Found Deceased Spain - Esther Dingley, from UK, missing in the Pyrenees, November 2020 #6

[tedtink]

The movement of bones and the articles that state the bones were dragged by an animal to me are more accurate than the posters who believe these bones were dropped in that location by a bird. If the bones were taken by a bird and dropped to smash them, there would be surely more than one segment of skull at the location. It is plausible where ever ED ended up the skull was removed by a bird and then dropped to smash it, but it has then been moved again by another animal. There is potentially still two sites that need to be discovered- one where ED met her maker, and another where her bones had ended up being moved and dropped by birds and the final location where the skull piece was dragged to.

Agree,
What I find interesting is that just a tiny proportion of Esther has been found. Nothing else has been found including her kit - or any other body parts, bones etc even after an extensive search.
The article above refers to a crevice or cavity.
If Esther had been buried in an apparent cover up of a crime, I would have expected animals to have dug up all of her remains, surely there would have been other evidence of her remains and kit left behind. One cannot say that animals would have scavenged ALL of her kit, Animals aren't wombles that make use of everything they find - including mobile phones etc.

I suspect she has fallen down an incredibly small space between rocks, possibly stuck with only the upper part of her body, head, shoulder, possibly arms remained accessible - The rest of her, including her kit, wedged out of sight. An animal could have reached the parts visible, left some for vultures or other animal who transported the skull fragment.

JMO

 

[Grouse]

Phone GPS are often rather rubbish. It all depends on how the geolocation is done and how this is related to whatever base map is available on the phone.
Take the UK's ordnance survey map application. The geolocation is done by both GPS and cell tower location triangulation. Now the phone cannot store much of a map as they simply do not have the memory. So with the OS app you get the free base map which is actually not bad in urban areas but a total rubbish in rural and outback areas. You can subscribe to the OS's map service and then get their full map of the OS 1:25000 scale maps on the phone - but, this is the important point, the map is streamed live to the phone via the data connection to your phone. So once you go out of 3G,4G whatever connection the app basically ceases to work. Ironically in the Welsh part of the UK mountains area the OS map app will work at the top of mountains (easy to see cell towers umpteen miles away) but it won't work in the valleys where there is often no phone cell phone reception let alone a data connection. So although the GPS part will still be working and you can use another GPS app which tells you your lat and long position and how many satellites it can 'see' without a base map you are a bit stuffed for using it for navigation.

Now move on to the proper walkers dedicated GPS units from the like of Garmin who moved into this area from their former stronghold in aviation grade gps. I've got one and have purchased the full UK map details at 1:25000 which comes on an SD type card and is installed behind the batteries. This will track my path and can "see" satellites even when the gps unit is (as normal) in my trouser pocket. If I deviate off a track 5 yards to go and take a picture it will record that deviation and I can later download the track to view it on a PC. Its also tracking my altitude and heights climbed. Zoom in, zoom out, built in compass etc. The screen is actually about the same size as a phone but you are trading power required to run the screen and the gps engine and the tracking so larger screens as well as making a more bulky unit degrade batteries more. You need to be able to re-charge the batteries every day as 2 AA rechargeables will only last a day's walking. I've found it pin point accurate recording every left,right, dogleg turn etc up mountains, in forests etc - though you often wonder how accurate are the location of some of the paths marked anyway. Obviously their ain't cheap and you make sure you do not drop it!

Some of the Garmin stuff looks great, but I actually have an ancient Samsung Galaxy phone from 2013 that I can do a lot of that on and the GPS on it is superb. On treks and bike rides I carry it alongside my newer phone and it works very reliably in areas where this often no phone signal - it always picks up a GPS "signal". I use a free app that I really like called Oruxmaps (that doesn't seem to be available in the play store any more so I never bothered trying to put it or an equivalent on my newer phone). On the SD card I have quite a lot of maps and still plenty of space. A 25k map for the entire Yorkshire Dales is 415MB (stored in the form of a SQlite3 database). Sometimes I prepare custom 25k maps of more specific areas that I extract on the PC from larger maps, and download to the phone.

Like you I also copy the gpx files onto a PC and can review my routes using other software. The tracks are always very accurate and tie in with the paths and routes I know I used, there are never any gaps in the tracklogs, and it also records elevation and speed profiles.

