheriffs a couple times and had my wrists slapped a time or two. Sometimes they were in the right, sometimes I was.)

I have met, played with, and admire several Inyo County SAR members, and have only had iffy encounters with the Inyo Sheriffs so far, so in a way I aligned with what the author said. Luckily this man's blog post has nothing to do with you or anything that happened during your time, everyone is entitled to their unique/weird experiences and opinions, and you don't need to defend anyone.

The author sometimes seems a bit unaware that despite being aligned with Riverside Mountain RU, he's not really credentialed to be mixing and gaining access to the ear or information of all the other involved agencies. After he was essentially the source of a leak (the bank card) and had moved evidence, folks might have been justifiably hesitant to enlist him and/or engage him fully. Plus he accomplished something they weren't able to. Annoying! It's a premise for a great story that he inserted himself in this puzzle, and he got to see a whole heck of a lot of puzzle pieces, but does he deserve to place the last few pieces? And might he be a little bit bitter that he wasn't "better recognized" for his work? People are just people. Once we find them rotting in the desert we maybe realize that none of the little stuff matters.

I thank you endlessly for your service.

I thought he was clear he was taking about the sheriff's office rather than the search and rescue people.

Even then it was clearly a bit of a grudge and certainly passive aggresive (oh, if you can't even tell me this, I bet you can't organise a SAR operation). But it's an understandable reaction - that final multi day grueling trip could have been avoided if they'd just been told about the children's remains beforehand. Maybe you'd also be annoyed if you went on a trip like that because someone withheld information from you.

It's extra frustrating that he was never properly told the location even afterwards, so after all that effort he (and we) can't know what really happened to them.

I think at the end of the day, it's very understandable that Inyo County would be of the mind that they may not know every blow by blow detail but it's a case that's basically solved and they don't want to get dragged into a costly resurfacing of some minor point.

Thanks for sharing this. I've read this account quite a few times now and I've always wondered if his attitude towards the SAR teams was completely justified. I don't have any personal experience, but I read about rescue efforts by local SAR teams in the local news almost weekly. The risks and danger these volunteers expose themselves to in order to save others are incredible. And often they deal with people who are wholly unprepared and end up in situations requiring rescue that could have been easily avoided. That must be very frustrating sometimes. Thank you for your work!

This is the first time I've read the story.

I completely understand it how you view this piece as you are out there putting your life at risk. However, for me it came across as nothing more as some minor annoyances that seemed justified from his point of view in the grand scheme of things. We have to remember, he was also out there putting his life at risk too.

In fact, I felt he gave the search and rescue a lot of praise and as a reader I left with a very positive view of the Search and Rescue effort and the people involved, and his annoyances seemed to be with the sharing of information in the years after.

>> I have personally been on a number of very challenging searches and rescues in the vicinity of this incident - some of the toughest things I've faced in my life.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. Can you tell us what made your searches so challenging. I suspect the team is well prepared, has adequate resources, and knowledge of the area. Was it mostly the unbearable heat and conditions?

As a German myself I think I can confidently say that most of my country-men don't have the slightest feeling for what "remote" actually means until they have actually been to some of these places outside of Europe. "Remote" to a German might mean that it takes more than 30 minutes to the next highway. "Remote" means that cell reception drops to 3G, or that there's only one gas station in a 20km radius. Lots of folks I knew always talked about going to the outback in Australia as their first major trip abroad, because "it's so remote". It's hard to convince them that there's "remote enough" and "way too remote". I know plenty of places, specifically in Canada and the US, where driving for ~ 60 minutes from a major city will get you somewhere remote enough that you won't spot another soul. This is hard to grasp for us Germans since there's basically no place in the whole country where you're truly by yourself. My two cents.

I don't remember appreciating how barren and distant a place can be until I drove from Vegas to Death Valley, seeing absolutely nothing but grey soil and dust around me for hours, no hints of civilization outside of a dingy gas station once in a blue moon.

