Caltech Employee Wade Cooksey Perishes in Blizzard
June 07, 2004
PASADENA, Calif.—It is with deep regret that the California Institute of Technology announces that on Monday, May 31, the body of Caltech employee Wade Cooksey was recovered from a mountainous region of northern Nevada.
On March 5, Cooksey, a geodetic technician in Caltech's geological and planetary sciences division since 1999, was working on the top of Mt. Lewis, elevation 9,600 feet, approximately 18 miles southeast of Battle Mountain, Nevada.
Cooksey was repairing a communications system used to recover Global Positioning System data from remote geodetic sites throughout north central Nevada. Caltech owns and operates some 53 remote geodetic sites deployed across eastern California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, for studying subtle motions of the earth's crust and how they relate to the generation of earthquakes.
The Lander County Sheriff's Department reported that Cooksey became caught in a whiteout snowstorm that reduced visibility to less than five feet. They launched an exhaustive search of the mountain by Navy helicopter, 4-wheel-drive vehicles, dog teams, snowmobiles, and by foot.
The Caltech community expresses its deepest sympathy to the Cooksey family, colleagues, and friends. Caltech sincerely appreciates the efforts by the Sheriff's Department and citizen volunteers from Lander County who gave of their own time to assist in the extensive search.