ETA:

the screen, being a bit small, is not something I'd want to use primarily for real time navigation - for that I prefer a paper map, and the GPS to confirm my location if required. It's main usefulness to me is to record routes for analysis later.​

In terms of relevance to the thread I guess I'm saying I find my phone GPS very reliable and would feel confident that I would always know where I am using it. But in terms of a rescue situation if I had an accident it would not be much help if I didn't also have a phone signal.​

 

[OEJ-JEO]

Cavity versus crevice?

A cavity could be a narrow space between two rock ledges. A crevice is usually a gap in the terrain. Given that cavity is used, I'm thinking the former.

I'm not a native French speaker, and my French is rusty, but cavité in French is as vague as "cavity" in English. Given the understandable uncertainty of the situation, it seems to me that M. Bordinaro was being deliberately imprecise.

 

[fridaybaker]

I don’t know what a SPOT is, but the book says she did have a PLB, a “ResQLink personal locator beacon.” More specifically, an ACR Electronics ResQLink 375, whose signal, in this case, was monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmosphere Agency (NOAA) and the Air Force Rescue Coordination Center (AFRCC).

Sadly, by the time Matrosova used her PLB, it was already too late for anyone to reach her in time to help save her. The device gave off conflicting signals because she folded the antenna and put the PLB in her backpack after activating it.

I thought about Esther the whole time I was reading the book, wondering what her story will be.

Windrower, I believe that your book is incorrect, just FYI. Matrosova did not have a PLB, and it’s thought that this was a key factor in her death. She had a SPOT. I can go into the differences later, but just to clarify, as I do think (not know, of course) that it may have saved Esther as well.

 

[OEJ-JEO]

Esther carried her phone in a back pack pouch near her left hand - based on recently linked photos. It was not protected from the cold.

Of course we can't know where her phone was kept on the day she disappeared. The picture I posted was clearly taken in mild conditions, and she may have kept her phone close to her body in colder weather.

I am struck by the general lack of paper maps in DC and ED's pictures though - apart from the example mentioned previously. Neither of them seemed to carry a map case, which makes it likely that they were using their phones to navigate in the field, though IGN maps are mentioned in their blog.

The natural paper map to carry for Esther's presumed route on the French side of the border would be the IGN TOP25 1848 (1:25,000), which covers the whole area in good detail, but doesn't extend far into Spain.

 

[fridaybaker]

This is a more recent analysis of the Matrosova tragedy, and it goes into the differences between SPOT and a PLB if anyone is interested:

Kate Matrosova - Catskill Mountaineer

 

[OEJ-JEO]

I'm surprised that nothing else of her or her gear has been yet been found.

I'd think Dan would be up there day and night with a drone searching every crevice, canyon, nook and cranny.

I've been playing with the French IGN géoportail website to try to get a sense of the terrain:

Géoportail

You can view topographic maps, aerial photography, even geological maps, and tilt and rotate the view in 3D. Even in the small area Esther might plausibly have covered, the scale of the task is immense.

 

[Ruthbullock]

So I’m down the rabbit hole of which animals may have moved the bones in the Pyrenees- my guess is it will be a bear (but not in the initial SAR timeframe), I didn’t realise there were only 40, although I knew they tracked them. I wonder if any were in the area a few days before these bones were found as they would be able to track back their pathways and narrow down potential search areas. One aspect I hadn’t thought about was the fact that all deer are opportunistic carnivores, so they will eat meat, including humans, if there is a lack of available vegetation, found an interesting article about body farms, which I will have to read up on. What struck me though was whilst the deer ate the human meat from the bones, they didn’t remove the bones.
In a Never-Before Seen Behavior, Deer Spotted Gnawing Human Flesh

 

[ZaZara]

So I’m down the rabbit hole of which animals may have moved the bones in the Pyrenees- my guess is it will be a bear (but not in the initial SAR timeframe), I didn’t realise there were only 40, although I knew they tracked them. I wonder if any were in the area a few days before these bones were found as they would be able to track back their pathways and narrow down potential search areas. One aspect I hadn’t thought about was the fact that all deer are opportunistic carnivores, so they will eat meat, including humans, if there is a lack of available vegetation, found an interesting article about body farms, which I will have to read up on. What struck me though was whilst the deer ate the human meat from the bones, they didn’t remove the bones.
In a Never-Before Seen Behavior, Deer Spotted Gnawing Human Flesh

Bears will usually not roam above the tree line because they do not find food there. There is enough food to be found below the tree line at this time of the year.

