Search team members, from left, Lew Toulmin, Deb Atwood, Dick Sale and Robert Hyman update maps Saturday at a base camp just west of Hawthorne, Nev. The map displays exact areas where searchers were looking over the weekend for famed aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett.

Hawthorne, Nev. ? A year after aviator and adventurer Steve Fossett vanished on a Labor Day solo flight over western Nevada, friends and admirers are waging a new search for some sign of him in an area of rugged mountains.

Steep canyons and gulches choked by concealing trees and brush on the west slope of the Wassuk Range are being combed by 28 searchers headed by explorers Robert Hyman, Lew Toulmin and Bob Atwater.

They’re relying in part on new information from another pilot who was in the area that day that alters earlier assumptions about Fossett’s likely path on what was supposed to have been a short flight. He had flown over the area many times since the mid-1990s and once hiked to the top of the Wassuk Range’s 11,239-foot Mount Grant.

“This is the right thing to do,” Hyman said in an interview at the team’s isolated camp. “Explorers don’t leave fellow explorers lost. : We want to find out what happened to our friend and colleague, no more and no less.”

The main search area is just west of Hawthorne and only 10 to 15 miles from the Flying M Ranch of longtime Fossett friend and wealthy hotel magnate Barron Hilton, where Fossett had borrowed a plane for his flight.

The terrain was flown over repeatedly last fall in what was described as the largest aerial search for a downed plane in U.S. history – the Nevada National Guard and the Civil Air Patrol scoured 20,000 square miles – and also was extensively searched on the ground.

However, Hyman said there’s a lot of area that didn’t get close scrutiny.

“While I feel he’s under our nose here, he’s in an area that’s extremely hard to get to. It’s the vertical terrain, it’s the dark terrain, and it’s the trees, the vegetation,” Hyman said.

“If that aircraft didn’t go straight down and kind of angled in under a stand of pine trees, it’s going to take someone physically walking upon that scene to find it,” said Lyon County Undersheriff Joe Sanford.