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Bridgeport: A ten-member team of elite athletes and expert mountaineers hopes to do what search planes and satellite imagery couldn't - find Steve Fossett's body.
The multimillionaire adventurer was declared legally dead in February, five months after he was last seen taking off by plane from a remote Nevada ranch owned by hotel magnate Barron Hilton.
Wreckage
The search team led by geologist and adventure racer Simon Donato will focus on remote, wooded areas near where the 63-year-old Fossett was last seen - areas that could have concealed wreckage from the crews of the many private and military planes that searched last year.
"Whether we luck out and find the wreckage or not, at least our tracks will be preserved so that in the future if someone wants to give this a try they'll know where we already were and they can go to the next mountain range over," Donato said at a camp between the Bodie Hills and Sweetwater Mountains.
The search area, with peaks ranging from 3,000 metres to more than 3,350 metres in elevation, is just east of the even higher Sierra Nevada and about 177 kilometres south of Reno, Nevada.
Because the area is close to Hilton's ranch, where Fossett was staying, Donato believes it's the best place to search. Searchers, who are paying their own way, began arriving Friday to set up camp.
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