HAWTHORNE, Nev. — A year after aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett vanished on a Labor Day solo flight over western Nevada, friends and admirers are waging a new search for some sign of him in an area of rugged mountains.
Steep canyons and gulches choked by concealing trees and brush on the west slope of the Wassuk Range are being combed by 28 searchers headed by explorers Robert Hyman, Lew Toulmin and Bob Atwater.
They’re relying in part on new information from another pilot who was in the area that day that alters earlier assumptions about Fossett’s likely path on what was supposed to have been a short flight.
“This is the right thing to do,” Hyman said in a weekend interview at the search team’s isolated camp. “Explorers don’t leave fellow explorers lost. . . . We want to find out what happened to our friend and colleague, no more and no less.”
The terrain was flown over repeatedly last fall in what was described as the largest aerial search for a downed plane in U.S. history. It also was extensively searched on the ground.
However, Hyman said there’s a lot of area that didn’t get close scrutiny.
Fossett, 63, was declared legally dead by a judge in February. The multimillionaire’s widow, Peggy Fossett, issued a statement supporting the latest effort, one of three private, self-funded searches this year. She spent $1 million on last year’s search efforts, in addition to more than $1.6 million that Nevada state agencies spent.
