Searchers pursue a piece of history

Eric Leake

Monday, Feb. 24, 2003 | 11:13 a.m.

CALIENTE -- When he trudged through the sagebrush and juniper of Nevada's high southeastern desert this weekend, aviation archaeologist Richard Russel had his faith in the research that attempted to pinpoint the location of space shuttle debris.

"If you don't do good detective work ahead of time, you waste a lot of calories," he said.

An X marked the projected impact site, drawn by radar images and trajectory models. By Sunday night there had still been no confirmed finds, but searchers were eager to continue.

"For people who are basically treasure hunters, that's what this is now, a treasure hunt," Russel said.

He was joined in the weekend hunt by more than 60 Civil Air Patrol volunteers, an auxiliary of the Air Force. Most were from Las Vegas, but others had come from other parts of Nevada and from California. Various prison work groups were used to augment the land search.

Scanning of the area about 170 miles northeast of Las Vegas was also done from the air and by horseback.

The searchers found plenty of metal in the Great Basin Desert not far from Groom Lake, but nothing that was confirmed to be from the shuttle Columbia's Feb. 1 disintegration. The weekend's finds will be further analyzed by NASA. If any pieces of Columbia are found in Nevada, they are expected to provide key clues about what happened to the shuttle because they would be among the earliest pieces to have come off the craft.

While a separate search got under way across the border in Utah, the find of the weekend in Nevada, off dusty Delmue Ranch Road, may have been made by Eugene Carlson of Fresno, Calif.

He found a a foot-long foil-like object near the campsite.

"I was just wandering through," Carlson said as he squinted behind rose-tinted bifocals. "You can find anything anyplace."

The 58-year-old self-employed electrical engineer was just as excited about another item he found, certainly unrelated to the shuttle, that looked like a crude stone tool.

"You've got Stone Age and Space Age artifacts out there," he said.

In all, a couple of dozen pieces that experts say might have come from the shuttle were found Saturday and Sunday. Some said they were Inconel, an alloy used as a heat shield in shuttle wings. Other items were dismissed as weather balloons or cigarette wrappers.

Maj. Greg Frazier of Costa Mesa, Calif., looked at an old license plate discarded aside sun-bleached cattle bones, a skull and ribs, collected in the center of camp Sunday and said: "I don't think the space shuttle is registered in Nevada."

During his daylong search, 16-year-old Brett Donaldson kneeled to pull back brush and said he was "looking for anything like foil, with strings sticking out of it, anything out of the ordinary."

The Mojave High School junior, who is also a second lieutenant with the air patrol, trooped in line with two dozen fellow cadets 5 to 5 feet apart, eyes on the ground, imposing a grid on the shallow gullies and banked ridges. They studied the ground trying to discern the glint of quartz from that of rocket ship.

Walking up a wash, Senior Airman Alanna Simpson, 19, spotted something.

"It was shiny like a metal can, but a metal can split open," she said.

Simpson signaled to her commander, who kindly ordered the unit, "Hold the line, please."

As bearded Lincoln County Sheriff's Department men on ATVs tagged and bagged the piece, Simpson took a moment for a snapshot next to her find.

"I'm not going to brag about it or anything," she said, as she continued the hunt. "It's cool to be a part of history."

At the command center -- an assemblage of trailers, trucks and radios on a caliche flat -- a blinding dust storm forced senior members to take refuge in a motor home.

"Now I know what a camel feels when he's in the desert," one said.

"Oh, I've been in the desert," said Maj. Kerry Caramanis. "They're grouchy."

The winds grounded planes on the Panaca airstrip. Others made the hourlong flight from Las Vegas to drone overhead as they circled the field.

The gusts were the front edge of a storm system that forced the postponement of more searching today.

People on the ground were not sure how long the search would continue. Some had already left, others were still fresh to the scene.

Glen Church said he and his quarterhorse Tillie would leave sometime Sunday.

The Las Vegas veterinarian was the first Nevada Civil Air Patrol member to work atop a saddle since World War II.

"I can't hike the distances these kids do, so this is the next best thing," said Church, who rode in his flight suit.

He motioned to the teen cadets who had retired from the day-long treasure hunt and were rallying for pizza.

"These youngsters are the ones working," he said.