Search for hiker turns to drones and crowdsourcing

VERLOT, Wash. — The sheriff's helicopter is gone now. After an exhaustive effort, the official search and rescue teams have packed up and left.

But friends and family of Sam Sayers keep looking for the 28-year-old missing hiker from Seattle, and they are turning to technology.

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Drones and online crowdsourcing are keeping the search, and hope, alive nearly a month after Sayers disappeared.

Aerial photographer Stephen Monchak is among those using a drone around Vesper Peak in Snohomish County, where Sayers was last seen Aug. 1.

He's taking high-resolution photos and posting them online through pages and sites dedicated to finding Sayers, so anyone can examine them and look for clues.

"They had 27,000 followers before I was even involved," Monchak said. "So those 27,000 people, once I started posting photos, they were our best detectives."

That crowdsourcing led one person to notice a pink jacket about 50 yards off a trail.

"It turned out not to be hers but it proved that the drone was working because quite a few other people had missed that," Monchak said.

The drones are trying to cover as much rugged terrain as possible, giving a new view of areas that might not have been searched before.

"We've exhausted those avenues so its time to go off grid," Monchak said. "We need to look in areas we don't think she should be in, but it's possible."

The Snohomish County Sheriff's Office is aware of the search effort with drones.

A spokeswoman said their search plan was, what they call evidence-based, which is why they spent thousands of hours searching from the point she was last seen.

Cox Media Group