Now, it’s up to chance

Saturday, Sept. 22, 2007 | 7:42 a.m.

After all that sacred technology - airplanes outfitted with specialized magnifying cameras, homemakers scanning online satellite photos for debris, pilots who exhausted themselves endlessly flying the same search-and-rescue grid - the person who finds missing aviator Steve Fossett probably won't even be looking for him.

The person who finds Fossett, searchers say, will probably be a hunter or a farmer or a hiker who comes across him by happenstance.

That the search for the missing adventurer has come to this reveals a truth about Nevada often lost among the manicured subdivisions and broad boulevards of the Las Vegas Valley.

Most of Nevada, like that 20,000 square miles searchers spent three weeks combing from airplanes , is vast and rugged and remote enough to trump even the best efforts of our age.

How else to explain the fact that searchers found crash sites for six missing aircraft when they were looking for Fossett? That they guess there could be as many as 150 more?

It's a terrain that isn't understood until you're there, which is nowhere.

"It's a great place to look at stars," Nevada National Guard Capt. April Conway said.

It's a terrific place to vanish.

There are 314 named mountain ranges in Nevada, the most mountainous state in the nation. The land searchers combed for Fossett, an area twice the size of New Jersey, has caverns so deep that someone at the bottom couldn't get a line of sight to the sky. Scrub and brush are so thick that searchers hovered helicopters above them, using chopping rotors to beat the bushes apart.

Land that nobody has set foot on, Conway said. Ever.

(Privately, aviators have started calling it the "Nevada Triangle." That's after Bermuda.)

"There are 100 million places to hide," Nevada National Guard Maj. Ed Locke said. "If Mr. Fossett is out there, it will be someone on the ground who finds him. It almost just comes down to boots on the ground."

So the hunt boils down to boots. There are only so many states left where this can happen, places pilots list like catacombs: Alaska, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona. States with stretches of nothing and no one.

The Fossett search started shortly after the millionaire aviator took off Sept. 3 from the Flying M Ranch, an estate roughly 80 miles from Reno owned by hotel czar Barron Hilton.

It wound down Wednesday when government search-and-rescue workers announced that the operation, which had swollen to more than two dozen planes flying search patterns, was left to just two Civil Air Patrol planes stationed at Minden Airport, sitting standby for a worthwhile tip or new information.

So far, tips have been disappointing. Public Safety Department spokesman Chuck Allen, a Nevada Highway Patrol trooper, has personally suffered phone calls from at least eight psychics.

The armchair searchers who banded together to scan satellite photos off Google Earth regularly called in to report planes that were photographed frozen en route to say, Des Moines, Iowa. Or they reported what ended up, on closer inspection, to be boulders underwater. Or a shot-up refrigerator abandoned in the desert.

So much for sophistication .

Kim Toulouse, Nevada Wildlife Department spokesman, called the land an airplane "graveyard."

At least one of the six wrecks searchers found while looking for Fossett wasn't listed on the National Transportation Safety Board's register of 129 known Nevada plane crashes.

"Who knows how many of them are out there?" Toulouse said.

When the Fossett search is officially over, search-and-rescue groups say , they'll begin scouring the downed planes they found for serial numbers, trying to trace them .

California aviation consultant Robert Norris, a former airline captain familiar with the terrain that swallowed Fossett - rocks, canyons, overhangs and cliffs sanded smooth under downdrafts - says the winds that draw pilots to that stretch of land are the same winds that bring their planes down.

Eventually, Norris says, Fossett will be found. Maybe a hiker will come across the site, he said. That's usually what happens when nothing else works.

"They have used the latest technology available to find him, hundreds of pilots, but it's huge," Norris said. "It's a land that doesn't support life."