After the disaster last week where I lost my new drone, I had been thinking about it and I couldn’t let it go. The weather for the following Sunday was supposed to be rather nice, and I thought it was worth a shot to see if we could find and recover my drone. We had looked for a while last week, but after thinking about it some more, it seemed like it should be relatively easy to find. Kirk had the idea of using endoscopes to try and search underwater, which was a really good idea. I brought my fishing waders so I could wade the creek and look by hand as well.

I knew it would be a short day, so we headed out after lunch and arrived at the gravel area a little after 1:00. We headed out, down the horrible side hill, with tons of downed logs. We had realized that staying high was a better option that going low, as hugging the cliffs was usually a little easier.

As we went, we passed a couple of small creeks. One of them had a cool waterfall:

After about an hour, we made it to the creek and started searching. Kirk used his endoscope and I used mine and Zack was using his pole to poke around. Here is Kirk using his endoscope, attempting to find the drone (with the dogs supervising him):

And here is a great photo of the Helion Creek Waterfall:

Along with a video:

After a while with no success with the endoscope, I decided to put on my waders and wade the creek and use my hands to search the pools. That worked really well, although the water was REALLY cold. After about an hour of searching, we finally gave up. I thought we searched the target area pretty well, but there are a LOT of nooks and crannies it could have gotten stuck in, or it could have been washed way down the creek. Either way, we decided to call the search and head back.

The trip back seemed slightly better than the trip back the prior week (maybe we were getting better at finding a good route, or maybe we were just worn down by the rough trip). It took us about another hour to get out and back to the van. We were all tired and a little disappointed we didn’t find it. Even if we HAD found it, who knows what shape it would have been in. I guess I just wasn’t meant to have a drone. If/when I get another one, I will make sure I have one with obstacle avoidance, and I will make sure I’ve practiced flying it a LOT more before I try and fly it in a tight canyon.

Even though it was a disappointing day, it was nice to get out for a few hours.