3 years ago
06/08/2016 8:45am CDT
The RV incident details are what got me. If Rob continued on the sandy road they mistakenly took until he hits the only route that gets to Laughlin (US95)... that's a little less than 3 miles. The RV gets unstuck a half hour later and it takes them apparently about 20 minutes in the RV from after they get unstuck before they get to US95 themselves - bizarrely they drove that first few miles slow as if they were still leading a runner before they gave up the charade and drove fast up US95.... They then travel north on a path that should have intersected with where Rob would connect to US95 himself. If Rob was running fast enough to make 30 miles, according to the tracker, in sub 5 hours to Laughlin, how did the RV not end up seeing Rob on US95? If he didn't manage to make it to US95 on the shortest direct route off that sandy road then he actually ran in excess of 25-30 miles in 5 hours... because it's not a straight shot, it requires a bit of navigation or it looks like you could easily end up having to stop to get directions. And Rob supposedly called them on mobile within those first 30 minutes while they were still stuck to tell them to meet him in Laughlin, 30 miles away, which if he was running at the pace he claims to have done for that distance then he would have been *RIGHT THERE* at the US95 intersection where the RV could have met him up almost immediately after instead of having to be separated for so long.
Next I went to use google maps to verify the distance on exactly how far it is from where they got stuck outside of Mojave according to the tracker to get to Laughlin. Google maps says that distance is 38 miles on the shortest road route. Confused, I check the tracker distances again - at most it adds up to ~31mi. Then I realized, that's because the tracker is expecting short jumps of 12 minutes between spot tracks and no other movement, so it's actually calculating a distance as the crow flies using lat/lon, and has no idea about the distance from the roads themselves... That particular area is not a straight shot and they drove straight through it at 50mph. So the 31mi on their tracker actually undersells the real distance by quite a bit.
According to the tracker and the timestamp on their picture, they got stuck at ~8:20am Pacific, and unstuck by around 9am. They drove straight from there to Laughlin to wait for Rob, per Rob's command.
Then, according to the blog: "The 3 of us went to the Casino and put $20 each on the roulette table before having a swim in the pool and taking a shower." And they posted a picture of Rob in the pool at the hotel, which is timestamped as 12:52pm (verifiable by checking the shadows in the image).
The real of it is, from the image timestamps, and the spot tracker stoppage time.... Robert Young is claiming to have covered 38 miles on foot through the desert in 80F+ heat solo, self supported, in under 5 hours.
Yeah.
