hikers who found Julian Sands' remains talk to the LAT: "he was dressed like a ninja"
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"The hikers did not find a backpack, which could have contained much of the gear he would have needed. But the hikers, most of them experienced mountaineers, were troubled almost as much by what they didn’t see as what they did.
For example, all of the clothing they found was dark, with nothing orange or red or yellow that would have made spotting him from the air easier. “He was dressed like a ninja,” one of the hikers said in disbelief.
Strapped to one of Sands’ boots was a set of microspikes. These are small metal cleats, about a quarter of an inch long, that can be attached to almost any kind of footwear. They’re easy to put on and take off and great if you stick to snowy trails that aren’t too steep.
But trails don’t really exist on mountains buried in snow, and Sands was traveling up steep, icy terrain where a minor slip can turn into a catastrophic slide in seconds. In such cases, microspikes are no substitute for crampons, long heavy spikes that attach to sturdy mountaineering boots and dig deep into snow and ice to prevent potentially fatal falls.
“I was a little shocked to see the microspikes,” Dwyer said. “They were just the wrong tools for the job at hand.”
There were no signs of a helmet or an ice ax, a lethal-looking tool winter mountaineers use to plant themselves in the snow and to stop themselves if they start to fall.
Sands had his cellphone — it was perched on a rock beneath a big tree. But most of Mt. Baldy gets no reception, and the hikers could not find a signal in the area where they found Sands’ remains. They didn’t see any evidence that Sands, who was traveling alone, had another way to summon help.
After finding the remains, Dwyer used his Garmin InReach — a $400 pocket-size satellite-messaging device — to send an SOS with their exact location to authorities. They responded in eight minutes.
There are no hard rules about what gear you must carry to be safe on a mountain trek. Outdoors enthusiasts have been scaling rugged peaks for centuries to soak in their grandeur and solitude, well before much of today’s standard equipment was invented. Sierra Club founder John Muir, arguably the most adventuresome mountaineer in California history, probably never imagined a satellite-messaging device, and he died of old age in a Los Angeles hospital bed."
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