Missing hiker (Monica Reza)

[GoalHiking]

I'm assuming they think it's her beanie (which is what, a wool ski cap?) because they ran a DNA test. I can see local cops skipping that step, but not the FBI (even under Patel).

Assuming @Matthew isn't winding people up, I'd say the cult angle deserves looking into.

*Every* angle deserves looking into. Having an open mind isn't tin foil hat territory.

I got hit by a rock in JTree that broke a rib & caused a pneumothorax. Then, my phones went dead in a hard-to-navigate wash area. Then, night came on. I'm a programmer and I resolved the issue without panicking. Even tho I'd called SAR I was able to self-rescue.

I assume, as a scientist, Monica - if she was in her right mind - would have applied scientific principles to her situation. And, if she wasn't comfortable with off-trail, I'd think she'd try to work her way back to a trail before she'd been off trail for too long. If she'd gone off trail and had slipped down a slope and couldn't get back to the trail, one would expect they would have found her in the first round of searches. Her friends would know if she was in the habit of freaking out when in a bad spot.

Another angle that shouldn't be ignored is something related to her job. China, Putin's Russia, Iran, etc have thousands of spies in the USA and a lot of them are in SoCal. She might have had some knowledge they really wanted or that they really wanted to impede us on. Foreign countries have kidnapped their dissidents inside the USA. Kidnapping an American who works at JPL is a bit of a stretch compared to that, but not outside the realm of possibility.

Also, I'm considering going up there May 16 or 17 in the afternoon, assuming the road is open to the trailhead. This would just be to look around without leaving the trail.

[Ry_Ky]

We're talking about a woman who hadn't learned to put her beanie inside her backpack. We've all made these rookie mistakes...

Agreed. Good point about losing the beanie -- seems like she took it off when she got warm and just stuffed it into her waistband. I think about all the gloves I've dropped (and had to go back and find) after they fell out of my pockets. Definitely something to be said for as you hike more, you get better at stopping to secure your belongings, even though sometimes you don't want to stop and break up your flow.

Self-rescue attempts can make things a lot worse, and make subjects a lot more unpredictable when we're planning their search and trying to pose a likely scenario. Instead of one initial decision point to plan a search around, now we have several. It introduces so much more variability. The Hug-A-Tree program is targeted towards children but I think it's good for everyone to remember.

Prevention is the best, of course. I don't want to get too didactic so I won't get into it here. I'll just say that even though PLBs/inReaches are expensive, I got myself one years ago. I'd rather spend $300 - $600 once than lose my life. Crowdsource from your loved ones and ask for it as a birthday gift. I hope to never call in an SOS but it's there if I need it.

I also think about the Swiss cheese model of failure here. Let's say Hiker C was able to do the whole hike with them and was hiking behind Monica at that point. Hopefully they would have noticed her go off trail and would have said something. Or imagine if Hiker A had stayed at that hairpin right turn to make sure Monica made it. Or imagine if it had been marked with wood before this tragedy happened. Or what if she had been able to find her way back to the trail somehow. What if she turned around and walked back uphill after the point at which she dropped the beanie? Or if she did find her way to an unfamiliar trail, if she just sat down and stayed there because at that point, she should have known she was lost. There are more of these ways things could have gone differently.

I know this is speculation, but after thinking about it more, I do wonder if Monica thought she was on the proposed shortcut. I wonder at what point she realized she had initially gotten off of the trail, and what her plan was from there. Did she try to find the trail again? Did she think she was on that proposed shortcut and therefore less motivated to turn around and find the trail again? Or was she just really freakin lost at that point. Who can know.

[coloradohiker]

Hiking vs Trail Running. In my area there is a hierarchy: mountain bikers at the top, then joggers, then hikers. Monica and Hiker A were joggers, trail runners. They didn't come out to take in the scenery; they came to get some exercise. They were pushing themselves to perform. Monica was trying to keep up, but Hiker A was a superior runner. Monica was more concerned with keeping her feet and speed than she was with where she was. Eventually it became clear to her that she was lost. Will she hike her way out of this predicament or run her way out? Maybe a hiker wouldn't have made the critical mistake that Monica made (probably falling in a crevice or canyon) because a hiker might have been more mindful of the dangers. Monica needed to change her mindset from runner to walker, and maybe she didn't make that adjustment soon enough. It would have been insane for joggers to go off-trail on a shortcut over pine needles. This whole exercise was ill-advised.

