Hi all,
My wife and I spend several days camping in the area where Barbara went missing (I'm a bit of a desert rat, so did some 2.5 mile loops to search as well), and I chatted briefly with the Sheriff at their Incident Command post trailer as well as ran into some of the nice SAR folks Sunday morning who were at that time covering the eastern side of Kelbaker road, the least likely side BT would have gone as that was on the other side of Kelbaker road that they had hiked). I saw them search again east of the road with K9 units until yesterday morning (Sunday). They then suspended the search at the Kelbaker road location some time later that morning, leaving just the porta potties which were still there today. I confirmed on Saturday with the Sheriff the precise location where the Thompsons had parked their 5th Wheel, the same location they had set up. I'll try posting Google Earth pics and pics of the environment if anyone is interested. It was NOT 20 miles north of I40 like the reports says and like the speculation on this thread and all over social media goes, (the media everywhere repeated or regurgitated this over 10 days without fact checking). The location is 6.3 miles north of the I-40 in a large turnout that can accommodate a Dually and 5th Wheel. There is a nonmotorized trail directly opposite of that turnout that leads to the closest rock formations which contain lots of nooks and crannies which you can see were searched by the SARS folks. Folks in this thread (haven't been able to read all of it) are asking about cell service. My phone did not work west of Kelbaker road, and barely worked a little ways east of the turnout. So likely even if she did have a phone she would not have been able to call for help. The road generates a lot of noise (it seemed to average about a car every few minutes) and could easily be heard from half a mile away. The Incident Command Trailer was about as large as the trailer the Thompsons had and large enough to stick out over the mostly creosote vegetation, so you would have been able to see it with the naked eye from a mile away from most directions provided you got up on a bit higher ground, like a small hill side or rock. It is true that there are plenty of bends on the nonmotorized trail leading to the rock formations ("rounding a corner" is a figure of speech in this case) in the dirt road they allegedly took to get to the rock formations. There is a pole line dirt road that intersects it perpendicularly. So it would be fairly easy to lose sight of each other even within a few hundred feet behind the creosotes. The temps where in the 90's up there this weekend, due to the higher 3800 foot elevation. There are tons of places to seek shade there, gullies, rock formations, boulders with openings and cracks, pines and dense thickets. The search area was marked with flagging for several square miles. I've also included a map I drew of a plausible hike that is a round trip a little over a mile that goes to the nearest rock formation. It's possible they went to the next rock formation, but if you're hiking around noon time in the upper 90's and drinking dehydrating alcohol, I don't think you can do much more than 2 miles before calling it good.
MOO
