Steve Fossett wreckage has been found

The StarTribune has this:

Crews conducting an aerial search late Wednesday spotted what turned out to be the wreckage in the Inyo National Forest near the town of Mammoth Lakes, Sheriff John Anderson said. They confirmed around 11 p.m. that the tail number matched Fossett's single-engine Bellanca plane, he said.

Hopefully the family can find some closure from this.

Search for Fossett crash site back on?

Back in September of 2007 I took part in the search for Steve Fossett. You can learn about it here.

All this work went unsuccessful and Mr. Fossett was declared dead in February of 2008.

It seems however that some of Mr. Fossett's stuff (papers) turned up on a trail in the Mammoth Lakes area (map above). From this this article:

The call came last night. A story from a friend about a ski shop owner hiking in the mountains off trail above Mammoth Lakes California near the area of Minaret Lake and Minaret Mine. Apparently the man came across what appeared to be some papers lying in a remote path, but what he may have found wasn’t some wayward trash left by a careless camper.

Tattered and crumpled on the ground, the Mammoth Lakes local found what appears to be two FAA cards that listed the name Steve Fossett, both were apparently either issued or had some sort of connection to the State of Illinois. The two cards were found with a small amount of money and not far away, a sweat jacket, also a bit worn and beaten up from the weather.

I think I've identified Minaret Lake in Google Earth:

Lat: 37.659534
Long: -119.156814

Here it is on maps.google.com (confirmed with the lake name):


View Larger Map

It should be noted that this area was NOT part of the high resolution imagery provided to Google Earth patrons involved with the Fossett search. We maybe were looking in the wrong area?

Is it possible the search could be back on? How could one go about getting high resolution imagery of this area shortly after the time of Mr. Fossett's disappearance?

[UPDATE 10/1/08] Google Earth Blog mentions the coordinates to the lake here and has provided a KML file for consumption here.

[UPDATE 10/2/08] The wreckage has been confirmed as his.