[SideQuestHiker]

Went back to the trail today to test cell phone coverage. I brought an iPhone 8 (deactivated), and iPhone 12 (deactivated), and an activated iPhone 16. Deactivated cell phones still ping cell towers because they are required to support SOS emergency calls, so I figured they can be used to test cell phone coverage.

My prediction was that the only place you might get cell service is where the last photo was taken (or higher up), as that has direct line-of-sight view of all the towers on Mt Wilson. Boy was I wrong! That mountain is bathed in cell coverage. I had to work hard to find a spot with no coverage! And that is why you test your assumptions.

Conclusion: Monica’s phone either ran out of battery, or there is a lot more cell coverage now compared to last June, or there is a lot more ping data that the authorities have and are not releasing.

[RH]

Went back to the trail today to test cell phone coverage...

My iPhone 13 had almost no coverage up there yesterday. Probably depends a lot on your carrier. All the searchers in June were told she had an older phone, no hiking apps, and her battery was dead by the time they were coming down.

It was good to see the winter storms had erased many of the off-trail routes created by the searchers last year so the beanie gully was in a more natural state than when we were all up there searching last summer. This was probably much closer to how Monica would have found it if she went down that way.

Also, the "shortcut" idea that keeps randomly popping up is a retcon myth. There was never any mention of any shortcuts by Hiker A or C for the first few weeks. It was not until they released a video over a month after the disappearance when this was introduced. We've also all been up there looking for anything that could be perceived as a shortcut even erroneously. Nothing like that was found and she would never have been even remotely comfortable trying based on what we've been told of her experience and comfort level. So why would she take a potential (non-tested) shortcut down extreme terrain in an unfamiliar area by herself to "save time" instead of sticking to the trail especially if she had only been out of sight for only a couple minutes?

My hiking partner today didn't realize when we emerged from the bottom of the beanie gully that it was the Waterman/ThreePoints/10W04 trail so it can be very easy to pass over without noticing in certain spots especially last June. It's also very easy to slip and fall in that gully due to the angle of the pine needle-covered slope and other places with decomposed granite on top of rocks. There are numerous boulder piles with vertical drops between them so if a person got up to gain a better vantage but slipped on the the dg grit, they could fall vertically into these shafts with no visibility from any direction other than if a searcher looks down the same opening from above. This makes searching all the possible places very time consuming. Some of us have done it in many of the areas but 100% positive that all possible ones have not been searched.

As for the missed north turn, people refer to it like it's one spot. It is composed of three turns: basically an upper, a middle, and a lower (where National Forest Wilderness Boundary vertical sign is) all in about a tenth of a mile. The 30' apart is also a retcon myth. We tested it again today with two people. Even 60' apart is next to impossible to believe. So this points back to Hiker A's original statement of 30 yards (~100') given during first two weeks of searching. Hiker A cannot see someone 100' away from lower or middle turn and 30' away she would not have missed it. So likely Hiker A was at upper turn when he signaled to Monica. This also makes sense because he would see he's about to go downhill through the turns where they wouldn't see each other for a bit. So he would turn around to signal her while they still have line of sight. And from the upper turn, he would have 100'-200' of visibility because it's fairly flat and open. The coordinates of her LKP is around 90' south of the trail so I'm assuming this was just an estimate of the spot he last saw her rather than firm coordinates.

And all of the forums across the internet are just speculating and/or making assumptions often by people who have never hiked that area or even hiked at all. And many of them are bringing up the same things that have been discussed and answered time and time again. There are several theories that aren't really being discussed because the whole scientist conspiracy theory is a much more exciting concept than a more likely but mundane alterative.

Really there isn't much more that can be done up there around Waterman without some kind of information from law enforcement and they will probably not release any information because it's technically an open investigation. But if anyone has contacts, it would be great to try! It's basically a catch-22. LE won't do any more searching without new information/leads but the hiking community can't provide new leads without LE releasing some information.

If we could see a photo of the beanie's resting place before it was removed, that could give much needed information. If we could see any pings from not only Monica's phone but also Hiker A and Hiker C; if they would tell us what time they dropped SARs off at Twin Peaks; if they verified the three hikers were there through photographic proof from the car (that would end the conspiracy theory that she was never on the mountain that day); if they explained what specifically happened with the search dogs and what type of search dogs (trailing or airscent) that were used.