Comments have been snipped to respond to certain points.
The dog was an air scent dog, which is a dog that is trained to pick up human scents. The mother mentioned that this means that they are not trained to find a particular scent, but rather ANY human scent. They sent technical climbers and helicopters in to look in that area, but nothing was found.
The blood on the rock likely belonged to a member of the boy scout troop that was injured. They mentioned that the group had to terminate their hike early because a member was injured in that vicinity.
Yes, this is how I took it as well. I think they were pinging her phone, but I'm not sure if they actually got a phone response. It would seem to me that that would have been a big lead that we would have heard about or seen on the maps.
I really don't think that the phone was active after the day of her disappearance. I think the "movement" that they were describing are the two pings on their maps (
MAPS | Find Sam Sayers). Given that these pings happened in fairly quick succession, it would give the appearance of movement. However, if these are two cell phone tower pings, it might not matter. Those towers would be so close that it's likely their coverage areas overlap.
I also find it frustrating to follow their timeline, especially since they haven't included all of the information. I think that this is confusing people. For example, did the witness see her at noon or at 3:00? If the witness saw her at noon, how is she videotaped approaching the summit at 1:30? And this is not just my assumption, this is what the family's maps say. I am taking any information that the family has posted on their website (or anything that the sheriff's office has posted) as official, and mostly ignoring media reports, since they've had some unreliable information. This is why I think the witness actually saw her around 3:00, not noon, which was the second statement by the police department, and what the family has said.
However, if that's true, then why do the pings have her moving away from the summit between 13:44 and 14:10 hrs? This would seemingly be in the wrong direction, if i fact these pings represent movement. This is why I'm almost inclined to think that they do NOT represent movement at all, or as previously indicated, they happened on another day (although I doubt this for the reasons said above). If she were at the summit, her phone could have pinged once off of tower one and then again off tower two, which would be further away, all without her moving. They aren't GPS coordinates from an app or anything, so we can likely safely assume that they are pinging from a tower. This is true even if the military was the one pinging it. They would ping it through a cell phone tower.
I hadn't thought of that! I could definitely imagine this happening. She might go to take a picture or a selfie, drop the phone, and then try to get it. This could explain the damaged phone and/or why she would have gone "off the trail" so to speak. But, please correct me if I am wrong, if she did have to climb down to get it, would she leave her hiking poles behind somewhere? It would seem that they would be in the way if you were trying to reach or climb to a phone.