Whenever people say "we're running out of room on this Earth" I encourage them to pick any of the less populated states in the US and just drive down a highway away from a city.

I'm sure you can have an even more surreal experience of the sort in any former USSR state or China, given their size.

> Bring an InReach and know how to use it.

Or... don't? There's something sublime about being outside, away from civilization, truly on your own. It's part of what draws me to wild places.

We drove from Death Valley to Ridgecrest. The 40 miles from the 190/178 junction to Trona where the loneliest drive ever. Just a strip of asphalt in the dark, with nearly no street markings and shrubbery on both sides.

Another poster already commented on this, but as a German I think it is important to provide some perspective:

There is next to no way to be outside of civilization and basic infrastructure for more than 30min of walking. Ok, maybe it is hyperbole and it is really 1-2 hours of walking in any direction but you're honestly going to have a tough time to not run into people and infrastructure anywhere in the country.

Western Europe is really dense when it comes to distance between urban areas in a way that has to feel foreign/weird for Americans. The distance between everything feels really different in the US versus Germany which either side will never fully understand or grasp until they're exposed to it in real life.

I appreciated it truly for the first time when I nearly ran out of gas on Route 66 back when I was a tourist before moving to the US. The needle was at 0, I had sweaty palms like never before. In contrast, a 2 hour drive anywhere in Germany feels really long and annoying, you will certainly pass multiple major urban areas.

A 7h commute in the US vs. a 8.5h commute in Germany: https://imgur.com/a/OSuzrF8

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23582417 - June 2020 (75 comments)

Hunt for the Death Valley Germans (2015) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19263057 - Feb 2019 (38 comments)

The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12019567 - July 2016 (61 comments)

The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9723065 - June 2015 (1 comment)

Here's a map with many of the locations and routes:

https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1FdGZI6DDRPe3Y9-dtpLG...

If you check one of the previous times it was posted, you get this list of maps and additional resources here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23596451

It’s my impression that you’ve uncovered a tiny tiny tip of a very very large iceberg. One simple answer is that not fixing a pothole has almost zero political cost. However, not organizing a huge mediagenic search when tourists from a developed country might die could have a massive blowback. So I think they will just tweak the budget of something else later when everyone else has forgotten in order to pay for the search.

But think about the police departments in places like Los Angeles, Seattle, Baltimore, and Chicago. They quietly pay settlements of tens of millions of dollars per year for police misconduct of all kinds. Somehow these costs are buried in opaque sections of the budget that no one is willing to disclose. It never appears as a line item. It would take multiple annual freedom of information act applications to start to get to the bottom of what’s happening there.

Note that there's a more recent chapter to this one (spoilers in the link!)

https://www.crossville-chronicle.com/news/glade_sun/enjoying...

Archived link: https://web.archive.org/web/20221006171641/https://www.other...

I think that's actually the recommended course of action, if you're stuck somewhere remote, especially in the snow. Light the spare tire on fire-tire smoke is very dark & thick, and can been seen for miles in the daytime.

I remember they found the car first. Would staying by the car not have bought them enough time?

I don't know if the advantage was enough, but basically the conclusion was that they found the car first. And this type of story keeps on happening (like the car in Washington state a few years ago where the only person who died wandered away from their car), to the extent there's a real lesson to stay still.

In hindsight, their best bet might have been to walk back to the Geologist's Cabin and wait for someone to come along. Supposedly it's usually stocked with some food and water, and there's a spring right next to it.

It would have been about a 4 mile walk with an elevation gain of about 1000 feet. Admittedly not easy with little kids, but they ultimately did make it 8 miles in the other direction.

In 1996, I'm not sure what their options would have been, but today a Personal Locator Beacon or some other satellite communication system is good to have if you're in a remote place with no cell reception.

The cabin they passed on the way there wasn't that far compared to how far they got in the end, the best option would likely have been to take what they had from the car and stay there. And try to set a tyre alight as a signal for help.

That said, since it seems there wasn't much investigation until the car sighting in October, it's unlikely even that would have been enough.