"So now you are saying that they actually knew where the body was, and were looking at it for 5 days? I mean, they actually looked at it and found the body, or they did not look at it, or did so in a cursory way, and missed the body?"

Seriously? Those are the only possibilities?

None of the above. In fact I am puzzled by where any of those inferences come from. They are all silly. Ken is missing the obvious alternative; they looked at it in a very competent, responsible way, but didn't see it in the first few passes because it was hidden in a very steep chute.

What I am saying is that the presumption that SAR didn't even look at the area for five days is absurd: it assumes that any cursory look would have been successful. Mr. Likely was found "in an extremely steep chute", not "at the bottom of a cliff" and so could have been (and I think obviously was) missed despite a highly competent look directly at this area. As these things go, the granularity of the search increases over time , precisely because of prioritizing: you look not only at the higher probability areas, but the higher probability locations within those areas.Yes he was in the high probability area, but at very obscured, low probability point.

The other inference that puzzles me is: "I would never think twice about doing a solo summer ascent of Whitney. The concept that it is an unacceptable risk to experienced hikers seems bizarre to me." Where does THAT come from? I don't see any such concept in anything anyone has written on this forum.



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