"An aerial crew spotted the chute, located at 11,450 feet."
Do you think they mean 10,450?
Wouldn't 11,450 put the chute somewhere between Trailside Meadow and Trail Camp, unless he climb up from the MWMT?
No, 10450 would put it just above Outpost, which is at 10,400, but yes 11450 would put it higher than TM. But, 11450 does seem high: there is a very important feature in the published photo: the (whitebark?) pine in the foreground. The highest tree along the trail used to be a krumholz whitebark just about at the top of the switchers above ML. Pretty unlikely to find another one significantly higher than that. Lining up the angles between ML and Big Horn park and a couple of other features, I put the POV of the published shot much lower than the x in the above photos. Another strong possibility is that the photo shows an exploratory rap in a different location, not the recovery operation itself. IF this were the actual recovery, there should be a lot more people and equipment in the shot.
I wouldn't rule out that the photo was of the recovery operation. This same photo was posted on the Inyo Register site last Friday (beating the LA papers by several days), and the captioning there says that the photo was Friday and that they were preparing to rappel down the chute where the body was sighted from the air Thursday night. The SAR team may not have thought to put all of their gear into the photo to satisfy the speculators on the WWW.
In the photo it appears that a line drawn from the trees on the north side of Bighorn Park through the southwestern corner of Mirror Lake would pass pretty close to where the SAR team is located.
Here's my attempt at this in Google Earth, red line showing approximate photo line of sight:
SAR team appears to be on north side of ridge from the point where the trail starts to switch down to Trailside Meadow. There is a very deep chute near there.
