I want to insert a corrective here:
The problem with the idea that "they did a huge search and couldn't find her, so she's unlikely to be in the mountains", unfortunately, is the opposite of what most often happens. In a large percentage of cases, bodies don't show up until long after the search has concluded, sometimes years later.
Spain SAR is extremely proficient, organized, experienced. As is routine in the backcountry for teams like this, they likely executed the most productive (according to their statistics) search for that area and those conditions, the one that would typically discover the most victims. This does not mean, in any kind of way, that they searched every nook and cranny: that's not even possible.
Furthermore, they won't have used ground searches except in the area of the highest likelihood of a find, i.e. where DC told them to go. But the number of assumptions underlying that information......! IMO ED went in the other direction, and was parrying DC to get him to back off. ED's incorrect gender choice for glère told me that. She made it up—in all its vagueness—on the fly.
Spanish SAR also likely followed their manuals in how long and how large a search area they used, namely the one with the highest percentage of success.
At some point, you end the search, not because you've searched every nook and cranny, but because percentage-wise the likelihood of finding something, anything, was minuscule. Plus, a big snow was coming in to begin the winter.
That being said, it was a COLOSSAL search. I wish we'd see more thankfulness for that in the published materials.
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Note: French LE/SAR had a whole different problem on their hands, which will have impacted their search criteria. They had a political problem. Hiking was prohibited because of COVID lockdown rules. They were getting a lot of flak from the public. The French area had also been contaminated by at least one other hiker in a way that would have been confusing to sniffing dogs. So, although French SAR may have done a thorough search, it may well not have been as thorough or extensive as the Spanish-side search.
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LE's position is that ED never made it into France. We don't know what that position is based on: evidence from communications, politics, statistics, likelihood?