A team of private-sector outdoorsmen and another of Yellowstone National Park personnel and volunteers are preparing missions next month to recover Austin King, a 22-year-old hiker who vanished after summiting Eagle Peak last September.
It’s a decedent recovery, not a rescue mission, because of the high unlikelihood that King survived the harsh mountain winter.
King was working as a concessionaire employee within the park last summer when he planned his ascent of the park’s tallest peak. He made it to the top, where he penned a note describing both breathless thrill and dangerous weather as a snowstorm encircled him.
From the 11,361-foot mountain, King described fog, rain, sleet, hail and wind in phone calls to his loved ones.
Then he missed his boat back to the main park and employee housing area.
Yellowstone National Park personnel and other searchers tried to find him in the days that followed, until more blizzards halted those efforts.
They found an abandoned campsite and personal things in the upper Howell Creek area, but not King.
Yellowstone National Park Superintendent Cam Sholly led a search team down the south drainage of the mountain, another team and a drone operator on the eastern ridge area last year — then he flew into the region via helicopter and scoped the mountain’s north face in October, he told Cowboy State Daily on Thursday.
Other search teams struck into the remote area, never finding King.
This handwritten note was left at the registry at the summit of Eagle Peak on Sept. 17 by Austin King. He's been missing since. (Courtesy Photo) 
This handwritten note was left at the registry at the summit of Eagle Peak on Sept. 17 by Austin King. He's been missing since. (Courtesy Brian King-Henke) 
Austin King has been missing since not showing up for a scheduled boat ride after summited Eagle Peak in Yellowstone National Park on Sept. 17. An intensive search has so far been unsuccessful and has been scaled back. (Photo Courtesy Brian King-Henke)
Dropping In
Now a 20-man team led by private search and rescue coordinator Bill Dohse is preparing another mission for the third week of August.
If necessary, the Yellowstone team will launch its mission after Dohse’s, using any new clues that team gathers and covering areas it didn’t reach, said Sholly.
Yellowstone in turn has been reserving campsites, making special allowances for search dogs in the back country and for drones; has been providing its own drone footage and maps to searchers and coordinating with the groups’ proposed plans for the search, a park spokesperson told Cowboy State Daily in a Thursday email.
Dohse pointed to that collaboration as well.
Choppers Though
The key for Dohse’s operation is getting helicopters, he said.
“We’ve got about a 20-person roster between dogs, drones alpine teams, rope rescue teams,” Dohse said, adding that to get all the equipment and people into the harrowing, remote terrain without helicopters would be daunting, if not impossible.
Though helicopter companies have been more than friendly with their estimates, the team still needs an extra $50,000 to cover the cost of the second chopper, he said.
A new GoFundMe campaign dedicated specifically to the helicopter fee had zero donations as of Friday.
Dohse said one chopper team out of Utah is still awaiting paperwork from the Federal Aviation Administration. Another team, Montana-based Yellowstone Helicopters, is permitted for the mission.
Dohse said he’s secured cadaver K-9 teams out of Utah, Colorado and Montana, and drone teams from Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, plus a couple operators out of Texas.
The drones are supplying a software technology Dohse developed with the help of Amazon and Denver-based Cloud 303, which analyzes drone photographs to search for anomalies and other images an operator can search on an input basis.
The program is called Sixth Sense.
It’s “almost” like the reverse Google images search feature, said Dohse. It also can pinpoint certain colors, patterns and lettering.
He’s also planning to shuffle people and equipment around the base with mule teams, and he’s bringing a six-person climbing team out of Montana, said Dohse.
“They’re going to come search the cliff’s edge and crevices,” he said.
Dohse plans to coordinate the operation from a base camp at the Hallow Creek area.
Maybe He Went This Way
Besides retrospect and areas already covered, there aren’t many more clues now than there were last autumn, said Dohse — except an interview with one of King’s coworkers.
The coworker flagged an alternate route King had contemplated “in case he had to bail out,” an access via the U.S. Forest Service trailhead at the Eagle Creek Campground.
Connor Goodwin, director of Mountain Safety Group and leader of the climbing team, noted that the side of the peak heading into that route is fraught with “lots of different drainages” into which a climber could drop.
It also has intermittent glacial and forest areas, and the crumbly mountain face for which the peak is already infamous.
And the area is not well developed. Even firefighter access trails number “very few,” he said.
Sholly has shared a few of his personal theories about King’s location with Dohse’s team, said Goodwin, and the park’s search and rescue coordinator has been a “phenomenal resource.”
“You can look at maps all day, but the intuition the (National) Park Service has is very much key to a more comprehensive search,” he added.
Ideally …
Ideally, the chopper will drop off the drone operators and some of the rope crew. The drones, which Goodwin said weigh a couple hundred pounds each, will conduct a two-day flyover and collect “a lot of footage.”
Choppers could lift the drone team out after that two-day mark and the searchers could process the images and any points of interest. Then the team will bring in the “broader group” with “ground pounders, rope teams and dog teams as well” based upon the anomalies the drone footage analysis highlights, said Goodwin.
A much more tactical style search could then follow.
Volunteers
The outdoorsmen have been volunteering their time and equipment to help bring King’s family closure, said Goodwin.
As for Yellowstone, its search efforts pull from the park’s sizeable public safety fund, Sholly said.
Goodwin remains concerned about the helicopter cost, however.
Secondly
Yellowstone's mission still looks tentative, since it’s a gap-filling effort to search any areas of interest Dohse’s team doesn’t cover during its search, said the superintendent.
Some of the searchers from Dohse’s mission may join the Yellowstone mission, Sholly added.
Sholly anticipates running between 20 and 30 searchers into the area for that second mission.
“We’ll stay flexible there and coordinate closely with (Dohse’s team) to make sure when we do the Park Service operation, we’re taking advantage of each other’s information and efforts,” he said.
Dog teams, ground teams, aerial searches and more drone work are all likely parts of that second approach.
The Prayers Ascended
King’s father, Brian King-Henke, was part of last year’s search efforts and is involved with this year’s as well, Dohse said.
King-Henke did not respond by publication time to a request for comment.
Last October, he urged people to pray for his son and vowed not to give up on finding the young man.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
