Steve Fossett's plane found near Mammoth Lakes ?

[The Other Tom]

News reports this morning say that plane wreckage that may be Fossett's was spotted near Mammoth. Anybody got more details ?

[Codester]

There was a story run on the local news last night that a manager at Kittridge Sports in mammoth was hiking up to minaret mine. On his way down, hiking off trail, he found steve fossett's pilot ID along with a bunch of 100 dollar bills. He looked around for a while more, but it started getting dark, and he had to head back. He hiked back in the next day and found a sweater. They reported it to authorities and Just on the news this morning they report that they found some wreckage in the general area.
Pretty exciting! I remember last year working on the roof of the house I was building seeing dozens upon dozens of planes and helicopters flying around looking for the guy. I'm glad that all of this will be put to rest

[packmule]

MAMMOTH LAKES, Calif. — With aircraft and dogs, the search for Steve Fossett was to resume at dawn Thursday where wreckage was seen near a steep mountain ridge on the Nevada border and after a hiker found missing millionaire’s pilot’s license and other belongings on Monday..
Erica Stuart, spokeswoman for the Madera County Sheriff’s Office, would not reveal the exact location of the reported aerial sighting, which she said was called in around sunset.
Searchers had been combing a 10-mile radius around the spot where a hiker had found what appeared to be a pilot’s license and other items belonging to Fossett earlier in the week.
Sporting goods store manager Preston Morrow discovered $1,005, the license and a Soaring Society of America membership card bearing Fossett’s name about 5 p.m. Monday while hiking in the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area near the Minaret range, a popular backpacking and mountaineering area of Mammoth Lakes.

RJG

I am pretty new to backcounty hiking(I have been hiding in the city to long ) but I was just wanting to here some stories of people who may have hiked this area this past summer? Could this have been you who found this stuff?

[SSSdave]

I checked the local Mammoth news site and they are reporting wreckage was about the Minaret Mine area to Dorothy Lake. That is on Volcanic Ridge in the Minaret Creek drainage. Dorothy Lake has me scratching my head though because I believe it is one of those horse pack outfit names for a small no name body of water in that area. There are two Dorothy Lakes, one at the top of the Falls Creek Sierra Crest area in Yosemite and the other up Convict Creek. So they are not talking about those. A friend and I once climb up on the JMT from Shadow Lake south to Rosalie Lake and on to Castle Lake where we camped. The next day we climbed over the spur ridge west at the tail of Volcanic Ridge and made a direct route to Minaret Lake. That area is rarely visited and is mostly lodgepole, mountain hemlock over irregular metamorphic geology terrain. To have a posibility of seeing the crash, someone would have had to been in the area between where the trail leaves Minaret Creek at the long cascade and where it enters the upper canyon due east of Deadhorse Lake.

I have to wonder why his experimental aircraft would be so far off course that needs to continue to follow up the MF of the San Joaquin River Canyon and fly over the low point at Minaret Summit? Thus might be he had a steering problem that only allowed going to the left.

[copeg]

For those wondering, because of the similarity in topics I merged the above posts together into the same topic.
In the last 24hrs I've gotten hundreds if not thousands of hits on my Minaret Lake webpage and map through google searches for Minaret Lake. Completely confused, I saw this news story perhaps now I am wondering if I know why.
Here's another article from the Associated Press:

Plane wreckage found in California belongs to millionaire adventurer Steve Fossett

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Updated Thursday, October 2nd 2008, 10:04 AM

Search teams found the wreckage of missing adventurer Steve Fossett's airplane in the Inyo National Forest, authorities said Thursday.

After an aerial search late Wednesday spotted what appeared to be wreckage near the town of Mammoth Lakes, ground crews were dispatched to the site, Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said. They confirmed around 11 p.m. that the tail number matched Fossett's single-engine Bellanca plane, he said.

The aircraft appeared to have crashed head-on into the side of a mountain, according to the sheriff. Most of the fuselage disintegrated on impact, and the engine was found several hundred feet away.

Anderson said no human remains were found in the wreckage. Teams led by the sheriff's department would continue the search for remains Thursday, while the National Transportation Safety Board was en route to probe the cause of the crash, he said.

The search began after a hiker stumbled upon three identification cards and $1005 in cash apparently belonging to Fossett in the area. The plane wreckage was found about a quarter-mile from where hiker Preston Morrow made his discovery Monday.

The IDs provided the first possible clue about Fossett's whereabouts since he disappeared Sept. 3, 2007, after taking off from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton. The plane crashed about 90 miles south of the ranch.

Anderson said the steep, rugged area around the wreckage site had been flown over 19 times by the California Civil Air Patrol during the initial search for Fossett, which covered a total of 20,000 square miles.

A judge declared the famed aviator legally dead in February.

[The Other Tom]

More info
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/200 ... sett_N.htm

[hikerduane]

I was heading towards Devils Postpile from Rosalie on a group trip the day he disappeared. I heard a plane, then nothing, may not have been the one. I called it in the next week, but then, he wasn't supposed to be there, so, not that much attention given to the area I guess. Would have been in the area I heard the plane.

[Shawn]

Here's a Google Earth view of the area:

edit - the forum chops off the right side of the image, here is the full view
http://www.theradioroom.org/fossett1.jpg

[Snow Nymph]

Photos from the search: http://www.flickr.com/photos/rockwellb/ ... 737959209/

[The Other Tom]

Latest update from CNN. Looks like they found him.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/US/10/30/fosset ... index.html