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Search launched for Yellowstone worker missing for 6 days in remote part of park
A search and rescue effort is ongoing in Yellowstone National Park after an employee went missing last week on a trip through the backcountry.
Austin King, a 22-year-old concession worker at Yellowstone, was last heard from on Sept. 17, when `officials say he called friends and family from the summit of Eagle Peak. Standing at more than 11,300 feet, Eagle Peak is the highest point in the national park and located in its extremely remote southeastern corner, several miles from the eastern shores of Yellowstone Lake.
The National Park Service is circulating a missing person flier for King, which includes two images of the hiker and describes some features that could help identify him. According to the flier, King is 6 feet tall with brown hair and hazel eyes. He wore a black sweatshirt and gray pants and carried a dark colored backpack when he disappeared, which appears in one of the two images. King also wears glasses and has tattoos.
National Park Service
King vanished during a 7-day backcountry trip. A boat dropped King off on Sept. 14 at Terrace Point, along the southeast arm of the lake, the National Park Service said. Two days later, he spoke to a park ranger at Howell Creek cabin in the nearby backcountry, which was not on his intended route. At the time, King was planning to send the night at a campsite in the area before climbing Eagle Peak on Tuesday.
When King last made contact with anyone, he had reached the top of Eagle Peak. He described fog, rain, sleet, hail and windy conditions while on the summit, according to the park service.
Search operations began when King failed to show up for his boat pickup near the lake’s southeast arm last Friday. On Sunday, the park service said more than 20 ground searchers, two helicopters, unmanned air systems and a search dog team were focusing on the area around Eagle Peak. Search teams from Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks as well as Wyoming’s Park County and Teton County were casting a wider net as they looked for King in the areas around Eagle Pass Mountain Creek Trail, Eagle Creek Trailhead and Shoshone National Forest.
The national park service has asked for the public’s help as they noted that anyone traveling through the backcountry near Eagle Peak since Sept. 14 could have seen king. People with information about his whereabouts should contact the Yellowstone Interagency Communications Center.
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The Chicago White Sox on Friday broke Major League Baseball’s 62-year-old single-season record with the most losses during a season with their 121st defeat against the Detroit Tigers.
The White Sox lost the game 4-1. This came after they had won three games in a row against the Los Angeles Angels and had hovered at 120 losses.
On Thursday, the Sox shut out the Angels 7-0.
The 121 losses eclipsed the total that the 1962 expansion New York Mets recorded. The White Sox had already surpassed the 2003 Detroit Tigers, a team that lost 119 games, setting the American League record. MLB only counts records set in the modern era, which began in 1900, so the 1899 Cleveland Spiders’ all-time record of 134 losses is not included.
The incredible feat of futility was the culmination of a long, grueling season in which the White Sox recorded multiple double-digit losing streaks, including a 14-game skid from May 22 to June 6, and then an American League-record 21-game losing streak between July 10 and Aug. 5. All that losing led to the firing of manager Pedro Grifol during just his second season at the helm. In less than two seasons, Grifol led the team to more than twice as many losses as he did wins.
Grady Sizemore took over as interim manager for the rest of the season.
The White Sox then recorded another 12-game losing streak that lasted from Aug. 23 through Sept. 3.
Jeff Chiu / AP
It’s been a season unlike anything fans of the franchise, which will mark the 20th anniversary of its last World Series win next year, have ever seen. The team’s winning percentage through Sunday of .231 is still significantly behind the next-worst season in franchise history, the 1932 White Sox that went 49-102-1 and posted a winning percentage of .325.
Until this season, the White Sox team with the most single-season losses in franchise history was the 1970 team, which went 56-106. This year’s team is just the sixth in franchise history to record 100 or more losses in a season, according to Baseball Reference, which has team statistics going back to 1901, the year the American League formally organized.
“I feel your pain”
The White Sox record has been so bad that even the team’s official X (formerly Twitter) account has been having some fun with the piling up of losses lately.
On Sept. 18, after a loss to the Angels, the team’s post for its final score read, “FINAL: the other team scored more runs than us.”
Last Saturday, the team posted, “FINAL: can be found on the MLB app,” after a loss to the Padres.
Then on Sunday, the team’s account posted a version of a widely used GIF of a car attempting to quickly drive onto an exit ramp, representing the team’s social media administrator, turning away from posting the final score and instead opting for “literally anything else.”
The Sox kept it up on social media after the Friday night loss.
A post read:
Things we’d rather do than read comments:
- Get a root canal
- File taxes
- Eat 5,000 saltine crackers without water
- The cinnamon challenge
- Put ketchup on a hot dog
- Bear crawl across the Sahara Desert
- Walk barefoot on an L train
The post also showed a separate window on a computer desktop screenshot showing a dejected Southpaw White Sox mascot, with the text, “slams laptop shut til tomorrow.”
The situation even prompted famed horror writer and Boston Red Sox fan Stephen King to weigh in on social media.
“Chicago White Sox fans, I feel your pain,” King posted on X. “As a fan of those other Sox, I tried to switch my loyalty to Cleveland during one particularly awful season (Butch Hobson, I’m talking about you). I couldn’t do it. Things will get better. They CAN’T get worse.”
Mark J. Terrill / AP
Despite the jokes on social media, White Sox team leadership has faced questions about what went wrong and how the team has been withstanding the historically difficult season.
General Manager Chris Getz summed up the feelings of the organization last month when he spoke to members of the news media after Grifol’s dismissal.
“There was lack of production overall,” Getz said. “I mean you look at how many games that we’ve led early and weren’t able to finish or how many games we haven’t been able to come back to get a win. Obviously, there was something that was broken. We know the flaws in this roster, but with that being said, we expected to win more games. We did.”
After last Sunday’s loss to the San Diego Padres, the team’s 120th of the season to tie the major league record, Sizemore, in true manager fashion, attempted to downplay the importance of the historic mark for the club.
“No loss is good,” Sizemore said. “Like I said, it’s not something we’re focused on. I think probably everyone outside of this clubhouse will be more obsessed with it than us.”
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