The news article is at: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20588788/?GT1=10357

Hope he's ok
As a Brit, its difficult to appreciate the vastness of the US.

SAN FRANCISCO (Oct. 1) - A hiker in a rugged part of eastern California found an ID and other items possibly belonging to Steve Fossett, the adventurer who vanished on a solo flight in a borrowed plane more than a year ago, authorities said Wednesday.

The items were found Monday near the town of Mammoth Lakes, Inyo National Forest spokeswoman Nancy Upham said.
"We have some ID that has the name Steve Fossett," Mammoth Lakes police Investigator Crystal Schafer said. "They were turned in to us and are in our possession."
A Federal Aviation Administration identity card, a pilot ID and about $1,000 in cash were found in a bush, according to David Baumwohl, an attorney for the hiker who recovered the items.
Preston Morrow, who works in a Mammoth Lakes sporting goods store, took the items to the town's police department Wednesday, Baumwohl said.
The hiker initially didn't know who Fossett was, but once he found out, wanted to alert the Fossett family, Baumwohl said.
Michael LoVallo, a lawyer for Fossett's wife, Peggy, said, "We are aware of the reports and are trying to verify the information."
Fossett disappeared Sept. 3, 2007, after taking off in a single-engine plane borrowed from a Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton. A judge declared Fossett legally dead in February.
Baumwohl and Morrow tried to contact the law firm that handled the death declaration. When they weren't successful, they decided to turn everything over to the police, the attorney said.
Morrow also found a black Nautica pullover fleece, size XL, but left that at the scene. A quick search for airplane pieces before night fell didn't turn anything up, Baumwohl said.
Chances of finding remains are slim, said the attorney, who is a longtime resident of the mountain town and has followed similar cases.
"He's probably been eaten. This is not the first time this has happened," he said. "When people land in alpine wilderness, there's bears, mountain lions that'll eat the body."
This year's biggest search for Fossett focused on Nevada's Wassuk Range, more than 50 miles north of Mammoth Lakes. That search ended last month.
Mammoth Lakes is at an elevation of more than 7,800 feet on the eastern flank of the Sierra Nevada, where peaks top 13,000 feet.
Fossett made a fortune trading futures and options on Chicago markets. He gained worldwide fame for more than 100 attempts and successes in setting records in high-tech balloons, gliders, jets and boats. In 2002, he became the first person to circle the world solo in a balloon. He was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in July 2007.

According to Fox News Website (not a site I venture to very often...it was linked from Google).



What a horrible ending.

Hey jake, some people would rather crash out doing something they love over wasting away in a nursing home sitting in a pile of your own poo!

how about you?

If he was eaten by an animal, it was probably after he died in the crash.

It's hard to imagine how he could have ended up down there. There's been lots of speculation that he faked his disappearance, and this will only add to that.

I'm certainly not ready yet, but when it comes time to go, yeah, you're probably right. That being said I don't think being eaten by a mountain lion or bear was "doing what he loved".

Unless the animals opened his seatbelt and dragged his dead body out of the airplane, and very far away from the wreckage, I seriously doubt he died in the crash. He must have lived and tried to walk out, and either died trying or was grabbed by a bear or mountain lion. He must have walked some good distance before he died, else they would have found the wreckage by now.

Too bad, he was a great inspiration to boldly go where no man has gone before, at his age, he had no reason to fake his death.

Ken Lay however, I'm sure is alive and well in Tahitti... <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />

Oh I agree!...but...I was talking about the eaten by a bear part...and if there was animal fur around all the stuff, Steve may have not yet been ...well...completely incapacitated at the time.

This just in from CNN...

Nancy Grace to interview bear.

Nancy, "He was a Veecteem..." <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

Hey, congrats on getting Tami back on the boat! See you there. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

Nancy Disgrace you mean....what a loser, she cant interview the bear, shes still hanging out in Caylees grandparents frontyard

Plane found http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081002/ap_on_re_us/fossett_search

Bones of dead range cows wind up in my yard all the time. Cow dies, coyotes and other critters tear up the carcass and wander off with bits, my dogs find them and bring them home By that time the bones are miles away from where the cow went down. A seat belt wouldn't stop that process.

But they still haven't found any human remains, either in the aircraft or outside it. The airplane hit the mountain hard, tumbled down and the engine was found 300 feet away.

Word is he had two mistresses, lots of money missing from his bank accounts and a $50 million life insurance policy. And his final words that he was scouting dry lake beds sent the searchers looking in the wrong direction.

I guess he could have been thrown from the wreckage if he hit at 100-150mph or so, but I doubt if the Coyotees would leave the money neatly stacked up under his vest...

Hey, maybe he jumped out (parachute) to fake his own death, and just left some stuff scattered around to make it look good. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />

Here's the account of the guy who found the money and ID:

"Morrow said a $100 bill first caught his eye, prompting him to search through the dirt and pine needles. He then found three identification cards with Steve Fossett’s name on them sticking from the ground, he said."

http://rgj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081001/NEWS18/81001043/0/NEWS12

Nothing about a vest or neat stacks of bills. Rather, they were scattered in the dirt and pine needles.