And birds are animals too.

 

[Ruthbullock]

French Pyrenees: Advice as bears leave hibernation
A little more information about the bears and their tracking in the Pyrenees. I wonder if the reason they were confident they weren’t involved in EDs death is because they were already hibernating at the initial point of EDs disappearance.

 

[Ruthbullock]

Bears will usually not roam above the tree line because they do not find food there. There is enough food to be found below the tree line at this time of the year.

And birds are animals too.

I explained earlier why I personally don’t think a bird moved the skull to this place. The Pyrenees bears appear to not like sticking to one side or the other of the border, so absolutely do go above the tree line.
In the Pyrenees Mountains, It’s Bears vs. Sheep vs. Humans
In this example they have chased the sheep and some have ended up dead in Spain, whilst others were found in France.
Bear chases 200 sheep over cliff edge to their deaths

 

[pentimento]

I understood that the bones were found shortly after the trail was opened, shortly after the snow melted. The trail had been checked a few days earlier, and there were no bones in that area.

Vultures drop bones onto the rocks from a high elevation to break them and eat bone marrow. It takes 7 years for the birds to get it right (linked upthread). Young birds could have dropped the bones near the trail before the "run" held. That is, the birds could have been aiming for a different area, missed, and the bones landed close to the trail.

Well, maybe, but it would seem to me that, given all that wilderness, vultures would have more preferred spots much farther away from any human activity, and that young birds would mimic the parents' behavior, and we do know that people were out there in the days before. People may have been out there before the trail was officially checked -- I don't know, did that happen, was it officially checked?-- or a maybe a ranger or searcher or someone had just been through there recently. And as far as another animal dragging the bones from nearby to that location -- again, why? Why not scavenge them in place? Would there be anything left to scavenge after the vultures got to them? And surely there must have been at least the scent of human activity and most wild animals seemingly avoid possible encounters with humans. And lastly, does the fact that the skull fragment was hers, and the other bones were of animals imply that there is also a dead animal (it must have been a larger animal since it took a while for them to announce that they are not human) near where Esther's remains are, and if so, what are the implications of that? I just find it all very puzzling and strange.

 

[Ruthbullock]

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from the Esther and Dan page - the snail post, also has a photograph of what she suspects is a bear footprint, high up in the mountains in the snow on 17th Nov 2020.

 

[CoverMeCagney]

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from the Esther and Dan page - the snail post, also has a photograph of what she suspects is a bear footprint, high up in the mountains in the snow on 17th Nov 2020.

Esther’s photo:



Bears have more toes and they’re more parallel. Looking at this image of animal prints, it does seem more likely to be from a bird.

 

[miekei]

Having spent several years living and hiking in Alaska, (the Pyrenees now), I’ve run into my share of bears and learned quite a bit about bear behavior along the way. While they don’t typically hang out above the tree line, I have on occasion seen bears up high – luckily at some distance. Never a problem. They see me, I see them, we keep out of each others’ way. Bears don’t like surprises. What is really dangerous is when a hiker unknowingly stumbles upon a bear’s cache of food. Bears have a special way of storing their kill. They will eat what they can, then hide the carcass in an appropriate spot and bury it under a large mound of moss, dirt and branches to disguise it and protect it from scavengers. These food caches are about the deadliest thing a hiker can walk into. Bears will definitely kill to defend their food cache. They say that encountering this is pretty much the equivalent of stepping on a land mine. Any time we’ve been hiking and come across a funky, rotten smell, we've turned around immediately. Also, it is very typical bear behavior to grab its prey by the skull when attacking.

 

[windrower]

I find the stories I’ve read of other hiking/mountaineering tragedies to really have a bearing on my thoughts about Esther. I anxiously await further information about ED, I hope we will have a clear conclusion to her story.

Windrower, I believe that your book is incorrect, just FYI. Matrosova did not have a PLB, and it’s thought that this was a key factor in her death. She had a SPOT. I can go into the differences later, but just to clarify, as I do think (not know, of course) that it may have saved Esther as well.

Interesting that some detail, which should be easy to ascertain, is wrong in one place or another.

Most of what I’ve read about Matrosova is she was dead before any SAR team was even geared up, based on when she activated the beacon, when SAR got on the mountain, and the horrific weather conditions that afternoon. That added to my curiosity about ED’s situation.

