Media pressure is a funny thing. On one search, our coordinator carefully explained that he was calling us out only "to fly the flag" because skilled Border Patrol trackers had traced our subject, a rather spacey elderly gentleman, to the road where he had gotten in a car. The "real" search was focusing on downtown.

Guess what? We found our guy about two hundred yards from the road after about twenty minutes.

I think the main way to avoid media and family criticism is to start quickly, keep going, and be receptive to new strategies and techniques. We knew we were in the terminal phases of an epic when we started listening to the clairvoyants. But we did, because, what the hell, we had tried everything else.