I went back to the radio interview, because there was some discussion of how far the Millers were from the location of the car when they got the call that it had been found, and it seems more relevant now:
* As I recall, the (unintelligible) Road sounded like El Reno Road, but I couldn't find any named roads in the vicinity that sounded anything like that. You guys are welcome to go listen and see if you can figure it out if you think it's important.
So Addison Ranch is basically a lodge and 5,000 acres of wilderness. It sounds like the Millers were somewhere on that ranch when they got the call, then either hurried back to their vehicles and drove around to where the car was, less than half a mile away, or maybe they hurried over on foot if that was the quickest way to get there from where they were.
But, by the time they got there, the car was already gone. They didn't get to look at it or in it. If it was me, I would've headed straight to the salvage yard or impound lot, wherever it was taken, and looked at it for myself. If it was my child missing and that's the last place she was known to be, I would insist on seeing it for myself and, if anyone tried to stop me from seeing it, there would have been a commotion of epic proportions. But none of the family members on either side mentioned that they did go look at it, so I'm wondering if they ever did. I think about that a lot.
Okay, back to the dirt road. There appears to be a gate at the entrance off Pike Road. This is the closest view we can get on Google Maps:
There's a fence stretching off to the southwest from the spindly-looking shape, which must be a gate, and the darker rectangular shape beneath it is a cattle guard, I think. You can see from the shadow thrown across the road by the utility pole that the light is coming from the east, so the rectangle doesn't appear to be a shadow. There's no street view available for this location, so we can't get a visual from ground level to confirm that's a gate and a cattle guard, but that's my best guess.
If this road is gated and it passes through private property, then it would make sense that there's a back gate somewhere along that road before it comes out on Long Hollow, but I couldn't find one. It may be hidden by trees. Could that gate be what the car crashed into? Or maybe CN swerved off the road to drive around the gate and through the weaker fence beside it and it wasn't as successful a maneuver as he hoped. Still, it's a poorly-maintained road that has a number of "rotten" spots, or crumbly areas where it would be easy to spin out or skid off the road if you were driving too fast, so there's more than one place that looks like a good possibility for the wreck.
I went back to Google Earth and traced as many creeks as I could, and there are probably more hiding in the woods:
Some of these are wet-weather creeks; dry most of the time until a good rain falls and then the runoff flows down them.
There are swampy areas as well, some just boggy and some with a good amount of standing water. Not something you'd want to hike through, especially in the dark.
