I’m inclined to believe the Chronicle about the loop as IMO they’ve been doing excellent and thorough coverage of this case. As a mom, I can see how if they’d done a couple of 5ish-mile hikes earlier in the summer with baby (pure speculation) they would feel confident they could try 8.5 (EDIT: or 7mi or whatever it was!) Perhaps the baby would nap in the carrier for some of that time. Or they just went the wrong way, meaning to do Savage-Lundy first. The other thing that leads me to believe the Chron map is right is that SAR seemed to have gone clockwise before finding them in the middle of Savage-Lundy. At least, finding them
at 11am and some other media descriptions of the search suggested to me they went clockwise around the loop. All MOO, and correct me if that last bit sounds wrong.
Oh and welcome
@RedHaus!
I had another random thought today. So random, but since this case broke I’ve kept thinking of a segment in the podcast Locations Unknown where the hosts talk about hiking in jeans: Don’t do it, was the gist. They discuss a disappearance where a woman was attempting a huge hike to Mt. Katahdin in jeans. She was never found. Their point being that her attire and other details suggested ill-preparedness. I have noticed quite a few pictures of the couple in pretty casual attire while hiking, and with utmost respect to them, I am circling back to the notion that up until 2019, they lived in SF, something a few of you have pointed out before as a factor. Sure, they’d been to far-flung and hot places, but I wonder if their backgrounds in the cities and a sort of cavalier, “Hey, this is our backyard” attitude about Mariposa just did not serve them well on the day they perished. They were prepared, but not that prepared. They were feeling adventurous—too adventurous for conditions that in five or ten years they may have become all too wary of.