The hikers did not find a backpack, which could have contained much of the gear he would have needed. But it’s also possible his body had been pushed down the mountain by avalanches or flowed downhill with melting snow. The bones were scattered, probably by wild animals, according to the hikers. It’s also unclear how Sands’ remains came to rest in that flat spot. If he were seriously injured, escape might have been impossible. If Sands got lost or survived an initial fall without serious injury, trying to climb out of Goode Canyon - up steep walls covered in snow and ice - would have been an exhausting ordeal. A full autopsy report has yet to be released. The Sheriff’s Department has said the cause of death remains “undetermined” given the condition of the remains. It’s still not clear precisely how or when Sands died. A hiker a few paces behind was the first to see it. The organizer said she walked past the first boot without noticing because the brush was so thick. There, they spread out looking for a path of “least resistance” through the manzanita. “Full of wildflowers and waterfalls, it’s perfect for people who don’t like trails, like me.”Īfter about 3½ hours scrambling over boulders, trudging up slopes covered in loose gravel and bushwhacking through dense brush, they reached a flat spot at 8,400 feet. The group’s organizer said it was her fifth or sixth time climbing Goode Canyon. Baldy’s summit and descend by an equally steep route. The group of about a dozen hikers started climbing around 6 a.m. But in this year’s extraordinary conditions, it is a full-on winter mountaineering expedition, requiring serious gear and the expertise to use it. Whitney: A perilous trek to the top of California’s record snowpackĮven without much snow, the standard spring hike to Mt. Even the hikers who stumbled upon Sands’ remains were struck by how well they blended into the landscape.Ĭalifornia Mt. “If they had gone another 600 feet farther down, they might have found him.”īut not necessarily. “It was just one of those things,” Newlin said. But they ran out of daylight and neither team made it to the middle section where the hikers found Sands’ remains a few days later. It’s so steep and narrow in places that falling rock and ice can turn the canyon into a “shooting gallery,” she said.ĭuring the big search in June, after most of the snow had melted, one group descended Goode Canyon from the top and another started up from the bottom. Sending people into the canyon on foot last winter was risky because of all the snow, said Donna Newlin, a member of San Bernardino County’s search and rescue team who was involved in some of the search efforts. Repeated searches of the canyon by helicopter, including one using advanced technology that can pick up a signal as faint as that from a credit card, detected nothing. A fall from there, or simply losing the snow-covered trail and getting disoriented, would probably have led him in one of two directions: into the Baldy Bowl, a popular winter climbing destination where others probably would have spotted him quickly, or into Goode Canyon, where nobody was likely to find him. The last reported ping from his phone, according to the Sheriff’s Department, had come from a ridge on the Baldy Bowl trail. The would-be rescuers knew that Goode Canyon, where Sands’ remains were eventually found, was a likely place for him to end up.
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