Missing friend in Mammoth Lakes area

Come on up, Jimr.....you and I can bomb it on out there and check that thing.

We spent hours searching the fall zones, and the base of the glaciers, on the Southeast Glacier, including the Clyde variation, and the Ritter-Banner Saddle routes, each on separate days, to allow a good combing of the areas, but to be honest, a large group could spend weeks in just one of these areas, and still easily miss something.

We also checked the route between Ediza-Minaret Lakes, a couple of times, since Matt mentioned it being one of his objectives while in Mammoth.

Also climbed up beyond Deadhorse Lake to the check the falls zones right underneath Kehrlein Minaret, rough country.

A bang-up day could be had going up the South Notch, climbing Kehrlein, traversing over to Starr, then back to the Starr/Kehrlein chute and down toward the tarn above Deadhorse lk, then over the saddle between Kehrlein and Pridham, bag Pridham if time permits, then across over to Cecile and back down to Agnew Meadow. Since he bagged both Rielgelhuth and Clyde, this trifecta would have covered a good portion of the southern Minarets and well withing his comfort zone (I think) considering the gear he brought with him and the fact that he was solo. I think most of this is in the class 3 range with a bit of class 4 going up Kehrlein. This traverse would also put the more difficult stuff earlier with an easy peasy peak at the finish (Pridham) and no big deal if time did not permit.

Jim, thanks for clarifying and more important for searching. I thought your name looked familiar. (I think I read the reports on HST about last year's search that mentioned "Jimerick"... :-)

I’ve long wondered about a similar possible scenario involving Kehrlein and Starr, though it didn’t occur to me that Matt might have intended Pridham as well. I imagined him intending to climb Kehrlein and Starr and then to make a beeline down the Starr/Kehrlein chute, down to Deadhorse Lake, and back along the Minaret Lake Trail to catch the shuttle near Devil’s Postpile. I wondered whether Matt might have fallen from one of those Minarets or whether he might have run into trouble descending the Starr/Kehrlein chute.

BTW, as you probably are aware, when searching last year for the remains of his son, Matt’s father climbed Pridham and left a note in the summit register. He also climbed up to the little tarn above Deadhorse Lake but wasn’t able to explore higher up in the bowl.

Located someone, who is willing to attending next years search, and is an
expert drone pilot, he does aerial searches for SAR, and has a drone
that can fly at these altitude, this will hopefully eliminate the need for
anyone having to search those class 5 ledges, and put themselves in danger.

Are you sure?

You been reading too much bullsh!t from the stooopid duck .....

Have the logs from the summits of all the likely mountains Matthew would have climbed been pulled and the names recorded. One might try to track down those that left their non trail names on the registers. Someone is out there that saw Matthew on the 17th of July. Perhaps showing them the info on Matthew might jog their memory.

Looks like Sierra club stores summit logs at the Bancroft Library in Berkley. Questions for those in the know...
1. Are all the minarets/Ritter/Banner covered by the Sierra club and gathered and stored.
2. Has anyone reviewed the stored summit loges to get the names of those who climbed on July 17th of that year?

3. If the logs are on the mountains still what about sponsoring a climbing event to photograph the logs for the dates that Matthew went missing. Again the goal would be to contact those climbers to see if anyone saw Matthew in an area to LIMIT the search area.

In this day and age it seems pretty silly to still be recording anything that matters so much with pencils and paper.
It should all be done online, and just remove the (eyesore) registers from the summits altogether.