I’ll do some more looking, but the book seems to be well researched, including interviews with Matrosova’s husband, who I assume would give correct info tto this author and others who interviewed him. It also has a later publication date (2017) than the Catskill Mountaineer article you linked and the Bloomberg BusinessWeek article I linked below (both 2015, best I could tell).

This is a more recent analysis of the Matrosova tragedy, and it goes into the differences between SPOT and a PLB if anyone is interested:

Kate Matrosova - Catskill Mountaineer

More recent than . . . ?

The CM article has quite a bit of misinformation, based on my readings of the book and other articles—one mistake being that Matrosova had hiked this presidential traverse the month before. This is not true. Her husband said in an interview with Chip Brown of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and mentioned in the book, that he and Matrosova set up camp near Madison Hut and climbed to the summit of Mt. Madison. They descended the next morning without summiting Mt. Adams because of worsening weather conditions at that time.

Also from Brown’s article: And she had a gizmo Farhoodi had bought and insisted she take even though she couldn’t imagine using it and thought it was a waste of money—an ACR ResQLink personal locator beacon (PLB), which Farhoodi had registered with the federal authorities that monitor all personal locator beacons in the U.S.

The Heart-Breaking Story of a Trader's Last Climb

I guess we can agree to disagree about which publications to believe. And that’s okay. I was mainly curious how any kind of locator might have or wouldn’t have helped Esther.

 

[Grouse]

I am struck by the general lack of paper maps in DC and ED's pictures though - apart from the example mentioned previously. Neither of them seemed to carry a map case, which makes it likely that they were using their phones to navigate in the field, though IGN maps are mentioned in their blog.

Possibly they did, but I use good quality paper maps and do not use a map case any more. My maps are usually printed in sections from my PC on a colour laser printer (these are OS maps BTW at the same resolution and quality as the conventional ones), then stored inside a slim waterproof plastic document holder which I can fold up and store in my pocket, so you wouldn't see these on photos of me. I can take these out when needed, but they don't get in the way when not needed as map cases sometimes can IME.

Also these are A4 sized pages of the exact area I am in so, although I fold them, I don't have the same issue of having to unfold/refold those big maps if I move from one part to the other, or am on a trail that is right on the fold (really annoying when that happens) , so if anything I feel it is a safer method. MOO.

They may have had a printer at the farmhouse and done this as well?

 

[OEJ-JEO]

They may have had a printer at the farmhouse and done this as well?

It seems to me that Esther was making decisions from one day to the next about which areas to hike, so it's unlikely that she would have prepared printed maps before setting off. But they'd hiked in the Pyrenees before, so it's quite possible that they had maps from previous trips, or that she acquired them en route.

I sense that we disagree about the possible importance of the maps Esther carried, but I'm very interested in the idea that something as simple as dropping (and breaking) her phone could have had a big influence on the decisions she made in her final hours, and the possible implications for the route she might have chosen. There's probably too much conjecture in that line of reasoning though.

 

[Grouse]

I sense that we disagree about the possible importance of the maps Esther carried

I don't think we necessarily disagree OEJ-JEO , maps are very important IME, it's just these are unknowns and so, in order to try and maintain some balance on the thread, when I see posts that imply she was wasn't prepared/responsible etc I will sometimes try to balance that with an alternative explanation. Because we don't know. Maybe a lot of conjecture on all our parts

 

[otto]

I explained earlier why I personally don’t think a bird moved the skull to this place. The Pyrenees bears appear to not like sticking to one side or the other of the border, so absolutely do go above the tree line.
In the Pyrenees Mountains, It’s Bears vs. Sheep vs. Humans
In this example they have chased the sheep and some have ended up dead in Spain, whilst others were found in France.
Bear chases 200 sheep over cliff edge to their deaths

The condition of the bones, such as cuts on the bones, should give some clues.

This article also mentions that Esther and her partner had different ideas about their future.

"Captain Bordinaro, who was involved in the searches from the beginning, said that the remains could have been moved by animals. “We passed the area where these bones were found many times, and we saw nothing until last week. So it is possible that the remains were scattered by scavengers, like foxes or vultures.”

Some have even suggested that lynx and bears may have played a role."
​

July 31, 2021
Esther Dingley's final moments still a mystery as remains may have been scattered by animals