#JOSHUA TREE GPS TRACKS PROFESSIONAL#
Hundreds of people, volunteers, professional searchers, six search dogs, and a helicopter crew spent 6,000 hours scouring the park for the Canadian.
That day, park rangers found Miller’s car at a trailhead. When he failed to return in time to for them to check out, his wife, Stephanie, reported him missing.
He brought a hydration backpack and a camera bag with him but left his cell phone in the hotel room. On July 13, 2018, Paul Miller (51) told his wife he was going to take a short walk inside Joshua Tree National Park. Another barrier to using drones to find the missing are regulations against flying unmanned aircraft within national parks and wilderness areas, the locations where most hikers disappear. To conduct a thorough search, drones must be programmed to fly a precise grid at the proper altitude while contending with variable terrain, thick vegetation, wind, fog, shadows, hauling heavy equipment to remote locations, and a short battery life. But Greg Nuckolls, founder of Western States Aerial Search, would say that a drone operator's job isn't any easier. Searching thousands of aerial images for evidence of a missing person is a tedious, headache-inducing process that frustrates Morgan so much his wife often hears him cursing at his computer.
"I was tired of looking at the same real estate over and over again,” he says, “with good but not great imagery." Too many times he believed he’d found a bone, or a backpack, or a tent belonging to O’Sullivan only to be deflated once ground searchers hiked in to his coordinates and discovered the bone was a stick, the backpack was a rock, and the tent was a tarp abandoned by illegal marijuana cultivators. By December 2019 the process had begun to wear them down. And Morgan Clements was burned out on image searching. But they had spent two years searching over 5,000 aerial and satellite photographs for signs of O’Sullivan with no success. Tarr’s volunteers are optimistic, hard-working, and dedicated individuals, all driven to help families of missing hikers. Morgan (50) belongs to a small team of volunteer searchers led by Cathy Tarr to find David O’Sullivan, a 25-year-old backpacker who disappeared while trekking the Pacific Crest Trail in Southern California on April 7, 2017.