Also, news accounts from when he disappeared said that he was only wearing shorts and a T-shirt.

i can't find any info regarding how far from the wreckage the personal items were found

1/4 mile.

10-02) 09:41 PDT MAMMOTH LAKES, MONO COUNTY -- The wreckage of a plane found near Mammoth Lakes has been confirmed to be that of adventurer Steve Fossett, who has been missing for more than a year, authorities said today.
No body has been found, but investigators said it was unlikely Fossett survived.

A preliminary investigation showed that the plane Fossett was piloting slammed into the west side of the Minaret mountain range in the Inyo National Forest at the 9,700-foot elevation, about seven miles west of Mammoth Lakes. The wreckage of the acrobatics-style Bellanca Super Decathlon airplane was initially spotted late Wednesday by a Yosemite National Park helicopter.

"It was a head-on crash into the side of a mountain, into a rock," Madera County Sheriff John Anderson said at a news conference. "The plane disintegrated. We found the engine 300 feet from the fuselage."

Fossett was 63 when he took off on a pleasure flight from a private airport in Yerington, Nev., south of Reno on Sept. 3, 2007.

"The crash looked so severe, I doubt anyone could have walked away from it," Anderson said. "It's our job to try to locate the remains and take care of those. The family deserves our best effort."

There was no black box aboard the plane that would have recorded flight data or any attempted communications from Fossett, Anderson said.

Fossett's view may have been obstructed by clouds, and his instruments may not have shown that he was approaching a mountain, the sheriff said. The cause of the crash is under investigation.

Some 50 searchers from more than a dozen agencies and five dogs are continuing to comb the site of the wreckage in the Sierra, Anderson said. The National Transportation Safety Board has joined local, state and other federal officials at the scene.

Fossett was world-renowned for setting 115 flying and sailing records, including being the first to fly around the Earth alone without refueling. The wealthy financial broker had also swum the English Channel and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro, leading his friends to say that if anyone could survive an air crash, he could.

The confirmation that Fossett's plane had been found came three days after Preston Morrow, the manager of Kittredge Sports in Mammoth Lakes, found Fossett's pilot's license, a glider license and a membership card for the National Aeronautic Association while day-hiking with Kona, his Australian shepherd mix.

Morrow, 43, said today that he started his hike at Devil's Post Pile and took the Minaret Lake Trail up into the mountains. He was hoping to reach an abandoned mine, but it got late and he gave up. But he then came across the ID cards and $1,005 in cash. Authorities believe the money belonged to Fossett.

Morrow didn't know what he had found at first. It wasn't until Tuesday that he realized it was Fossett's name on the documents. He and his wife decided to go back to the site to get coordinates for the area. His wife found a sweatshirt, and he notified authorities.

The ID cards were found about a quarter-mile from the plane, Anderson said. It's possible that they landed there as a result of the impact, authorities said.

Morrow, his face showing early-morning stubble, listened to the sheriff confirm that the plane was Fossett's.

"I woke up this morning at 3 a.m. wondering, 'Wow, did I really do that? Did I find that stuff?' " Morrow said. "I'm very happy that I can help. I found the haystack, and there was that little needle they needed to go back and get. I'm glad they did.

"I'm so relieved, so happy that they found something," Morrow said. "Now they can put an end to it, I hope. Maybe the family can get some closure."

Fossett's widow, Peggy, will probably not address the media immediately, said Jeff Page, director of the Lyon County Office of Emergency Services in Nevada, where the original missing persons report for Fossett was filed.

California Highway Patrol officers had flown over the general area 19 times, Page said. There had been a number of unconfirmed sightings of possible wreckage immediately after Fossett disappeared, but they were among hundreds of tips that came in, he said.

Page said he wasn't surprised that the wreckage hadn't been spotted before. "It's very heavily forested with trees and brush," he said.

Officials said last year when the search was suspended that they believed the best chance for the wreckage to be discovered would be if a hiker came across debris by happenstance.

"We pretty much assumed something would be found either in hunting season or the peak hiking season," said Lyon County sheriff's Lt. Rob Hall. "And that's how it worked."

The original search area encompassed 25,000 square miles, one of the biggest such hunts in U.S. history.

Page noted that the wreckage had turned up nearly 200 miles south of the focus of the original searches. He shook his head as he described how search teams had been focusing their efforts in the wrong place.

"They were wrong, I guess," Page said. "So were the psychics from last year and the mind-readers and all the others who jumped in."

U.S. 395, the highway Fossett was known to fly along, passes close to Mammoth Lakes as it snakes from Canada to the Mojave Desert. Fossett had been flying in the area searching for dry lake beds where he could attempt a planned land speed record. The Sierra lakes in the area being searched are generally filled with water, said U.S. Forest Service.

Fossett vanished after taking off from the private airport - the Flying M Ranch - of his friend, hotel mogul Barron Hilton. He carried just a bottle of water on board.

The initial search teams tried to follow tips from sightings on the ground and partial radar trackings, then widened the hunt out to a huge area taking in most of the south-middle portion of Nevada. Three private teams took a cut at the hunt this summer, also with no success.

They've Found enough remains to verify DNA.
What a shame.
Todd