of his granddaughters had mentioned
seeing a waterfall while she was climb-
ing in the area, so he called her for ad-
vice. He described the ravine, the rock
walls, and the white-blazed trail that
he thought might take him back to the
Jeep. “It looks pretty easy,” he said.
She didn’t remember the trail.
Grandpa, she begged him, go back to
the ridgeline.
But he wanted to take the trail. “I’ve
got it figured out,” he said, then real-
ized he was talking to air. His phone
had died.
He dug into his pants for the GPS de-
vice he always brought in case of emer-
gency and pushed the “on” button.
Nothing. He had forgotten to charge it.
The trail looked to be angling down-
ward in the right direction. Soon,
though, it turned and began to climbaway from the road where the Jeep was
parked. So Bill decided to take another
shortcut. He began bushwhacking,
stopping occasionally to adjust course.
He reached the valley. No road.
No, I’m not lost, he told himself. His
eye caught a stand of tall trees. He re-
membered admiring the line of majes-
tic oaks and pines earlier. Reach them
and the car wouldn’t be that far off.
He’d have to cover some ground, but
part of it looked like an area loggers
had clear-cut. How bad could it be?
As it turned out, the loggers had left
behind a gnarly thicket of limbs and
branches; laurel, prickly greenbrier,
and other vines had sprouted up
into a web of a billion needles in the
pockets between the debris. Crawl-
ing through barbed wire in Korea, Bill
thought, would be better than this.The search-and-rescue drone has a camera so powerful that “you can see the nose on a
guy’s face on the ground from 400 feet up.” Here, it pinpoints Bill’s orange cap in the forest.102 june 2019
courtesyloudoun^countysheriff’s^office