MIDMORNING DAY ONE and we already have a break. Base-camp manager Keith Szlater, with a Calgary cowboy mustache that fits right in here on the Nevada line, is frantic on the radio-"We've got a very interesting development here"-and he's leaving his post!

Soon a white Jeep with California plates growls to the day's search site, near the ghost town of Chemung Mine, where the team is having a lunch of trail mix and V8. Keith is riding shotgun with a local named Tom-no last name, no photographs, please-who enjoys a mid-morning Miller High Life while he tells us he was up here cutting firewood last Labor Day, the day Fossett disappeared. He and his buddy were taking a cigarette break with the saws off and heard a small plane sputtering.

This is called "local knowledge," and there seems to be no shortage of it. But the guy appears legit. "I guarantee nobody searched in there on the ground," he says, pointing southward toward a canyon especially thick with piñon and juniper. "It's a real tough area to get into. You could land a 727 in there and no one would ever see it." Tom said he told the Mono County Sheriff Department, but they didn't seem too interested.

But the tip is a bust. By the end of two hot, grueling days, all we've found is a windscreen from a snowmobile, many old beer cans, an arrowhead, an antique Canadian-whisky bottle, and a boot. We're sunburned, blistered, and scratched from sagebrush and alder sharp as punji sticks.

The next day, at 10,000 feet on the eastern shoulder of snowcapped Mt. Patterson, Simon finds a battered aluminum door. He carries it out of the trees as if it were a Roman shield. The door is full of bullet holes.

"If that's his door,"someone jokes, "it's proof that Steve Fossett was shot down." The door appears to me to be from a snowcat-there's a rusty hinge and the handle isn't recessed for aerodynamics. At best it's a military antique. But the news that Team Adventure Science has found an airplane door makes the newswires nonetheless, and it gives us hope. The door is a symbol, a reminder that Fossett really could be out here.

In my fatigue I find myself getting caught up in the spirit of the search. My back hurts from sleeping in the dirt, but I can feel success close at hand. At dawn, midweek, I spring out of my tent, gobble down my oatmeal, lace up my trail runners, and do a little stretching while playing hackysack with the guys. My skepticism clears away and I join in with the daily Iron Maiden air-guitar jam. I'm becoming a Team Adventure Science homer: I want to find Fossett. Closure for the family is great and all that, but goddammit, I want to win! Where the hell is that airplane?

BY FRIDAY EVENING, Team Adventure Science has combed 62 miles, climbed and descended thousands of feet, and consumed a case of Costco canned salmon. We haven't spoken with a woman since Monday, when a Reno news anchor drove up to interview Donato. Three nights ago, morale was so low he had to rally us to Travertine Hot Springs, south of base camp, to soak sore bones and check out naked hippie chicks.

On Saturday morning, our last day, the search takes on the bittersweet feel of winding down-bitter because we haven't found Fossett and sweet because tonight we'll be in Reno, which rhymes with casino. Carpenter Paul is wearing bulbous leopard-print sunglasses. "I'm feeling a little depression that we didn't find something,"he says. "We're all fucking athletes here, we like to win, right?"