KallMeKris

and people meant help.

And if the family had read the map that way, South looked like the best direction that made the most sense, which meant that was almost certainly the direction they had gone.

And if that was the direction they had gone, a search that had focused everywhere except the South had not actually looked for them at all.

So Mahud booked a trip to Death Valley.

So in late October of 2009, 13 years after the family disappeared, Mahud drove out to the area alone and made what he later described as a pretty stupid day hike to the van's last known position.

And he wanted to stand where they had stood,

look at what they had seen and understand in three dimensions what the map had shown them in two.

So he stood at the side of the van and he walked to the spot where the single beer bottle had been found by the 1996 search team, about a mile and a half from the van, and he looked south.

and the terrain fell away toward a wide alluvial fan, beyond which the ridge line of the China Lake boundary rose in the distance, which was eight or nine miles away on the map.

But in the desert in July, that distance would be everything.

So two days later, sitting at home with his maps, the theory started to crystallize.

And he wrote about it afterwards saying, it was like viewing one of those optical illusions where an image suddenly pops out.

Everything just fell into place and became visible.

I suddenly saw a way the Germans could have ended up where the van was found through a series of reasonable, honest mistakes and why they might have set out for the south.

I was always acutely aware that I might have done exactly the same thing were I in their situation."

And he began explaining an expedition.

But most of the people he contacted actually declined.

And one person said yes, and it was his RMRU teammate, Les Walker.

And they carried a personal locator beacon and a spot satellite tracker that reported their position in near real time to a public webpage.

which was a direct line of communication with the outside world that the Rimkus Meyer family never had.